Peter Singer wrote my blog today

Peter Singer, from Salon.com:



Salon: How does the ethicist put a price on the impulse of a chicken to spread its wings?

Singer: We recognize the chicken as another conscious being. It's different from us, but it has a life, and if something is really important for that chicken, if it would work hard to try to get it, and if we can give it without sacrificing something that's really important to us, then we should.

You can't make this stuff up.

Dear Professor Singer,

Call on the chicken for protection of your own life and right not to suffer when you are attacked by your own animal rights fanatics. After all, you, yourself, compared the chickens to the Jews, while denying that you are equating them:

Singer: The question is whether saying that you are not a member of my kind, and that therefore I don't have to give consideration to your interests, is something that was said by the Nazis and the slave traders, and is also something that we are saying to other species. The question is, what is the relevant difference here? There is no doubt that there is a huge difference between human and nonhuman animals. But what we are overlooking is the fact that nonhuman animals are conscious beings, that they can suffer. And we ignore that suffering, just as the Nazis ignored the suffering of the Jews, or the slave traders ignored the suffering of the Africans. I'm not saying that it's the same sort of suffering. I am not saying that factory farming is the same as the Holocaust or the slave trade, but it's clear that there is an immense amount of suffering in it, and just as we think that the Nazis were wrong to ignore the suffering of their victims, so we are wrong to ignore the sufferings of our victims.

(Wasn't one of these Jews your own grandfather, Peter?)