I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.

Singer’s quip reframes vegetarianism from a self-improvement regimen into an ethical stance centered on the welfare of animals. By joking that he did it “for the health of the chickens,” he highlights the asymmetry in common justifications for diet: people often cite personal health, while the most immediate beneficiaries of abstaining from meat are the animals not killed. The line uses humor to sharpen a moral claim—compassion, not self-interest, is the decisive motive—and it implicitly critiques a culture that normalizes animal suffering by treating it as invisible or secondary.