A Rhetorical Analysis Of All Animals Are Equal By Peter Singer

The passage “All Animals Are Equal,” by Peter Singer is about how us as humans should consider animals’ equality as well as our own. Singer starts out by talking about many minority groups that have come out with the idea of their own liberation movements towards their equality. These minority groups consisted of African Americans, Spanish Americans, women, and people of gay orientation. Us humans never really understand how one group of people could give the another an injustice until most of the issues are forcibly pointed out. He states that we should give the respect of giving the opportunity of equality to the nonhuman animals, so that we may be open-minded to extending equality not just into our own species but toward a very large group

This “capacity for suffering” does not compare to intelligence and verbal language. He compares this idea to a stone. If the stone was kicked alongside the road it would be absurd to think that it is not in the stone’s best interest to be kicked because a stone cannot suffer therefore it has no interests. Animals have an interest to not be tortured or abused because it will suffer therefore the animal does have interests. If any being suffers there is no moral reason as to why their interests and pains should not be questioned. He then compares speciesists to racists in the fact that if a racist believes his or her race is dominant and their own interests matter more than any other races. The same things work with speciesists, they put their own species interests before any other species. Singer goes into extreme comparisons when comparing the a “retarded” human/an infant and an adult dog. He goes into the conclusion that the adult dog would have more understanding of their surroundings than the infant or brain damaged human. So if the choice arose to either sacrifice an adult dog rather than an infant/handicapped human most humans will pick the human due to the bias of their own species making them

I believe that his three main arguments about how animals should be granted equality on their own rights due to equal consideration, the idea that equality is a moral idea, and that animals have pleasures and pains that need to be paid attention to. When people hear “animal equality” they think have equal rights as humans which is not entirely true at all. The rights of nonhuman animals are completely different. We all know an animal has no idea how to vote or what voting even is, but what these animals do know how to do is how to be happy and how to be sad. Animals need to be respected and not abandoned or mistreated. Almost everyone should at least know that due to the many laws against animal’s