Peter Singer, "Consider the Turkey" (Princeton UP, 2024)
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Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of NewBooks Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today, I'm honored to be speaking with one of the world's leading philosophers, Dr. Peter Singer.

Peter Singer is a professor emeritus of bioethics at Princeton University and has been described as the world's most influential philosopher. His many books and influential books include Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, The Life You Can Save, and Ethics in the Real World, I think all published by Princeton University Press. And today he's here to... No. Not all of them. Ethics in the Real World was. Yeah.

Yeah, but not... But today he's here to speak with us about a book called, a very short book called Consider the Turkey, which was published by Princeton University Press this year in 2024. Peter, welcome to New Books Network.

Thank you, Montez. It's good to be talking to you again. Thank you. You're a world-renowned philosopher, so I guess many people will know you, so I won't really ask you to introduce yourself and about your background. You're quite well-known. But I'm really interested to know, I know that you've been writing a lot about animal liberation, animal rights, but I'm really interested to know why you decided to write such a book, such a concise, small, but thought-provoking book called Considered Turkey.

Right. Well, as you may know, at Thanksgiving, Americans typically consume a turkey. That's the traditional center of the Thanksgiving meal is a large, dead, roasted turkey. And in fact, about 46 million turkeys are sold at Thanksgiving in the United States alone.

But Americans also eat turkey at other times, more than most people, I think. So it's not only at Thanksgiving that Americans eat turkey. There's more than 200 million turkeys raised and killed each year in the United States. And there are a lot of things that Americans don't know about the way their turkeys are produced and how they are created, in fact, how they live, and also how they die. So...

Some years ago, I wrote a little essay. I write a monthly column for something called Project Syndicate, which syndicates into media around the world. And I wrote something called Consider the Turkey, which was published in the book you mentioned in the introduction, Ethics in the Real World.

And the editor of that book actually suggested to me that it might be nice to do something specifically on turkeys. Princeton University Press has done quite a number of these very small books, around 10,000 words, some of them as short as that, really a long essay. I think consider the turkey is 14,000 words. But he thought that would be a good thing to write and to publish

shortly before Thanksgiving, thought it might create some attention to the situation regarding turkeys. And I jumped at that chance, honestly, because I do want to influence...

The way people eat, I think that the consumption of animals is responsible for an enormous amount of cruelty in factory farms in particular. It's also not particularly healthy. It's also giving rise to greater risks of pandemics. And in fact, we're now seeing avian flu, which is something that turkeys as well as chickens get, is now in a lot of the dairy industry in the United States and

you know, once it transmits to cows, the possibility of it mutating to transmit to humans is quite significant. And if that happens, I think we'll think that the COVID pandemic was nothing very serious at all, because this could be much more deadly. So for all those reasons, I thought, yes, it would be good to

alert Americans to what it is that they're supporting when they have turkey at Thanksgiving and see whether I can have any impact on that. And I guess even in speaking of pandemic or diseases related to birds that we raise for food, I guess even a few months ago here in Australia, they had to cull a large number of chickens because of a kind of a disease that developed in Australia

that had come to astrology, I guess, from overseas. But again, it was the product of this just mass industry, which is producing these animals on a large industrial scale. Yeah, it was the same thing that they have in the United States. HP5N1 is the official term, highly pathogenic avian influenza. And yeah, it's around. It's endemic now in Europe.

Once it gets into a country, it often gets into wild birds as well and they kill many of them. But it's pretty much impossible to get rid of. Yeah.

And I'm just curious, out of curiosity, the arguments in this book and also a lot of other similar articles that you've published is in a way a continuation of the previous arguments you made in books such as Animal Liberation and Animal Liberation Now. Am I right? Yes, you're absolutely right about that. This is...

A scaled-down version, obviously, a much slimmer book, and just an attempt to get those arguments into more people's hands. In this book, we'll get to talk about turkeys and that industry a little bit more, but I'm interested to know your thoughts. You make a really good argument in the book that we usually are good at extending our sympathy to animals such as dogs or cats,

but no other species, such as turkeys or chickens that we eat. And I guess this phenomenon in a way is called speciesism, if I'm pronouncing it correctly. It's a bit of a mouthful. Can you talk about why we're conditioned to do that? Yeah, I think there's two forms of speciesism, really. And the most basic form is the idea that humans are...

not just superior to animals, but almost infinitely superior. So the thought is that there is no number of animal deaths or of animal suffering even that would not be justified in order to save one human life, let's say, or to prevent much lesser human suffering than the animals are experiencing.

And that's something that you can find in, particularly I'd say in Western religions, you find it in the verse in Genesis where God supposedly gives us dominion over the animals. You find it in the idea from the creation that God made humans in his own image but didn't make animals in his own image. And, of course, in the idea that humans have an immortal soul. So...

I think that's a kind of, if you like, a religious justification for the idea that we're entitled to use animals to kill them, to eat them, basically to do what we like with them. And so that's the kind of speciesism that says if you're a member of our species,

You have rights, a whole range of rights. Your life is to be protected, you know, sacrosanct. But if you're a member of a different species, then none of that applies. You don't have rights. We're entitled to kill you for all sorts of reasons.

to eat you but also to hunt you for sport or to use in science or a whole range of different reasons. And I think that's the ideological basis for the way we treat animals, the way we treat them as commodities. And I think that that's a very general attitude that we have.

Now, you also mentioned more specific forms of speciesism, such as the idea that it would be, again, held in many, well, maybe all Western countries, not held absolutely everywhere in the world, but the idea that it would be wrong to treat dogs in the way that we currently treat pigs. So that it would be wrong to kill and eat dogs, but also...

that it would be wrong to lock them up in small stalls and never let them go outside, not have the opportunity to exercise, all the things that we do to factory farmed animals. We would think that wrong to do to dogs and perhaps to cats and maybe you could add in horses for some people. So that's a kind of...

a sub-variety of speciesism, if you like. But the overall idea that I'm trying to get across by using the term speciesism is...

The idea that we are superior and also that in a sense there's a parallel here between the way we relate to other species and the way that the European racists who enslaved Africans and transported them in horrendous conditions across the Atlantic so that they could be sold as slaves, essentially made them commodities. There's a parallel between that

extreme form of racism which you know we all reject today and the way we treat animals today not obviously not a complete perfect parallel there are important differences but the idea of one dominant group defining itself in a certain way and granting to itself the right to exploit and use and turn into commodities those outside that group and

You've raised a number of important points. When I was a student, I did my PhD thesis on eco-criticism. I do remember I read an article a long time ago in a book, An Anthropology of Eco-Criticism, I think it was, which was a biblical origin of our environmental problems, which again made references to the Bible, how humans are made in the image of God and all the animals are created to service humans.

And also when I was reading more about ecofeminism, there was this famous phrase that women are animalized, which is again more or less the same argument that you made now that people of other races, that kind of racial discourse is always there, that people of other races are described in animal terms. This way, by animalizing them, they take their humanity away, the sympathy you can have with them away. And it's the same way, I guess, with some animals and some birds such as turkey that you just mentioned. Right.

Speaking of turkey, I'm interested to know when the tradition of having a turkey for dinner at Thanksgiving become a tradition. It shouldn't be a very old tradition in the United States. So when did it become a thing in the United States to have turkey for Thanksgiving Day?

It really only seems to become a tradition in the late 19th and early 20th century. But, I mean, a lot of people think the tradition goes back to the Pilgrim Fathers who had what was the first Thanksgiving meal after essentially Christ.

Because when they landed in New England, they actually had no idea the conditions that they were going into. The winter was far more harsh than they had imagined coming from England, and they very nearly died. So when spring came and they survived, they were able to survive. They were helped by the indigenous people there.

They had a harvest feast, I think, for the first harvest that they had actually managed to bring in and they

They apparently, or there's some sources that suggest anyway, historians dispute this, they had wild turkey. So there were wild turkeys. There are still wild turkeys, very different birds from the birds reared in factory farms to eat. Perhaps we'll get into that in a moment. But they had turkey for that Thanksgiving feast. So...

Some people think that the tradition of having turkey goes back all the way to that initial founding fathers. But that's not actually accurate. People didn't have turkey for Thanksgiving or didn't make such a thing about Thanksgiving until sometime late in the 19th century. And by the way, you just said the wild turkey.

Obviously, there's a huge industry around turkey, but would it make any, from your point of view, would it make any difference if we didn't kill a large number of turkeys and we just used maybe one turkey that are available in nature? From an ethical point of view, would it make much of a difference? Yes, it would make a difference because those turkeys would be free-living birds who would live a natural life and a life that they're suited for in a small social group.

So rather than be in a shed with, you know, maybe 2,000 or 3,000 turkeys, all strangers, which is very stressful to them, they would be living in a group of 15 to 20 turkeys where they would know every other individual. They would spend their day foraging for food, so they would be active looking for things. They would have purposes. They wouldn't just be...

had food in front of them, and also they would be birds who were adapted to their life and who were fit and healthy, whereas the presently bred turkeys

are so large, in particular their breasts are so large, that they suffer from all kinds of skeletal abnormalities. They put on so much weight that their immature leg bones can't really support their weight because they're bred to eat all the time and put on weight. So it would be a very different situation.

Mind you, there's no way that you could provide 46 million wild turkeys for Thanksgiving tables in America. You would wipe out the turkey population, I think, and there's not so much meat on the native turkeys running around in the bush anyway, of course. The 2024 F-150 Lightning Truck gets dirty and runs clean.

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And that's actually a perfect segue to my next question, because in the book you describe the conditions under which these turkeys are raised. And when I was even reading it, I could imagine that. I could kind of picture what was happening. And it's very kind of graphic as well. You also provide some statistics as well in terms of how many of them, I think 200 million, you mentioned turkeys are raised every year. Can you talk about some of the conditions under which they are raised? Sure.

Yes, certainly. Yeah. So...

Let me start actually before they're raised with how they're conceived. I mentioned a moment ago that the turkeys have been bred to have very large breasts because everybody apparently wants a slice of the breast. People are not so interested in the other parts of the turkey. So they've been bred to have such large breasts that actually mating is physically impossible for them. The male simply cannot get close enough to the female at the relevant point.

anatomical parts of the male needed for reproduction cannot get close enough to the female. So every one of these more than 200 million turkeys produced is the result of artificial insemination.

which means that there are people whose job it is to masturbate male turkeys all day and collect the semen, and other people whose job it is to squirt the semen into the female turkeys, and particularly the females for whom this is a really unpleasant experience. They are turned upside down, opened up. They struggle against this. It's happened to them before because these are the ones that are allowed to breed, that grow old enough to breed.

and they hate it. But that's the way all those turkeys are produced. The industry disguises that. It doesn't actually admit that they have produced such misshapen birds that there is no other way that these turkeys

breeds of turkeys, the dominant breed of turkey, would exist at all if it wasn't that they're all artificially inseminated. But then let's get on to how they're raised, and you asked that as well. So when you have the fertile eggs, as a result of the artificial insemination, they're taken to a hatchery. They're kept warm until they hatch.

And then the chicks hatch. Now, normally, of course, well, I don't know normally, but anyway, in the wild turkeys that we were talking about, the eggs would be hatched by the mother and there would be a few chicks who the mother would look after, would shepherd, make sure they stayed close, didn't get too far away where predators could get them, and essentially would look after them and go foraging with them and they would learn

to forage in time but the commercial turkeys never see their mother they are after they hatch they are released into a large shed at first when they're small they have heat lamps to keep them warm because they need that but

They are going to be then indoors all of their life. And as they grow, the shed will become more and more crowded. So that by the time they get close to market weight, if you look at one of these sheds full of turkeys, it looks like a carpet of white. And it's just all the white turkeys filling up the floor space.

As I said, because they are with so many strangers, that's a stressful experience for them. In a normal group, they would know their place in the group. They would know if some of the other turkeys were dominant over them and they had to stay out of their way and not try to get a bit of food that the dominant turkey had its eye on. And they would know which turkeys they might be dominant over. But with thousands of turkeys in a shed, they can't learn that. So

So that's a stressful experience and also it leads to more aggression. So the turkeys heck at each other. And I should say before they're released into sheds, various things are cut off them to reduce the likelihood of them killing each other. So the beak may be trimmed back to be less sharp and pointy. The toes may be trimmed off because they can be sharp and can be used to injure other birds.

And the snood, which is a piece of fleshy protuberance that the male has hanging down, is also likely to be cut off because that seems to lead to more pecking if there is the snood. So they're basically mutilated. All of this is done without anesthetic. And then they're released. And then they put on weight.

faster and faster so that, as I mentioned, it actually becomes painful for them to stand up because they're still immature birds but they put on such a lot of weight that it hurts their legs. Their leg bones are not sufficiently developed. And they also develop a lot of foot abnormalities so that it may actually hurt them to walk as well. So there are many problems with them.

the way in which turkeys are reared. And, you know, they're in these sheds all the time until they reach market weight and then they're sort of put on trucks, you know, pushed off onto trucks and crammed into cages and transported to slaughter.

And you also described one of the methods that they are killed, ventilation shutdown plus. I'd seen videos of how chickens are killed, but this was quite shocking to me. And I'm sure it will be shocking to our listeners and readers of the book. Can you describe what that is, ventilation shutdown plus?

Yeah, sure. Let me firstly make clear that this is not the way in which turkeys who end up in supermarkets are killed. Not that that's necessarily humane. Quite a large number of them don't get freestunned properly. But Ventilation Shutdown Plus is used when you have to kill a shed full of birds, which is typically in the

chicken and turkey industries because of what we were talking about before, that is bird flu or avian influenza. If just a few birds have got avian influenza, the regulatory authorities, the Department of Agriculture, require that all the birds be killed and they can't be transported to slaughter and killed for food.

So how is this done? Well, the way it's done in the United States, which is not the way it's done in other countries, it's not the way it's done in Australia or New Zealand, it's not the way it's done in the European Union, but in the United States it's done by this method called ventilation shutdown plus. Now, ventilation shutdown, I guess that's pretty clear what that means. These birds are in very large sheds.

The sheds are ventilated with fans. The fans are turned off. And if there are large gaps in the shed, they may be sealed up in some way. That's the ventilation shutdown. A plus is heat. So heaters are brought into the shed and the guidelines specify that the temperatures must be raised to above zero

104 degrees Fahrenheit, which is what we're talking about, what, 38 or 39 Celsius. And sometimes they will go considerably higher than that. And it must be maintained at that temperature for at least three hours. So also I should say water will be shut off to the birds as well. So essentially what is being done here is you're closing up the shed and you're heating the birds to death.

The birds die slowly. Obviously, they get hotter and hotter. They pant. They struggle. They...

but it isn't there, and eventually they die of heat stroke. And that may take three hours. As I say, the temperature is supposed to be maintained for three hours. And in some cases, they won't even all be dead then, but there'll only be a few survivors, and then people will go through the sheds and they will individually by hand kill the survivors. So as I say, this is obviously a very distressing and slow way of bringing about death to any survivor.

sentient being and in other countries it's not done. Europeans are shocked when they hear that this is used. They have bird flu as well in Europe but they're shocked to hear that this is the standard method used or a very common method used.

to kill turkeys in the United States. There are much better ways of doing it. You can, for example, instead of heating the shed, you can put in nitrogen, which is an inert gas, and heat

the birds will die very quickly from nitrogen and without any obvious signs of struggle. So they will die within a minute or so once there's nitrogen in the shed. You can use carbon dioxide as well. It takes a bit longer. I would not recommend...

recommend it but it is sometimes used I think because it's cheaper than nitrogen but essentially you know the United States industry is using ventilation shutdown to save money I mean it's it's

Otherwise, they would have to install nitrogen plants to produce the nitrogen, to produce the gas. I mean, there is nitrogen produced in the United States, but they would have to order it. It's a somewhat more expensive way of killing birds. But when you're talking about killing, well, literally millions over both chickens and turkeys, tens of millions, in fact –

and inflicting long, slow deaths on them to save a little bit of money, I think that that's completely unconscionable and

That's one of the other reasons I wanted to get this book out, so that more Americans could know what the poultry industry, the turkey and chicken industries are doing to animals. And moreover, they're actually subsidized for this. They're compensated by the United States Department of Agriculture for the losses, which

So in a way, this is like a kind of government subsidized insurance coming out of U.S. taxpayers' pockets.

And you could say, you know, well, the first time that there was bird flu, maybe that was justified. But we know now that it's there. It's not going to go away. And it's just a cost of producing turkeys and chickens that there is a risk that you will have to kill all your turkeys and chickens before they can go to market. And, you know, there is...

That's what commercial insurance is for. If you're producing a product that has an inherent risk, you should be able to insure against it, but you should pay for your own insurance because that's part of the cost. There's no reason why taxpayers should pay for your insurance against getting bird flu and having to kill your birds. Mm-hmm.

You also discussed this whole industry from another point of view, which is this whole wastage in breeding turkeys. And it seems that we don't even get a fraction of all the nutritional value that we feed the birds.

Can you elaborate on that point, please? Yes, this is true of factory farming in general. It's not only chickens and turkeys. It's also pigs, and it's also egg-laying hens. It's also dairy cows, and most acutely, really, it's raising beef cattle in feedlots, feeding cows on grain in order to produce beef.

Essentially, the reason for this is that animals need food to provide not only to grow and not only to put on the flesh, the meat that we eat, or to produce eggs or milk, but to do a whole lot of other things.

we're talking about birds and mammals, they need energy to keep their body warm. That's one thing. They need energy to produce parts of their bodies that we don't eat, whether it's the internal organs, whether it's the bones, whether it's the feathers in the case of turkeys and chickens. So...

A lot of the food value of the food we grow, and of course we put them in sheds so they can't feed themselves. We're not talking about cows ranging around the pasture and eating grass. We put them in sheds, or in the case of beef cows, we've put them in feedlots. So we have to grow all the food, we have to truck the food to them, and then they're going to eat it, but they're only going to give us back a small fraction of the food value where

whether it's grain, whether it's soybeans, some cases fish meal is fed to animals. We get back, in the case of beef cows fed on grain and soybeans, we get back only about 10% of the food value

that we put into them. 90% is wasted. In the case of chickens and turkeys, it's not quite as bad as that. Maybe it's two-thirds that is wasted, something like that, and one-third that we get back. In the case of eggs and dairy cows, it might be a little more. But in all of them, the majority of the nutritive value of what we're growing and feeding to them is not returned to us. It's just wasted.

So basically the option of this is if we stop doing this, we would have the opportunity to produce more food if we wanted to do that or...

We would have the opportunity to release some of the land we're now using to grow crops and we could, for example, reforest it and we could have trees which would soak up some of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We could leave more of it for wildlife, for recreation. There are many different things that we could do and we would not be putting such a strain on our environment, producing so much fertiliser which pollutes our rivers, etc.

we could have a much more sustainable food supply. Just on that, you have this sentence in your book. Part of the argument is that, quote, economics overrides the suffering of turkeys every time. I'm going to play the devil's advocate here. To a lot of people, it might be difficult to become vegetarian or to give up chicken, beef, or whatever.

So do you think that instead of trying to change people's eating habit, maybe we should fight capitalism, which seems to be the major source of all these environmental problems, especially the suffering of animals as well? Well...

I have a couple of things to say about that. Firstly, I think the ultimate source is not capitalism but speciesism. And evidence for that is if you look at the Soviet Union, which was not a capitalist system, they

they also developed factory farms in which animals were treated in much the same way. So that was simply, I think, the idea that, well, we like to eat these products and we want to produce them cheaply so that more people can afford to eat them. And if this method of raising them produces their flesh, eggs or milk more cheaply, we'll do it. So I think it's that that's the underlying cause of the way we treat animals.

It's not capitalism. But suppose that you disagree with me and you think, well, you know, it's more extreme in capitalism. I'm not sure about that, but let's assume that you think it is.

well, then my next question is, so how are you going to stop capitalism? What's the path for that? People have been trying for a long time. Marx thought that it was going to inevitably be overthrown. It was going to collapse on its own. That obviously hasn't happened. There have been a lot of attempts to change capitalism, to overthrow that. The most recent was the Occupy Wall Street movement.

It didn't really get anywhere. Capitalism is still there. So I just don't see how you're going to do that, and I'm not prepared to wait for it to happen. It may never happen, but I certainly don't see it as happening soon. So I think there are things that we can do that are simpler and easier, and that is to stop eating animals. Now, okay, there may be some people who have unusual habits

unusual conditions that mean that they don't do very well without eating animal products. I think that that's rare, but if they were to eat animal products, occasionally obtaining them from

free-range animals who are able to go outside and live in a social group natural to the species. I wouldn't particularly condemn them for doing that. I would think that that would be acceptable. But obviously we would be producing far fewer animal products and it would be a more sustainable system because we wouldn't be growing so much food

For the animals, we would be, at least in part, they would be grazing for themselves and finding their own food. So, yeah, I mean, I'm not an absolutist about this, but I do think that the parent system that we have is a moral atrocity on a variety of different levels. I'm James McComb, reporting live from home in my bathrobe and slippers. Tonight, we're talking Dunkin' Polar Peppermint Coffee. Gene's here with the latest.

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babbel.com slash Spotify podcast, spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash Spotify podcast. Rules and restrictions may apply. And I've read some of your books and also I talked to you before about another topic with your orthodox terms. What I'm guessing is that you're not against those big arguments that yes, there's a role that capitalism might play, but you emphasize individual responsibility because as you mentioned, it's how long can we wait to overthrow capitalism? But there are things you can do as an individual, right?

It might not play a big role, but if all of us come together, it could make a difference and awareness as well. Because I'm not myself comfortable eating animals if I know all the suffering that they go through. And I've seen some documentaries which were really shocking and I don't really wish that to happen to any sentient being.

regardless if they're intelligent, aren't intelligent, humans, non-humans. And I do feel that even the people who work on those conditions, I cannot imagine myself working in those conditions, killing those animals to be paid. And I feel that it also might change my sense of ethics. Yeah, I'm sure it would. And in fact, workers in...

Both workers in slaughterhouses and workers in factory farms are underpaid and exploited and there's a huge turnover rate. The turnover rate in some

slaughterhouses is over 100%, which means that within a year, the entire workforce changes, obviously not all at once, but the average worker doesn't stay there longer than a year and often significantly less. So, yeah, they're pretty terrible places to work.

uh actually working in the factory farms is very poorly paid work it's often undocumented immigrants in the united states who are doing this work uh the air in these places is terrible you know especially with the the chickens and turkeys there's all of these droppings on the floor so that her air reeks of ammonia um in fact i've been into a couple of these places and you notice it in your throat and your eyes as soon as you breathe in you know it's this this

something going on in the air that doesn't agree with you and you don't want to stay there very long. And the workers don't want to stay there very long either, which also means they don't really pay much attention to the animals. They're just

If you're talking about a chicken or turkey, they'll walk through the shed now and again. And if one has died or is lying on the floor, they'll maybe pick it up and take it out. If it's still alive, they might wring its neck. But there's no individual attention, no attention to the welfare of individual birds that just wouldn't pay. There is this myth that these animals, birds or turkeys,

turkeys are are stupid but they're highly intelligent animals you do discuss some of these aspects so can you talk about that myth and supposedly even if it's true would it would it make any difference in our ethical standpoint on turkey consumption well let me take the ethical question first and the

As long as they're capable of feeling pain, I don't think intelligence is really the morally relevant criterion. It's the capacity to feel pain that really matters. And we recognize that with humans, of course. Some humans are more intelligent than others, but we don't think that those who are less intelligent, that their interests don't matter, that they don't count. So it wouldn't be the case with turkeys if they were intelligent

If they were stupid birds, as long as they could suffer, and obviously they can, what we're doing to them would still be wrong. But in fact, it's a myth. And I do talk in Consider the Turkey about a particular very fortunate turkey called Cornelius who was adopted by a sanctuary and actually –

Didn't want to live outside in the sheds or fields with the other animals, but wanted to live in the owner's house and came in and became friendly with a pig who was also living in the owner's house. The pig was named Esther and became kind of a viral sensation. But Cornelius the turkey and Esther the pig developed a relationship. They obviously cared for each other. At one point, Esther had to go away for some days for veterinary treatment.

And Cornelius went down to the sort of front gate of the farm every day to wait for Esther to return. And then when finally Esther did return, they greeted each other and cuddled up close. So obviously turkeys form relationships. And Cornelius was also pretty smart at noticing if somebody had a banana, which was one of Cornelius' favorite foods.

If they started peeling a banana, Cornelius would be over there in a flash wanting a bit of banana. But, you know,

A lot of birds are actually quite highly intelligent. I think people understand that now with parrots. There was an African grey parrot who was able to speak, actually, and parrots, of course, can imitate human language, but this parrot could answer quite complex questions, like you would show the parrot a yellow cube and a yellow sphere, and you would say, what's the same? And the parrot would say, colour.

And then you would show a yellow sphere and a yellow cube and you'd say, what's different? And the parrot would say, shake.

So there's quite interesting studies now, also studies with corvids, members of the crow family. They can work out how to get at a food supply, even if it involves three or four different steps. So, you know, first they have to...

sort of drop a put a rock or something on a on a place where that opens a door and then they get something out of that little cabinet and then they can use that to poke into something else which opens something else um and they can they can follow that that pattern so i think uh bird brains might be small but they're extremely efficient and birds are not at all stupid absolutely right um

I have only a couple of more questions. One of them is about that famous ritual in America, which is pardoning the turkey in the White House. Do you think it's kind of a hypocritical or symbolic act to make it easier for people to consume turkey? Or is it a symbol of American politicians just simply pandering to, you know, big businesses, big agribusiness tycoons there? Yeah, I mean, you could see it as a kind of

a continuation of this tradition of the scapegoat. You know, there was in biblical times, there was this idea that if the people had sinned, somehow you could make all those sins go into a goat and then you would release the goat into the desert and it would take the sins away with you. So some people see it as a continuation of that. But actually the history of it is much closer, in this case, I'll acknowledge, to capitalism because it really developed from farmer's

their turkeys to the White House as a gift and getting publicity out of that. And it really got going in a big way with

Not that long ago, I think it was when Harry Truman was president, so after the Second World War, and the National Turkey Federation, which is a federation of turkey producers, sent a couple of turkeys to the White House, and that got a lot of attention. And Truman didn't actually pardon them. Truman ate them. But...

I think the first president to pardon them was President Kennedy who got sent these turkeys. Actually, this was just sadly a few days before he was assassinated. So we're talking about 1962. And he received the turkeys and said, or one turkey, I think, and said, we'll let this one live.

and sent it to somewhere, a place where they would be looked after and could live. And then there were a couple of interruptions. Some presidents did that and some didn't. But with the first president, Bush, he pardoned Turkey or a couple of Turkeys. And since then, I think every president has pardoned Turkeys. But it's an absurd ritual. And of course, the Turkeys don't need pardoning. They've done nothing wrong.

It's the turkey producers who would need pardoning if anybody does. But it seems like no president is prepared to buck the trend here. And just one final question. The last thing I expected to read in the book was a series of recipes.

And it seems that I've known a couple of environmentalists, activists, activists who actually also fight for the environment. In their books, they do include some recipes as well. So can you tell me, and it's called ethical recipes, can you tell me where that idea came to you? And if you care, you can share your favorite recipe here.

As well. Yeah. So I had recipes in the first edition of Animal Liberation. It was published in 1975 because I was urging people to be vegetarian. And at that time, there were very few good vegetarian cookbooks around.

So I thought, well, it will be useful. Here's a book I'm telling people to go vegetarian, but they won't know how to do that. So I put in a few recipes into that book. Then when the 1992nd edition came out, I dropped the recipes because by then there were a lot of cookbooks in people's shops and I thought they don't need it. But a lot of readers said, oh, I like the recipes. That was a pity. You should put them back. So I put them back for Animal Liberation Now.

but I made it a bit more personal. I made it recipes that my wife and I had used in particular in Animal Liberation Now. And the turkey recipes I have from... So I went to America in 1999 when I got my professorship of bioethics at Princeton University. And already in the first year...

There were a couple of vegetarian philosophers or vegan philosophers I knew who were around the area. And so they said, what are you doing for Thanksgiving? And my wife and I said, well, nothing. We don't have any family over here. You know, I had children who had grown up and hadn't come to it.

The United States is with us. So we weren't really planning too much. So they said, oh, we'll come to our Thanksgiving. We get a group of vegetarians together for Thanksgiving. And so we did that. And basically we did that every year for the time I was in Princeton and I just retired earlier this year. So the group wasn't the same every year, but there was a lot of overlap. And people brought different dishes to the Thanksgiving.

So I thought, well, I'll get some of those recipes and we'll put them in. So I've got a section of vegan recipes that includes a sort of fake turkey made out of seitan or seitan is essentially the gluten from wheat. It's a high-protein product that you can mold in a certain shape and –

That comes from the philosopher Karen Bennett, who is at Rutgers University now. And she would bring the seitan turkey each Thanksgiving. It's quite a bit of work. It's a complicated recipe, but she enjoyed doing it. And it was pretty tasty, I have to say.

And so that's one of the recipes that I'd recommend, particularly if you want to have some sort of bird-like object at the center of your table, but you don't want to actually be complicit in factory farming. And then, of course, there's all the trimmings, the side dishes that go well with them.

the stuffing and the cranberries and so on that go with traditionally with Thanksgiving dinners. But the philosopher Dale Jamison, who's another friend of mine and was very central to this Thanksgiving group, is married to a woman who's originally from China called Chun Mei. And she sometimes makes Chinese dishes. So there's a recipe in there for Chinese.

tofu and cabbage dish. If you like spicy Sichuan food, that's a really good dish to have as well. I have not tried that one, but when I was looking at the recipes, I said this is the one that I'm going to go for.

I'm safe. Yeah, good. Professor Peter Singer, thank you very, very much for your time to speak with us. It was such an honor to be able to speak with you again about your book. The book we just discussed was Consider the Turkey, published by Princeton University Press in 2024. It's a very easy read, and I do strongly recommend to our listeners and viewers to pick up the book and read. Lots of food for thought here. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks a lot. It's been great talking to you again.