Review
"In this latest leg of Jeffrey Moussaieff's 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
"I found The Pig Who Sang to the Moon wrenching, yet vitally important--at last a voice for the domestic animals who need it most. While every attention is paid to wild animals and to pets, farm animals are systematically ignored because the fact that we kill and eat these sentient beings is almost unbearable to acknowledge. Yet if that is what we are doing, we must acknowledge it. We must understand our actions. This powerful, excellent book is not for cowards."
-Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Lives of Dogs
"For years now, Jeffrey Masson has been illuminating the emotional world of animals, and helping to restore the beauty of the human-animal bond. I've 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 The Food Revolutionand Diet for a New America
"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 everyday - on 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 feel--and 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 D'Silva, CEO, Compassion in World Farming
From the Inside Flap
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson s groundbreaking bestseller, When Elephants Weep, was the first book since Darwin s time to explore emotions in the animal kingdom, particularly from animals in the wild. Now, he focuses exclusively on the contained world of the farm animal, revealing startling, irrefutable evidence that barnyard creatures have feelings too, even consciousness.
Weaving history, literature, anecdotes, scientific studies, and Masson s own vivid experiences observing pigs, cows, sheep, goats, and chickens over the course of five years, this important book at last gives voice, meaning, and dignity to these gentle beasts that are bred to be milked, shorn, butchered, and eaten. Can we ever know what makes an animal happy? Many animal behaviorists say no. But Jeffrey Masson has a different view: An animal is happy if it can live according to its own nature. Farm animals suffer greatly in this regard. Chickens, for instance, like to perch in trees at night, to avoid predators and to nestle with friends. The obvious conclusion: They cannot be happy when confined twenty to a cage.
From field and barn, to pen and coop, Masson bears witness to the emotions and intelligence of these remarkable farm animals, each unique with distinct qualities. Curious, intelligent, self-reliant many will find it hard to believe that these attributes describe a pig. In fact, there is much that humans share with pigs. They dream, know their names, and can see colors. Mother cows mourn the loss of their calves when their babies are taken away to slaughter. Given a choice between food that is nutritious or lacking in minerals, sheep will select the former, balancing their diet and correcting the deficiency. Goats display quite a sense of humor, dignity, and fearlessness (Indian goats have been known to kill leopards). Chickens are naturally sociable they will gather around a human companion and stand there serenely preening themselves or sit quietly on the ground beside someone they trust.
For far too long farm animals have been denigrated and treated merely as creatures of instinct rather than as sentient beings. Shattering the abhorrent myth of the dumb animal without feelings, Jeffrey Masson has written a revolutionary book that is sure to stir human emotions far and wide.
From the Back Cover
"In this latest leg of Jeffrey Moussaieff's 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
"I found The Pig Who Sang to the Moon wrenching, yet vitally important--at last a voice for the domestic animals who need it most. While every attention is paid to wild animals and to pets, farm animals are systematically ignored because the fact that we kill and eat these sentient beings is almost unbearable to acknowledge. Yet if that is what we are doing, we must acknowledge it. We must understand our actions. This powerful, excellent book is not for cowards."
-Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Lives of Dogs
"For years now, Jeffrey Masson has been illuminating the emotional world of animals, and helping to restore the beauty of the human-animal bond. I've 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 The Food Revolutionand Diet for a New America
"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 everyday - on 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 feel--and 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 D'Silva, CEO, Compassion in World Farming
About the Author
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, former Sanskrit scholar and Projects Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives, has written more than a dozen books, including the bestsellers The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats, Dogs Never Lie About Love,and When Elephants Weep. A longtime resident of Berkeley, California, he now lives in New Zealand with his wife, two sons, and five cats.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ONE
Pigs is Equal
An old English adage claims, "dogs look up at you, cats looks down on you, but pigs is equal." There is some truth in the folk wisdom of this saying, which has been ascribed to different people, including Winston Churchill, but nobody is sure who said it first. Pigs are more or less the same size as human beings and resemble us in many ways. The organs of pigs are so similar to our own that surgeons have resorted to pig heart valves for replacing the patient's aortic or mitral valve.
There is a wonderful quote from W.H. Hudson, the great naturalist who lived for some time in Argentina, that perfectly describes the pig's attitude towards us:
I have a friendly feeling towards pigs generally, and consider them among the most intelligent of beasts. I also like his disposition and attitude towards other creatures, especially man. He is not suspicious or shrinkingly submissive, like horses, cattle and sheep; nor an impudent devil-may-care like the goat; nor hostile like the goose, nor condescending like the cat; nor a flattering parasite like the dog. He views us from a totally different, a sort of democratic standpoint, as fellow citizens and brothers, and takes it for granted that we understand his language, and without servility or insolence he has a natural, pleasant camaraderie, or hail-fellow-well-met air with us.
The fact that pigs will become extremely friendly with humans, given half a chance, is something of a miracle, considering how we have almost invariably treated them. Perhaps pigs themselves are aware of our resemblance and so regard us more as cousins than members of a completely different species. Unlike dogs, pigs don't seem to have a critical period after which they can no longer be socialized. Handled with affection, even an adult pig might well become as friendly as a dog who has always lived with the family since puppydom. This shows remarkable trust and flexibility on the part of the pig. The one big difference between pigs and dogs is the way we treat them. We play with our dogs, take them for walks, and romp with them. We rarely do the same with pigs.
One has to wonder why the pig came to be despised by both Jews and Muslims. Was it merely the flesh of the pig that was distrusted, or the pig itself, as an animal? By and large people have believed the former, claiming that because pig meat was so easily prone to spoiling and trichinosis, the consequent human diseases led them to avoid the meat and thereby censor the animal. But the late F.E. Zeuner, the leading expert on domestication, rejects this view, pointing out that pork is no more likely to spoil than any other meat in a hot country, and in any event there are tropical islands where pork is the main meat eaten. He proposes instead an interpretation having to do with the people who raised pigs. Unlike cattle, pigs cannot be driven, and therefore the pig is only valuable to the settled farmer. The nomad, who always felt superior to the farmer, "came to despise the pig as well as the farmer who bred it." The religious prohibitions seem to have been transferred from the people on to the animal, one they "themselves could neither breed nor keep." But then why would this not apply equally to chickens? Could it be that they are smaller and more transportable?
In most parts of the world today, we cannot own another person in the way that we can own an automobile. The law is also increasingly taking the view that a human cannot "own" an animal companion either.
This became evident when a wealthy man in Philadelphia sought to have his two dogs euthanized after his death. In a surprising victory for the views of the movement for the rights of animals, a United States federal court decided that animal companions cannot be owned, and therefore could not be disposed of at will as if they were merely chattels. The logic then (as now) is that living beings can never be property. As early as the nineteenth century, Henry Bigelow, professor of medicine at Harvard University, was writing: "There will come a time when the world will look back to modern vivisection in the name of Science, as they do now to burning at the stake in the name of Religion."
It is undeniable that we humans share a great deal in common with pigs, though people have been reluctant to acknowledge the similarities. Like us, pigs dream and can see colors. Also like us, and like dogs and wolves, pigs are sociable. (I've been told that on warm summer nights pigs snuggle up close to one another and for some unexplained reason like to sleep nose to nose). The females form stable families led by a matriarch with her children and female relatives. Piglets are particularly fond of play, just as human children are, and chase one another, play-fight, play-love, tumble down hills, and generally engage in a wide variety of enjoyable activities. As Karl Schwenke points out in his classic 1985 book, In a Pig's Eye, "Pigs are gregarious animals. Like children, they thrive on affection, enjoy toys, have a short attention span, and are easily bored." He reports that when pigs were put into a small pen, as they are on most farms, "their world was instantly narrowed to each other, the food, and the sty, and as they grew, their world became smaller and smaller. The tedium of their existence soon became apparent: they were lethargic, exhibited ragged ears, had droopy tails, and rapidly acquired that dull-eyed glaze that swineherds associate with six- or seven-year-old breeding hogs." Much like children, piglets do not develop in a normal way when they are deprived of the opportunity to engage in play.
Kim Sturla, of the Northern California animal sanctuary Animal Place, tells me that pigs express friendships with other pigs a variety of ways: vocalizing, body language, who they sleep with, explore with, who they hang out with during the day. Some pigs, Kim says, are friendly with certain pigs because they arrived at the sanctuary about the same time. Juveniles will play with each other and immense patience is demonstrated with new piglets. One can witness the interaction and affection when pigs greet each other, snout to snout, sometimes with love grunts--soft, wispy open-mouthed greetings given when a pig is in heat, feeling amorous, or maybe just feeling sweetly affectionate. Pigs can also be cliquish: an older new arrival may not easily find acceptance.
Like humans, pigs are omnivores. Though they are often fed garbage and eat it, their choices--if allowed--would not be dissimilar to our own. Kim Sturla, of the animal sanctuary Animal Place, tells me that when she offers her pigs mango or a head of broccoli, they will always take the mango. She explains that they have a sweet tooth and a pastry will always win over a healthy vegetable. Remind you of somebody? They get easily bored with the same food. They love melons, bananas, and apples, but if they have had them for a few days, they will set them aside and eat whatever other food is new first. We don't often think of pigs and cleanliness in the same breath, but pigs, if permitted, will be more fastidious in eating and in general behavior than dogs. When offered anything unusual to eat, a pig will sniff at it and nibble gently. About 90 per cent of their diet in the wild is plant-based, consisting of fruit, seeds, roots, and tubers. In fact, a study of what fruits pigs routinely eat, conducted on one of the Indonesian islands, found that they would eat more than 50 varieties. Perhaps this is why of all animals their flesh most resembles human flesh, which is somewhat disconcerting when you consider that more than 40 per cent of all meat raised in the world is pork.
Like people, pigs avoid extreme temperatures. Since they have sweat glands only on their noses, it is important that they do not overheat. Water is not effective in cooling them down, because it evaporates quickly, whereas mud provides evaporative cooling over a much longer period of time. This is why pigs, like elephants, need to roll in mud. Mud protects their sensitive skin from sunburn, dangerous to a pig, and also from flies and other parasites. It is not, then, that pigs are dirty; quite the contrary. Never will a pig defecate near its sleeping or eating quarters. Fastidiousness is one of a pig's most salient characteristics. Kim Sturla has repeatedly seen old arthritic sows waking up early in the morning, getting their stiff bodies up with enormous effort, then dragging themselves through deep mud to walk a long distance away from the barn before they would urinate.
And if we find them sometimes difficult, because they can, like humans, have tantrums, it simply means that they are prone to powerful emotions. Pavlov, after a month of fruitless attempts to obtain gastric juice from a vociferous pig, declared: "It has long been my firm belief that the pig is the most nervous of animals. All pigs are hysterical." But let us bear in mind that this same comment has been made numerous times about women and, in both cases, it is an example of pure ignorance. What is clear is that pigs are much like us in ways that matter. There is nothing shameful in recognizing the similarity.
The resemblance extends to the expression in the eyes of pigs. Many people have found it disconcerting to look into the eye of a pig. This is because one gains the startling impression of seeing another person looking back at you. Pigs have small, rather weak eyes, and appear to be squinting, as if they are trying to get a better take on the world. They seem often to wear a wistful look. Dick King-Smith, the writer who created Babe (turned into the much-loved film) and who used to be a pig farmer, said on a television show, "Many times I've looked into a pig's eye and convinced myself that inside that brain is a sentient being, who is looking back at me observing him wondering what he's thinking about." When I recently visited Carole Webb's Farm Animal Rescue in Cambridge, England, I was introduced to Wiggy, a gigantic boar (a male pig) wei...
