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(More customer reviews)I was prepared to dislike Peter Singer. I had heard outrageous comments allegedly made by him comparing the slaughter of animals with genocide against human beings. But one of the reasons a show like 'Charlie Rose' is valuable is that it enables a 'reality check' against one's own prior impression of what a certain person is considered to be. Here I was pleasantly surprised. Singer was not the raging arrogant extremist I had considered him to be. He spoke moderately and modestly. He explained that animals are sentient creatures who suffer, and that putting them into pens, artifically fattening them up, doing all kinds of things to them so that we can use them for food is not right. It is causing unnecessary suffering. Charlie Rose asks him where his sensitivity comes from, and Singer a bit reluctantly relates that he was raised in Australia by parents who escaped from Austria before the Shoah. ( Holocaust) He says that some, I believe three of his grandparents did not so escape.
Singer talks about ethics in general, says he admires the U.S. for being a society in which Ethics is important though he himself is distant from the religious faith of a good share of Americans.
Rose does a good job in this interview and asks the question about the difference in consciousness between humans and animals.
I myself am somewhat conflicted and hypocritical on the meat- eating issue. I believe there is something right in Singer's claim. I heard Richard Schwartz perhaps the most famous Jewish Vegetarian speak about how 'meat- eating' is contrary to the highest Biblical ethic. And perhaps it is true that mankind would be at an ethically higher place if we did not cause suffering to and did not kill members of another species.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Charlie Rose with Peter Singer; Cecilia Bartoli; Samuel Mockbee (November 28, 2000)
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