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

By Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Published in 2003 by Ballantine Books

Book Review by Steve Kane

“I was almost blinded by the sight of 25,000 pure white chickens packed up right against one another as far as my eyes could see … it was like a hall of mirrors,” observes Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, on a visit to factory farm. These seldom seen birds lived in their own waste under artificial lights, eating and drinking, waiting to die. “It was deathly quiet,” notes Masson, “the quiet of … despair not contentment.”

Do chickens really feel despair? Yes, says Masson in his latest book, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals. In fact, farmed animals get depressed, feel joy and sadness, dream, care deeply about their young, and express loyalty and friendship. Drawing from personal experiences, history, literature, and anecdotes, Masson’s book brings to light the complex feelings of chickens, pigs, cows, sheep, goats, and ducks. At the heart of this penetrating book is Masson’s belief in the power of the narrative to help us understand their emotional lives.

Their stories begin in the animals’ not-too-distant past. Masson argues that “the domesticated animals who live on our farms are very little removed from their wild ancestors and therefore have all the emotions that belong to those wild animals who live under conditions of freedom.” By denying farmed animals their natural behaviors (the way they have evolved to live), we in turn deny them happiness.

Meet Felicity, an egg-laying hen who, before being rescued and taken to a sanctuary, spent her entire life in a small, overcrowded wire battery cage inside a windowless shed. Felicity’s relative, the jungle fowl, spends her days scratching the earth for food, making nests, dust bathing, and roosting in trees—pleasures denied to battery-caged hens. Accordingly, within a day of her rescue, the thin, featherless, and broken-beaked (yet another victim of the egg industry’s practice of “de-beaking”) Felicity was able to construct a perfectly formed nest to protect her eggs. Soon her feathers grew back, she joined a small flock, and was able to live out the remainder of her life as a chicken. Happily ever after, Masson would maintain.

Sadly, the emotions of animals like Felicity are difficult to express (and rarely observed by humans) on factory farms.

Masson’s critics argue that chickens do not enjoy roosting in trees, pigs take no pleasure in moonlight, ducks are no happier in water, cows do not love their young, and so on. Instead, they maintain, the animals are acting according to their instincts. Moving beyond semantics, Masson believes that “the emotions [they] feel by obeying that instinct are still real, and surely it is those emotions that matter, not the source of them.”

However, not all one would expect to be Masson’s supporters agree with his basic theory that animals are happiest when allowed to live according to their nature. Masson admits there are exceptions to his rule, like the European herring gull who has abandoned the sea and taken up residence inland nesting on buildings and in garbage dumps. Here the absolutist reader might dismiss Masson’s claims.

“A chicken flew into my arms. I didn’t even know chickens could fly.” Masson meets this gregarious bird who “nestled in [his] arms like a happy kitten” at a sanctuary. The chicken captures his imagination. Indeed, it is Masson’s appeal to our imagination that sets this book apart from others in its genre. Statistics and facts create sympathy, but it’s the intimacy and details in one’s story that produce empathy. Masson asks that we stretch our empathy “across the species barrier.” Once these animals find a permanent place in our imaginations, they will cease to be on our dinner plates.

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