The Pig Who Sang To the Moon, A UPC Book (and Film) Review

[Guest guest]

Someone could purchase this film and invite others to attend it, including young

people. It should be understandable to very young ages. Then the film could be

loaned out to vegetarian parents and young people throughout the vegetarian

families' social network.

 

UPC News <news wrote:Sat, 20 Dec 2003 14:44:49 -0500

The Pig Who Sang To the Moon, A UPC Book (and Film) Review

United Poultry Concerns PO Box 150 Machipongo, VA 23405

Phone: 757-678-7875 Fax: 757-678-5070 www.UPC-online.org

 

The Pig Who Sang To the Moon, A UPC Book (and Film) Review

December 20, 2003

 

United Poultry Concerns is pleased to send you UPC President Karen Davis’s

review of the new book, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of

Farm Animals by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, and the new film by Stanley M.

Minasian, The Emotional World of Farm Animals with Jeffrey Moussaieff

Masson. For more great books and reviews, visit:

http://www.upc-online.org/book_reviews.html

 

Book & Film Review

The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals

 

By Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Ballantine Books, 2003

Hardcopy, $25.95 + $4 shipping. Canada $37.95

 

Film: The Emotional World of Farm Animals With Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Directed by Stanley M. Minasian. Executive Producer, Kim Sturla

$19.95 + $4 shipping

 

Order book and film from Animal Place, 3448 Laguna Creek Trail, Vacaville,

CA 96588. Tel. (707) 449-4814; fax: 449-8775

See: www.animalplace.org

 

Reviewed by Karen Davis, PhD

 

To the extent that you prevent an animal 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 up.

Their fate is to be buried alive in a brown wash of one another and one

anothers’ manure, sealed up in bodies and buildings that reflect not their will

but ours until we kill them or they have the luck to die first. Their feelings

are buried inside. “Farmers” can say they don’t have any feelings. Their sound

is either shrieks or silence – that and the sterile scientistic jargon in which

we’ve impounded them.

 

The Pig 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 want us to think so, like

the guy who wrote in The New York Times in November, regarding

industrially-raised turkeys: “every bit of natural instinct and intelligence has

been bred out of these turkeys.”

 

Masson takes us on a journey to meet and experience animals who are commonly

regarded as “food,” before they are stupidly hacked and squished into blobs and

icky liquids packed in cellophane and grease. He invites us to empathize with “a

pig looking up to the full moon, emitting mournful sounds much like singing,”

the exuberant rooster who having found 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 being called by jumping through

the clover with “all four feet a few inches off the ground at once,” the goats

who so “loved to hear the sound 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 about to commence play.”

 

He invites us to listen to the “penetrating piping of abandoned ducklings,” “the

slow quacks between adult ducks indicating affection,” and a gander trying

desperately to help his mate with a broken wing limp over a vast plain 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 wait

for her to catch up. He would fly ahead, to show her the way, then return “again

and again, calling to her with his wildest and most 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 factory-farmed animals in footage and photos over the past twenty years,

I see in this image of the desperate gander and his struggling mate a symbol

of the agony in the birds and mammals we’ve imprisoned “in situations where

they cannot express the emotions they inherently possess " apart from

desperation, fear, loneliness, degradation and defeat. Farmed animals carry

within themselves an imprint of their “distant homes.”

 

Those of us who run farmed animal sanctuaries try to create places where the

animals we rescue can express 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 you to several of these earth islands and

tells you how to reach them literally. It was lovely having Jeffrey Masson, the

author of When Elephants Weep and many other bestselling books, and the

award-winning filmmaker Stanley Minasian, visit our sanctuary in preparation for

the book and the marvelous film about making the book, The Emotional World of

Farm Animals with Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson.

 

The Pig Who Sang to the Moon is a stirring, wryly humorous, sorrowful and

engaging book that left me wondering why, after all Masson knows and declares –

that animals cannot be 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 practice

has not been easy for me,” he confesses.

 

My opinion of this imposition is given in part on page 227: “Many people who

have thought about it even more deeply than I have, like Karen Davis,” Masson

writes, “will not eat eggs even when they come from the chickens on her own

sanctuary and even though they have the best life you could imagine for a

chicken. She want people to move away from the idea that their 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 with

their imploring question, “Why are you doing this to me?” You will want to

stop doing that to them, and you will stop, because there are abundant vegan

food choices available to all of us, 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 similar to human beings in their

ability to feel anxious, bored, sad, lonely, or deliriously happy.” What more

do we have to be told to show compassion in our diet?

 

Karen Davis, PhD, is the President of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit

organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of

domestic fowl. www.UPC-online.org