An Animal's Place

[Guest guest]

An Animal's Place

 

By MICHAEL POLLAN

The New York Times

2002/11/10

 

The first time I opened Peter Singer's ''Animal Liberation,'' I was dining alone

at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium-rare. If this sounds

like a good recipe for cognitive dissonance (if not indigestion), that was sort

of the idea. Preposterous as it might seem, to supporters of animal rights, what

I was doing was tantamount to reading ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' on a plantation in

the Deep South in 1852.

 

Singer and the swelling ranks of his followers ask us to imagine a future in

which people will look back on my meal, and this steakhouse, as relics of an

equally backward age. Eating animals, wearing animals, experimenting on animals,

killing animals for sport: all these practices, so resolutely normal to us, will

be seen as the barbarities they are, and we will come to view ''speciesism'' --

a neologism I had encountered before only in jokes -- as a form of

discrimination as indefensible as racism or anti-Semitism.

 

 

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