Radio Australia Today Editorial

Peter Singer. Animal Lib’s Founder

18 July 2008

Some years ago I studied pharmacy. I only did it because my mum told me as a toddler that I wanted to be a doctor, but lacking the requisite intelligence and studying ability I wasn’t able to get in to medicine. Hence, I took the closest thing and accepted an offer for pharmacy at Sydney Uni.

The reason I mention this is that one of our first lectures involved studying the ethics of medicine. We talked about things like quantity of life versus quality of life. If someone is seriously and painfully ill with no hope of recovery, should that person’s life be maintained no matter what? I know it’s a contentious issue. There are many religions around the world that say that life is prima, and to switch off life support is the same as murder, Euthanasia, they say, is abhorrent.

The book we studied in this debate was written by an ethicist, Peter Singer. In the book he argued that life should have a quality to it. To maintain life in all circumstances, does no favour to the ill person. Sometimes, he says, it’s better to just let the person go.

To a naive 19 year old, these views were astounding. Never before had I considered that you could just let someone go, that switching off life support could actually be a kinder thing.

Peter Singer has never been afraid to speak out on anything. He founded Animal Liberation, the organisation that seeks respect for animals. Because animals can’t speak, he says, doesn’t mean that they have no value. We share about 99 percent of our DNA with rats, and even more with our fellow placental mammals, dogs.

Even so, when we went into the physiology lab in that pharmacy course to dissect living dogs, there was only one student who questioned the ethics of the dissection. “But the animal is anaesthetised” the lecturers hit back, suggesting it was fine to chop up a living animal to show us something that we could just as easily see in a video.

Even my girlfriend at the time thought the dissections were fine. She thinks differently now, she has since campaigned for animal rights and gone vegetarian. I should mention that such dissections have been long scrapped.

But it goes to show how the mindsets of people can change drastically over time.

Peter Singer is one of the people who whacked us all on the side of the head by simply raising the notion that animals have feeling too. Peter will be on the Breakfast Club later today. It’s been a couple of decades since I read his book, but it’s stayed with me in my mind, and I can still feel the whack.
– Phil