Consider the Turkey
On behalf of: Kathy Robbins - The Robbins Office, Inc.
From the world’s most influential philosopher, Peter Singer, comes a meditation on the centerpiece of the meal that, more than any other, brings American families together: the turkey.
We know little about the nature of turkeys, and almost nothing about the lives of the more than 200 million turkeys commercially produced in the United States each year. Peter Singer reveals startling facts about how today’s specially bred turkeys are conceived, raised, and how they die—both in the slaughterhouse, and, even more shockingly, when they are being “depopulated”—to use the industry euphemism for a method of killing animals that is widely used to kill tens of millions of animals in the United States, but is regarded as completely unacceptable in the United Kingdom and the European Union.
In asking his readers to “consider the turkey,” Singer encourages us to reconsider our own complicity in an industry that gives turkeys no consideration at all. Ignorance about what we eat and how it is produced is no longer acceptable and here, Singer outlines the fundamental ethical considerations that should govern our treatment of not only turkeys, but all animals who take the center stage of holiday meals—a persuasive argument for rethinking how we choose to celebrate and how we might do so in a way that respects the interests of animals, as well as our own health and that of our planet.