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About this book
Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals is a 1975 book by Australian philosopher Peter Singer. It is widely considered within the animal liberation movement to be the founding philosophical statement of its ideas.
Singer himself rejected the use of the theoretical framework of rights when it comes to human and nonhuman animals. Following Jeremy Bentham, Singer argued that the interests of animals should be considered because of their ability to experience suffering and that the idea of rights was not necessary in order to consider them. He popularized the term "speciesism" in the book, which had been coined by Richard D. Ryder to describe the exploitative treatment of animals.
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Our interpretation:
Reading this book over 25 years ago (it was written a year before I was born), was the start of a long journey. Not only into the twisted industry of animal abuse but also into the underlying ethics of human behaviour. We can certainly understand how we got to this point, but not all of our past behaviours and cultural values have proven to be 'the right thing to do'. So we should constantly keep reevaluating ourselves. These are not the Middle Ages, nor prehistoric times. This is an ever shifting world that requires our adaptation.