By Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Ballantine Books, 2003
Hardcopy, $25.95 + $4 shipping. Canada $37.95
Film: The Emotional World of Farm Animals With Jeffrey
Moussaieff Masson
Directed by Stanley M. Minasian. Executive Producer, Kim Sturla
$19.95 + $4 shipping
Order book and film from Animal Place, 3448 Laguna Creek
Trail, Vacaville, CA 96588. Tel. (707) 449-4814; fax: 449-8775
See: www.animalplace.org
Reviewed by Karen Davis, PhD
To the extent that you prevent an animal from living the way
he or she evolved to live, you are creating unhappiness for that
animal. – Jeffrey Masson
“We are expected to keep them out of sight.”
– “meat”-chicken farmer
The fate of farmed animals since World War Two has been to be locked
up. Their fate is to be buried alive in a brown wash of one another
and one anothers’ manure, sealed up in bodies and buildings
that reflect not their will but ours until we kill them or they
have the luck to die first. Their feelings are buried inside. “Farmers”
can say they don’t have any feelings. Their sound is either
shrieks or silence – that and the sterile scientistic jargon
in which we’ve impounded them.
The Pig Who Sang to the Moon is a must read for humane
educators and for anyone who thinks that animals exploited for food
are emotionally eviscerated brainless automatons. The “farmers”
and corporations want us to think so, like the guy who wrote in
The New York Times in November, regarding industrially-raised
turkeys: “every bit of natural instinct and intelligence has
been bred out of these turkeys.”
Masson takes us on a journey to meet and experience animals who
are commonly regarded as “food,” before they are stupidly
hacked and squished into blobs and icky liquids packed in cellophane
and grease. He invites us to empathize with “a pig looking
up to the full moon, emitting mournful sounds much like singing,”
the exuberant rooster who having found food, “calls both hens
and chicks together to eat it while he stands like a father and
host at a banquet,” the sheep who responds to his name being
called by jumping through the clover with “all four feet a
few inches off the ground at once,” the goats who so “loved
to hear the sound of their hooves” on a corrugated roof they
would wait in line and take turns, the calves signaling “to
let other calves know that they are about to commence play.”
He invites us to listen to the “penetrating piping of abandoned
ducklings,” “the slow quacks between adult ducks indicating
affection,” and a gander trying desperately to help his mate
with a broken wing limp over a vast plain to their southern wintering
grounds:
She had set out on the long journey to the Falkland Islands by
foot. He would not leave her, so after flying for a few hundred
yards, he would alight and wait for her to catch up. He would
fly ahead, to show her the way, then return “again and again,
calling to her with his wildest and most piercing cries, urging
her to spread her wings and fly with him to their distant home.”
Having gotten to know chickens and turkeys and ducks and studied
the faces of factory-farmed animals in footage and photos over the
past twenty years, I see in this image of the desperate gander and
his struggling mate a symbol of the agony in the birds and mammals
we’ve imprisoned “in situations where they cannot express
the emotions they inherently possess" apart from desperation,
fear, loneliness, degradation and defeat. Farmed animals carry within
themselves an imprint of their “distant homes.”
Those of us who run farmed animal sanctuaries try to create places
where the animals we rescue can express many of the vital emotions
they inherently possess. If you haven’t visited a farmed animal
sanctuary, but would like to, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon
takes you to several of these earth islands and tells you how to
reach them literally. It was lovely having Jeffrey Masson, the author
of When Elephants Weep and many other bestselling books, and the
award-winning filmmaker Stanley Minasian, visit our sanctuary in
preparation for the book and the marvelous film about making the
book, The Emotional World of Farm Animals with Jeffrey Moussaieff
Masson.
The Pig Who Sang to the Moon is a stirring, wryly humorous,
sorrowful and engaging book that left me wondering why, after all
Masson knows and declares – that animals cannot be humanely
raised for food, that we should stop raising them for food and that
he would not help a farmer with advice on how to raise animals less
inhumanely – he himself is not yet vegan: “From theory
to practice has not been easy for me,” he confesses.
My opinion of this imposition is given in part on page 227: “Many
people who have thought about it even more deeply than I have, like
Karen Davis,” Masson writes, “will not eat eggs even
when they come from the chickens on her own sanctuary and even though
they have the best life you could imagine for a chicken. She wants
people to move away from the idea that their taste has a ‘right’
to be satisfied and that animals in general, and chickens in particular,
may be used to satisfy that taste.”
This said, I highly recommend the book and the film. For those
who are not yet vegan, the suffering animals you meet in both works
will haunt you with their imploring question, “Why are you
doing this to me?” You will want to stop doing that to them,
and you will stop, because there are abundant vegan food choices
available to all of us, while the animals called “food”
are stripped to the bone of comfort and joy, and because, as Masson
and the film both say and show, “farm animals have the capacity
for all the deep feelings of their forebears [and] they are remarkably
similar to human beings in their ability to feel anxious, bored,
sad, lonely, or deliriously happy.” What more do we have to
be told to show compassion in our diet?
Karen Davis, PhD, is the President of United Poultry Concerns,
a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful
treatment of domestic fowl. www.UPC-online.org
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United Poultry Concerns, Inc.