The Pig Who Sang to the Moon (Review)
THE PIG WHO SANG TO THE MOON
The Emotional World of Farm Animals
By Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
286 pp. $25.95
By Colman McCarthy
Among those who believe animals have rights, and who honor those rights by not eating, hunting, riding, dissecting or otherwise victimizing animals, conversions are common. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson had his at eight. He had helped a farmer neighbor collect eggs from his free-range hens. “I loved it,” Masson writes. “But at the time I thought, are we thieves? Taking those eggs that belonged to the hen, not to us. The farmer assured me that they were gifts, but I did not believe him.” (p 75)
So began a life of questioning assurances: ones from a food industry that says when you’re hungry eat the flesh of animals, fish or fowl. Or assurances from religionists who quote Genesis that humans have dominion over animals. Or assurances from medical experimenters that torturing animals will lead to a miracle drug.
Masson’s childhood conversion led to both a personal life in which he chose an animal-free diet and a professional life that produced more than a dozen books, including “When Elephants Weep.” He is a partisan who calls for the abolition of animal gulags known as factory farms--and while we’re at it, he says, let’s eliminate family farms. On the latter, Masson is likely to lose readers. Do in all those earth-salting, hardworking and early-rising family farmers? Fine people they may be, Masson argues, but let’s stay real: “It makes no sense to me that [a family farmer] would want to care for an animal in a compassionate manner, live with them, get to know them as individuals, then turn around and simply kill them for our food. Every time I think about that I get dizzy. It just seems profoundly wrong, as profoundly wrong as anything I know.” (p. 231)
In a flesh-eating society that divides animals into two groups—pets that are close and adorable and beasts that are remote and edible—Masson can be dismissed as an extremist. But is he? After years of observing pigs, cows, sheep, goats, chickens, geese and ducks, as well as going deep into the history, literature and science of human-animal relations, how could he not conclude that it is rational also to see things from the animals’ point of view. Having this empathy aligns Masson with the thought of Alice Walker: “The animals of this world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites, or women created for men.”
Advocacy for animal rights can be preachy and moralizing. Masson avoids these lapses by writing engagingly—and reportorially—about people whose care for farm animals includes compassionate co-existence in natural settings. He travels to farms in New Zealand and England, describes farm animal sanctuaries in Maryland, New York and California, and tells about organizations such as Compassion Over Killing, Mercy for Animals, United Poultry Concerns and Vegan Action.
Mason, a former psychoanalyst now in his early 60s, contributes to a rapidly expanding literature that includes the recent “Rattling the Cage: Towards Legal Right for Animals” (Steven Wise), “Dominion: the Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy” (Matthew Scully), and “Battered Birds, Crated Herds: How We Treat the Animals We Eat” (Gene Bauston).
Masson’s arguments would have been stronger had he stresed that no one is totally nonviolent when it comes to other sentient non-human life. We buy newspapers—including this one—that earn money from supermarkets advertising meat, milk and eggs. We travel on roads that destroyed the habitats of animals. We pay federal taxes to government agencies—USDA, FDA, Commerce--that promote industries that kill or exploit animals. We feed our pets with the Alpoed body parts of other animals. We criminalize people who harm household dogs and cats but ignore corporations—McDonalds, KFC, Burger King, Wendy’s—that profit from the daily mass slaughter of animals. We vote for politicians who pass laws to protect dolphins but not tuna swimming with them.
As reasoned as Masson’s pro-animal arguments assuredly are—as solidly so as those of Helen Nearing, Peter Singer, Carol Adams, Tom Regan, Katherine Hessler, Paul Shapiro and other leaders in the animals rights community before him—they are offered to a public that is largely uninformed of the suffering and dying of farm animals. Masson, not naïve, knows this: “Why, then, have the real lives of farm animals been so universally ignored over thousands of years by humans who exploit them. Why do we remain so ignorant of even the most basic knowledge about these animals? Kim Sturla [of Animal Place, a northern California sanctuary] gave me what is I think the correct answer: because it is in our own self-interest not to know them; it is easier to disconnect from whom we are eating if we know nothing at all about them.” (p. 222)
Masson, as both a reporter and an ethicist, chose to know. What he learned about farm animals is an intellectual feast—a banquet of ideas and ideals.
Colman McCarthy, author of “I’d Rather Teach Peace,” is a former Washington Post columnist who directs the Center for Teaching Peace.