where's the beef? . The animal rights issue is a tricky one, because it touches on really deep questions about what it means to be conscious, to have rights, and to experience suffering.  So you might expect a philosopher to be able to sort through the ethical issues and suggest a way forward.  If so, you would be disappointed by this book.    The first chapter lays out the philosophical foundation of the book.  Singer argues that there's really no basis for assigning equal rights to all humans, since different humans have different abilities.  Therefore equality must be based on the recognition of another person's interests.  Since animals have interests too, they deserve equal treatment.  That's it.  It's not terribly deep, and frankly not even rational, but Singer doesn't bother to elaborate.    So if animals have interests, then they obviously have an interest in not suffering.  How do we know animals are capable of suffering?  According to Singer there are two signs:  they seek to avoid painful stimuli and they have nervous systems that bear a superficial similarity to those of humans.  He doesn't say how he came up with these criteria, but they seem awfully generous to me.      In fact, based on those criteria one would conclude that monkeys are capable of understanding spoken language and that humans are capable of echolocation.  Monkeys do in fact respond to certain vocalizations, and they have all the relevant physiological structures for understanding speech.  And humans actually can echolocate (with a lot of practice).  The point is that you would never seriously compare human echolocation to bat echolocation, and the ability of monkeys to process speech is negligible relative to that of humans.  Could this also be true of the capacity for pain and suffering?  I don't think anyone knows, and Singer doesn't shed any light on the subject.    The next chapter is about animal testing, and a lot of the chapter deals with the use of animals in scientific experiments.  This is the weakest part of the book.  Singer finds some of the most gruesome experiments in science history, and juxtaposes them with out-of-context quotes from the researchers to make it look like the research was useless.  He mentions in passing that the vast majority of animal experiments don't involve pain, but by the end of the chapter he suggests that all medical experimentation should eventually be stopped.    Part of his justification for ending medical experiments is the notion that such experiments don't actually contribute to medical or scientific progress.  This idea is unfortunately quite common among people who don't know anything about medicine or science.  However it's completely incorrect, and most of Singer's arguments regarding the scientific value of animal testing have been completely debunked.  For example, he continues to exploit the thalidomide tragedy, even though it was already known at the time the book was written that that incident was unrelated to animal testing.    In addition to being totally confused about science, Singer seems uncomfortable with the scientific method itself.  He repeatedly suggests that animal testing should, in the short term, be limited to experiments that will lead to rapid advances in medical treatment.  This is like saying you should look for your lost car keys where you left them.  Science doesn't work this way.  At one point (p. 47), Singer complains about a series of experiments that were shown "first to prove a theory, then to disprove the theory, and finally to support modified versions of the original theory."  This probably sounds ridiculous to a philosopher, but it's actually a pretty good description of the scientific method.    The next chapter deals with factory farming, and here Singer is on firmer ground.  As in the previous chapter, there's no philosophy, or even rational discourse.  It's just page after page of description, in this case of the conditions of animals on a large farm.  However, in contrast to the chapter on experimentation, the conditions he describes are standard practice for the majority of farm animals.  Here it would seem that there's plenty of room for improvement with comparatively minimal consequences for humans (although I imagine the situation has only gotten worse since the publication of the second edition of the book in 1990).    The next chapter deals with vegetarianism, calling for a boycott of meat and dairy products.  Again the appeal is basically emotional, and if you were moved by the arguments of the preceding chapter, you will presumably find this chapter convincing.    Curiously Singer doesn't call for a similar boycott of medicine or medical treatment, even though the argument would be identical.  Even if you belief that animal experimentation is useless for human medicine, you have to admit that the purchase of such medicine directly pays for more animal research.  Anyone who's receiving treatment for cardiac problems or diabetes, or who has ever had surgery, or who takes prescription drugs, is contributing to animal suffering.  Maybe Singer deals with this in another book, but given the chapter on vegetarianism it's a rather obvious omission.    The next chapter is a strangely out of place history of human attitudes toward animals, going back several thousand years.  It might have made sense to put this at the beginning of the book, but perhaps his editor was afraid of losing readers.    The last chapter talks about some popular animal rights movements and their accomplishments.  Singer doesn't draw any line between violent organizations like the Animal Liberation Front (which the FBI considers a terrorist organization) and organizations that actually help animals in a peaceful way (like the ASPCA).  He speaks positively of PETA, which in addition to other extremist activities, supports violence and arson.  I don't know why he would do this.    Ultimately this is a bad book.  It trivializes a serious issue by  substituting emotional imagery for rational argumentation.  The fact is that humans can benefit greatly from actions that adversely affect animals.  In the realm of science, there is no serious doubt that the length and quality of human life have been improved through animal testing.  With other behaviors, such as meat-eating, the benefits are more subjective and the suffering is probably greater.  How we assign weight to these costs and benefits is a very difficult question that Singer doesn't even attempt to take seriously
Output: NEG