The following is an excerpt of an interview with ( Is This A Dangerous Philosopher ? Peter Singer Interview ) with philosopher Peter Singer :

Claudette Vaughan: Correct me if I'm wrong but you once paralleled the animal situation to the slave trade. All the other liberation movements ? women, gays and slaves ? all won their freedom of sorts by becoming economically viable, therefore tolerated in the market-place. Will the Animal Liberation Movement be the first Movement that wins on moral grounds alone?

Peter Singer: The parallel I made was essentially this: in both cases there is a dominant powerful group, which essentially defines itself as the repository of the highest moral worth and of the highest values. It says that those outside of this group are lower beings that can be treated as things, brought and sold. Essentially seen as property. I've used that analogy to try and get people to see that for us today animals have that status and we think of ourselves as superior to them and therefore as entitled to use them as a means to our ends. In the same way that white slave traders did with Africans during the slave era. Really what I'm trying to say is: reflect on your own attitudes and ask yourself if you think that slavery is wrong. If you do, can you really defend the attitude that we have towards animals at present?

This next excerpt is a Singer review of Animals in Research , edited by D. Sperlinger in The Quarterly Review of Biology, December, 1982.

The authors of the new essays making up this collection are mostly scientists, though a couple of philosophers get thrown in for good measure. What is most interesting about the essays is that, while many of the scientists stress the value of animal research in their field, they all recognize that unnecessary suffering does occur in laboratories and that there is a need for tighter controls to prevent it. ? this concession is a marked change from hyper-defensive scientists who used to claim, for example, that no scientist would stress an animal because that would distort the results of the experiment (as if causing stress was not sometimes the point of the experiment).

The book makes a much-needed antidote to the venom engendered by antivivisectionists who think that all animal experimenters are sadists, and experimenters who think that all antivivisectionists are sentimental cranks who care more for cats and dogs than for people.