"I've read about Michael Vick," he said Friday afternoon from New York, having flown in the day before. "I know the Eagles just signed him. What he did was certainly awful. But many people do or participate in things regarding animals that are awful. To some extent, I think people may have rushed to judgment because he did something awful to dogs."
Rushed to judgment? The guy who was sentenced to 23 months in prison for profiting from a dogfighting operation in which the lesser dogs were tortured and killed? Singer is famous for sensitizing people to the feelings of animals.
"For example," he went on, "the kinds of things that are done to pigs to turn them into ham or bacon are awful, but we don't care as much about pigs as we do dogs. And I think there's every reason to believe that pigs are as sensitive and intelligent as dogs."
This was going to be a challenging interview.
"What I'm saying," he went on, "is that the people who are very quick to jump on Michael Vick maybe could spend some time thinking about how they participate in the cruelty to animals just by walking into the supermarket, spend some time thinking about what happened to that animal before it was turned into meat."
I did not tell him that I had just lunched on a BLT.
"There are pigs, probably millions, on factory farms," he said, "who are having a worse time than Michael Vick's dogs. That's what I find a little incongruous about the response to what he did."
Singer is 63, a prolific author in bioethics, philosophy, and world poverty, and a provocative public speaker. He has never seen dogs fight for sport, he says, and has never investigated the culture of the pit. But he is well acquainted, he says, with the ways humans mistreat animals.
