After reading
Peter Singer's Animal Liberation and
Tom Regan's "The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism", in 1975, Magel became a
vegetarian and introduced an
animal rights course onto the philosophy curriculum, making it one of the first university courses completely focused on the topic. He was considered to be a pioneer of
applied ethics. He was an outspoken opponent of
animal testing, once stating: "Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: 'Because the animals are like us.' Ask the experimenters why it is morally okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is: 'Because the animals are not like us.' Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction." In the 1980 edition of
Henry S. Salt's ''
Animals' Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress'', edited by Peter Singer, Magel updated Salt's original bibliography. In 1981, Magel published
A Bibliography on Animal Rights and Related Matters lists over 3,200 works. He retired from teaching in 1985. Another review described it as a "carefully crafted and scholarly overview to the literature and philosophy of the animal rights movement." Magel published a new edition of
J. Howard Moore's
The Universal Kinship in 1992, which included a biographical essay of Moore,'''' and in 1997, he released a new edition of
Lewis Gompertz's
Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes. == Death ==