Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson - The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals

Table of Contents

For Leila, Ilan, and Manu

PRAISE FOR The Pig Who Sang to the Moon

For years now, Jeffrey Masson has been illuminating the emotional world of animals, and helping to restore the beauty of the human-animal bond. Ive wondered if he might ever turn his extraordinary gaze to the animals we eat. In this book he has done just that, and it is a whopper! The Pig Who Sang to the Moon will forever enrich, deepen, and make real your relationship with extraordinary beings we farm for their meat, eggs, and milk. This is a great book!

JOHN ROBBINS,
author of The Food Revolution
and Diet for a New America

Masson convincingly argues that... it is human arrogance to disregard the growing weight of evidence that animals have deep, complex feelings.

The Boston Herald

At last, we have a book that treats farm animals as individuals, with emotions just like those that dogs and cats have. Masson is a fine writer, and this is his most important book yet. I hope everyone reads it. It will change the way people think about the animals they encounter every dayon their plate.

PETER SINGER,
author of Animal Liberation,
Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics,
University Center for Human Values,
Princeton University

Jeffrey Masson has written another winner. He skillfully juxtaposes fascinating facts with moving tales about the amazing ways in which farm animals show us how they feeland rounds off with a forceful ethical challenge to the reader. The days when farm animals were categorized simply as products must surely now be over. This is, without doubt, a vital book of our times.

JOYCE DSILVA,
CEO, Compassion in World Farming

In this latest leg of Jeffrey Massons journey through the animal kingdoms, this perceptive writer peels back our prejudices to reveal the depth of feeling and thought in animals minds and the leap we must make to be worthy of understanding them. Eye-opening, warm, thoroughly engaging.

INGRID NEWKIRK,
president of PETA

[A]n endearing, sometimes painful peek into the emotional landscapes of farmed animals... Is it right, then, [Masson] asks, to raise animals for foodespecially using often inhumane farming methods? Massons answer is an emphatic no, and after reading his impassioned arguments, even the staunchest meat-eater might agree.

BookPage

People who read Jeffrey Massons new book will never again see cows and pigs, chickens and goats as something to eat. With incontrovertible logic, Masson proves that farm animals are our psychological kin, having rich, diverse emotional lives not unlike our own. Deny it though we may, that meat on our plate is family.

TOM REGAN,
author of Empty Cages:
Facing the Challenge of Animal Rights

Preface

Three years ago, my family and I were visiting Auckland, New Zealand, when we heard about a pig who lived on a beach just fifteen minutes from downtown. This pig was famous; school children came to visit, she had been proposed for mayor, and her neighbors were fiercely divided between those who thought a pig living on the beach was a bit of magic and others who feared she would devour their children. We found the beach, but Piglet, as she was called, had moved to a macadamia-nut orchard farther north and was no longer on view.

To make a long story short, we met her guardians, the wonderful Tony Watkins and his equally wonderful partner Helen, and wound up buying a house on that very beach. We heard many stories about this amazing pig who liked to go for a swim early in the morning when the sea was at its calmest, and who enjoyed having children sit on her side, as long as they gave her a tummy rub before leaving. She was immaculate, well-mannered, sensitive, intelligent, and kind to strangers. When we finally met her, we could see that you could not ask for a better neighbor or ambassador for farm animals. Her emotional life was particularly near the surface. She always let you know what she was feeling; most of the time it was obvious from the smile on her face, especially when she was swimming or playing with her small human friends.

But there were more mysterious aspects to her as well. She was sensitive to music and liked to hear the violin played. She especially seemed to enjoy music on the beach at night when there was a full moon. Tony took a picture, quite recently, of her making the sweetest sounds during a night of the full moon, as if she were actually singing to the moon. The picture at left, of Piglet singing, is photographic evidence of her special affinity for music, water, night, and moon. It is another reason to believe that many animalspigs foremost among themmay have access to feelings humans have not yet known. Perhaps if we listen carefully enough to the songs that Piglet and her cousins sing at night to the moon, we may yet learn about emotions that could bring us a new and utterly undreamed of delight.

In my books about animals, I have usually devoted a few pages to speculate about emotions that animals have which humans may lack. Of course it is purely speculative, but there are moments in the lives of everyone who lives in great intimacy with another species, when we are suddenly aware that the animal is slipping away from us, entering a realm to which we do not have access. She gets a distant look in her eyes, or her face lights up with a kind of joy we seem not to know. At such moments, I am convinced that if I could just learn to listen better, or were just a bit more open to the unknown, I might slip into that same space and learn about emotions of which I at present know nothing.

There are many people who have undergone great suffering who seem to possess knowledge of the deepest recesses of human emotion unavailable to the rest of us. They may want to impart it, but we often cannot hear. Strangely enough, farm animals strike me in the same way. To some people, of course, it sounds absurd to compare the lives of farm animals to survivors of human tragedies. The more, though, that I learn about their lives in factory farms, the more I am convinced that the analogy is not as far-fetched as it might appear. Farm animalsin spite of or perhaps because of the fate that invariably awaits themseem able to retain their capacity for deep feeling, including, miraculously, their love for us. It is my hope that this book will alert you to the existence of another kind of animal life, one that has been with us for thousands of years, but which we rarely truly see. I want Piglet to sing to us as she sings to the moonperhaps a song of mourning, of loss, of sadness, but perhaps also a song of joy, of compassion, of love.

Acknowledgments

My editor in England, Tony Colwell, died while he was editing this book. We had been friends for many years, and he was a wonderful editor. I cannot say how sorry I am he is no longer here to enjoy the results of his many hours of work on this book that was close to his heart. At last, he told me when I said I wanted to write a book about the emotions of farm animals, the balance will be redressed a little. It is high time.

As usual, Nancy Miller, editor-in-chief at Ballantine, has done more than any author has the right to expect, going over draft after draft after draft, always improving the text and clarifying my thinking. I would not dream of writing any book without Nancys help.