Pig Who Sang to Th Emoon Review Guardian

Book & Moving picture Review

The Grunter Who Sang to the Moon:
The Emotional Earth of Farm Animals

By Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Ballantine Books, 2003
Hardcopy, $25.95 + $iv shipping.
Canada $37.95

Film: The Emotional World of
Farm Animals With Jeffrey
Moussaieff Masson
Directed past Stanley M.
Minasian. Executive Producer,
Kim Sturla
$19.95 + $4 shipping

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Meet: www.animalplace.org

Reviewed by Karen Davis, PhD

To the extent that yous prevent an beast 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 upwardly. Their fate is to exist buried alive in a brown wash of one another and i anothers' manure, sealed upward in bodies and buildings that reflect not their will only ours until we kill them or they have the luck to die first. Their feelings are buried within. "Farmers" can say they don't have whatsoever feelings. Their audio is either shrieks or silence - that and the sterile scientistic jargon in which nosotros've impounded them.

The Sus scrofa 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 desire us to recall so, like the guy who wrote in The New York Times in November, regarding industrially-raised turkeys: "every flake of natural instinct and intelligence has been bred out of these turkeys."

Masson takes united states on a journeying to meet and experience animals who are commonly regarded every bit "nutrient," before they are stupidly hacked and squished into blobs and icky liquids packed in cellophane and grease. He invites usa to empathize with "a pig looking upwardly to the full moon, emitting mournful sounds much like singing," the exuberant rooster who having institute 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 existence called by jumping through the clover with "all four feet a few inches off the basis at once," the goats who so "loved to hear the audio 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 near to commence play."

He invites united states to mind to the "penetrating piping of abandoned ducklings," "the slow quacks between developed ducks indicating affection," and a gander trying desperately to help his mate with a broken wing limp over a vast plainly 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 look for her to catch upwardly. He would fly ahead, to evidence her the way, then return "again and again, calling to her with his wildest and well-nigh 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 mill-farmed animals in footage and photos over the past twenty years, I see in this paradigm of the drastic gander and his struggling mate a symbol of the agony in the birds and mammals nosotros've imprisoned "in situations where they cannot express the emotions they inherently possess" apart from desperation, fright, loneliness, degradation and defeat. Farmed animals carry within themselves an imprint of their "distant homes."

Those of us who run farmed animal sanctuaries attempt to create places where the animals nosotros rescue can limited 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 y'all to several of these earth islands and tells you lot how to achieve them literally. It was lovely having Jeffrey Masson, the writer of When Elephants Weep and many other bestselling books, and the accolade-winning filmmaker Stanley Minasian, visit our sanctuary in preparation for the book and the marvelous film about making the book, The Emotional Earth of Subcontract Animals with Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson.

The Pig Who Sang to the Moon is a stirring, wryly humorous, sorrowful and engaging volume that left me wondering why, after all Masson knows and declares - that animals cannot exist 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 do has not been easy for me," he confesses.

My stance of this imposition is given in part on folio 227: "Many people who have idea virtually it even more than securely than I have, like Karen Davis," Masson writes, "will not eat eggs even when they come up 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 sense of 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 lot with their imploring question, "Why are y'all doing this to me?" You will desire to stop doing that to them, and y'all volition stop, because at that place are abundant vegan food choices available to all of united states, 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 like to human beings in their ability to experience broken-hearted, bored, sad, alone, or deliriously happy." What more do we take to be told to show compassion in our diet?

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Source: https://www.upc-online.org/winterspring04/bookreview.htm

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