Book Review - Jeffrey Masson's new book on the emotional world of farm animals

[Guest guest]

[From the 11/30/03 San Francisco Chronicle Book Review Section]

 

Why people should care when pigs fry and cows cry

 

Reviewed by Selina O'Grady

 

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The Pig Who Sang to the Moon

 

The Emotional World of Farm Animals

 

By Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

 

BALLANTINE; 277 PAGES; $25.95

 

 

 

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It has always struck me as odd that little children are regularly brought

up on books about fluffy farmyard animals, but we never say, " And you will be

eating every one of them very soon. " Last year 10 billion animals were raised

and killed for food in the United States alone. In the process many are crammed

into battery farms, force-fed or have their young taken from them. Clearly there

are a lot of meat eaters who just do not find this a problem. Jeffrey Masson's

book is an impassioned attempt to explain why they should.

Farmyard animals, he claims, are just like us because they have similar

emotions. They can feel anxious, bored, grief-stricken, lonely, deliriously

happy. The animal lover will, of course, hardly need persuading of this. The

difficulty for Masson is to convince everyone else not only that animals feel

but that they feel just like us and that we should therefore radically alter our

behavior toward them.

 

After all, it is hard enough for us to guess what our fellow humans are

feeling -- and they can talk. How can we possibly know whether and what

different species feel? No problem, says Masson. You just have to look at an

animal to know. Take Mary, the chicken, her beak deformed from factory farming,

 

now living in a sanctuary. She became the inseparable companion of a young

rooster, Notorious Boy. When the first winter rains came, they were found

huddling close together, Notorious Boy's wing draped over Mary " to protect her.

 

. . . If we can't call this love, the word has no meaning. "

 

This charming anecdote, followed by his wonderfully confident assertion of

the chicken's interior life, is indicative of Masson's style of " argument "

throughout. He gives us anecdotes about pigs, cows, sheep, goats, ducks and

geese as well as chickens to " prove " how emotionally similar they are to us.

(Pigs come out of this treatment particularly delightfully; they thrive on

affection, have a short attention span, are easily bored but apparently have a

great capacity for pure pleasure. Goats are not far behind: They are humorous,

fun-loving and independent.)

 

But how do you get from the anecdote to the truth about whether and what

the animal is feeling? Only by anthropomorphism, by empathy, as Masson is happy

to concede, citing Darwin's " The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals "

as his bible. (Masson, rogue psychoanalyst turned animal writer, claims that he

was the first since Darwin to specifically address the emotional lives of

animals.) Indeed, the anecdotal, anthropomorphic approach is increasingly

respectable among researchers studying animal behavior, such as Francis de Waal

and Jane Goodall. ( " The plural of anecdote is 'data,' " says Mark Berkoff, a

biologist at the forefront of scientists who believe animals have emotions.) But

in the absence of academia's " sterile experiments, " as Masson calls them, it is

easy for the skeptic to dismiss impassioned claims for animal emotions as pure

sentimentality.

 

There are, however, anecdotes that must turn the stomach of even the most

blithe carnivores. Masson describes the stench, artificial light and almost

total silence in a vast barn packed with 25,000 pure white chickens, and factory

farm pigs, so heavy they find it difficult to stand, biting the bars of their

crates. Here, Masson's style of argument seems at its most convincing:

 

It is hard to believe that these animals are not suffering.

 

Indeed, if Masson had set his sights lower, he could have made a much

better argument. There is good scientific evidence (which he does not cite),

based on the similarity in our brain anatomy and chemistry, that animals may

share with us the less complex emotions of pain, fear, stress, pleasure,

maternal love. What these emotions actually feel like to animals we have no way

of knowing, pace Masson. But it is unlikely that they will feel the same because

so much thought and self-consciousness goes into human feeling. Our grief, for

instance, is made up of what a life means, of memory, of the effect on others,

of time, etc. Masson proclaims that a cow forced to mourn her only calf is no

less tragic a figure than a human in such a situation. Wrong. Human parents

mourn their children a lifetime. They understand what they have lost. Does a

cow? Certainly Masson's book will not convince anyone who needs convincing that

it can.

 

Masson argues for the equivalence of human and animal emotions because he

hopes this will lead us to the ultimate stage of treating farmyard animals well:

not exploiting them in any way at all, including taking their eggs or milk. If

they feel like us, how can we kill them, treat them cruelly or use them for our

own ends? Sadly for Masson, all too easily. Look how we all manage to sit down

to our laden dinner tables while millions of our fellow humans starve and suffer

in the poor world.

 

Selina O'Grady is a San Francisco writer.