Ethics, as a rational enterprise, will often conflict with other, more negative, aspects of our natures and help to curb our natural impulses to conq… - Richard D. Ryder

In judging who are the maximum sufferers politicians must, today, cast their eyes around the whole globe and take into account the sufferings of all races, religions and species.

The 1960s revolutions against racism, sexism and classism nearly missed out the animals. This worried me. Ethics and politics at the time simply overlooked the nonhumans entirely. Everyone seemed to be just preoccupied with reducing the prejudices against humans. Hadn’t they heard of Darwin? I hated racism, sexism and classism, too, but why stop there? As a hospital scientist I believed that hundreds of other species of animals suffer fear, pain and distress much as I did. Something had to be done about it. We needed to draw the parallel between the plight of the other species and our own. One day in 1970, lying in my bath at the old Sunningwell Manor, near Oxford, it suddenly came to me: SPECIESISM!

[C]ertain moral imperatives are, rightly, considered to transcend national boundaries. What, after all, is so imperative about geography? Suffering is global.