The Meat Paradox

How do you persuade the whole world to stop eating meat?

I have been trying for half a century. My book Animal Liberation was published in 1975, when I was 29 years old. I argued that our treatment of animals is ethically unjustifiable: If it’s wrong to cause unnecessary suffering, then it’s wrong regardless of the sufferer’s species. On that basis, I urged readers to stop eating meat. Though I described how animals are forced to endure extreme suffering on factory farms and in laboratories, my appeal was to rationality, not emotion. I believed I had proved that there was no reasonable defense for animal cruelty.

At the time, my position was widely considered radical, even bizarre. Today it’s mainstream. And yet the paradoxical fact remains: Even as the ethical arguments for avoiding meat have become better known, meat consumption has risen not only in countries that are emerging out of poverty, but in the U.S. as