The Emotional Lives of Farmed Animals

Interviewed by Claudette Vaughan

Jeffrey Masson’s ‘The Pig Who Sang To The Moon’ is a fabulous book (Click Here to Read our Review). Masson argues that an animal can only be happy when it is living under conditions that allow he/she to express their natural behaviour and to feel the emotions that accompany that behaviour.

Jeffrey Masson’s book will arouse your love and anger for farmed animals. The stories are unique. The writing mesmerizing. Here is the interview based around ‘The Pig Who Sang To The Moon’.

Abolitionist: You set out to find out whether farmed animals have emotional lives in your latest book "The Pig Who Sang To The Moon". What were your findings?

Jeffrey Masson: To my surprise, I discovered that they had emotional lives every bit as profound and complex as those of “companion animals” such as dogs, cats and birds. This is probably not surprising, but most people, including myself, have not thought much about the feelings of farmed animals. It is uncomfortable to do so.

Abolitionist: Is there something perverse about bringing life into the world to kill it?

Jeffrey Masson: I cannot think of anything more perverse than to bring life into the world simply to kill it. Think about it in terms of humans: imagine how we would feel about a woman who gave birth to children only to sell them to a slaughterhouse for food? Or imagine how we would feel to learn that somebody had a farm devoted to raising orphaned children only to sell them for food later? It is the worst kind of horror story. Yet we engage in it happily when the children are animal children. Consider how many of the animals humans routinely eat are still babies: veal calves, lambs, even the chicken we eat is essentially still a baby bird forced to grow rapidly to satisfy human appetites. It is grotesque!

Abolitionist: The analogy between farmed animals and survivors of human tragedies you say, is not far-fetched. Is a modern day intensive factory farm, then, a microcosm of the greater macrocosm of life itself?

JM: Here is an article I wrote for SAFE on precisely this issue.

Trauma and Animals

By Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Although I am no longer a Freudian psychoanalyst (I once was director of the Freud Archives) there is still one principle that I deeply believe: trauma lies at the heart of all human suffering. And most traumas start in childhood. Children can be traumatized in many different ways: Sometimes it is physical abuse. Soon there will be laws against parents hitting their children just about everywhere in the world. Many countries, such as Sweden, have had them in place for some years. But it is sobering to realize that it was not until the early 1960s that doctors became aware of how common it was. Sometimes the abuse is sexual. It took the world a long time to recognize the reality of child sexual abuse; not until the 1980s did people become aware that it was not the fantasy of the child. Some people still do not understand this. But slowly we are making progress. Emotional and verbal abuse is still common and it is harder to get people to realize how much damage they can do.

If we have had so much trouble taking in the importance of trauma in the lives of our own species, you can how imagine how much more difficult it has been to acknowledge that trauma takes place in the lives of animals as well. But anyone who has lived in close proximity to an animal, whether a companion animal such as a dog, cat or bird, or an animal living on a farm, such as a sheep, cow, goat, pig or chicken, knows that these animal can suffer trauma just as easily as can humans. Alas, those on the farm suffer them far more often, in fact, one could say without exaggeration, that they were born to suffer. For we only have these animals near us into order to traumatize them. Their whole purpose in living on a farm (and yes, there are those who would question the use of the word “living” for what they experience) is to be killed, to be exploited for their eggs, their skin, and their flesh.

People wonder if it is appropriate to use the word “trauma” for what these animals experience. I too believe that we need a different word, because I am convinced that these animals suffer more not less trauma than humans. After all, humans have language and they can assuage their suffering with words. We can talk about it, reason about it. We can be comforted by others, and generally we will find somebody who sympathizes with what we suffer. Not so the vast majority of animals killed on a farm. Once in a while, a child will cry when “his” or “her” lamb is led to the slaughter. From time to time, the screams of a rabbit being killed will pierce the heart of the child who hears them. Sometimes a child watching a pig being killed, a gruesome act that reminds so many of the murder of a person, will turn away in horror and disgust. Many a vegetarian has been born on the farm in this way.

Our capacity to feel sympathy and compassion for others is severely tested by daily life. We are in constant overload from images on television and in the newspaper of human tragedy and human suffering. Can we possibly have any to spare for animal suffering, especially when most of us can easily go through life without ever coming face to face with it? But it is precisely this capacity that makes us most human. It is our most precious commodity, and it only increases by being exercised. The more we show, the more we feel. Sympathy does not diminish us; it increases the capacity of our heart. To feel deeply is the greatest gift that any human can have. To give of sympathy costs nothing and enriches us beyond belief. Extending that sympathy to the world of animals is clearly the destiny of humans, one that will come to full fruition, I believe, in centuries to come. Then we will look back with awed incomprehension at how we could have treated our evolutionary cousins so badly in times past.

Abolitionist: The Animal Liberation Movement attracts to its ranks older people, middle aged people, young, punks, hippies, gays – do you think the way forward is fostering diversity since one of the hall marks of many of the established large animal rights organisations these days, including inside Australia, is to kill off diversity and the individual action in favour of iron-fisted control?

Jeffrey Masson: Diversity is what we love about the world, the diversity of animals, people, colors, views, smells, sights. We must foster this, we must honor this, we must cherish it. In ALL forms, human as well, and in the animal rights movement too. Let a million flowers bloom!

Abolitionist: Is the terror we inflict upon non-human animals a symptom of a spiritual sickness only the human race possesses?

Jeffrey Masson: Not sure. In my last book, Raising the Peaceable Kingdom, I suggested that ONLY humans engage in genocide. There is something sick about our history of inflicting misery and death upon animals. Other animals eat other animals, but none torture them in the way we do, and none seek to torture their own species. We have a great deal of shame to live down.

Abolitionist: Is there any victim heartbeat that is not, somehow, also our own?

Jeffrey Masson: No. Only when we can recognise the “humanity” of every other life form will we be truly human.

Abolitionist: The ignorant mindset of the farming community really shines through in your book. Will they be the last to join the emancipation for non human animal rights?

Jeffrey Masson: I am afraid so. After all, they make their livings from these animals. Exploitation is what they DO. It would take a lot for somebody in that world to realize what they are doing, and turn their back on it. It happens, but alas, very infrequently. Just think about how hard it is to get politicians to do something they know is right if they are beholden to an interest group by financial ties. Or think of medical researchers who take money from drug companies. They can no longer think about what is right and what is true. I think the same is true for farmers.

Abolitionist: Did you find in your research of “Emotional Lives…” much confusion from farmers concerning animal rights?

Jeffrey Masson: As a group, I found farmers to be the most resistant to recognising the emotional capacity of farmed animals, for obvious reasons!

Abolitionist: Tell us some stories on the exchanges you had with some of the animals in your book?

Jeffrey Masson: I suppose what got to me the most was walking around a farm-animal sanctuary and being followed by several pigs. They were just like curious dogs. They followed me, tails wagging, wherever I went. I realize that they enjoyed the walk as much or more than I did. They were curious, good-natured, friendly companions. If we treated them like dogs, they would like next to us at night just as happily. How could we have been so contemptuous of such wonderful, warm-hearted animals? This came as a real surprise, because I had never been around pigs before.

Abolitionist: Can you shatter the myth that farmed animals wouldn't even exist unless we bred them?

Jeffrey Masson: All farmed animals come from wild animals who have been domesticated. As wild animals, they were doing fine in their own niches. They did not need us to exist. In fact, they were doing better than fine. They were thriving: The red Burmese jungle fowl, from which the chicken was derived is an extraordinarily shy and beautiful bird. We have attempted to demean the chicken, but anyone who lives with a chicken (and more and more women choose to) find they make lovely companion animals. But they don’t need us to exist; they never did.

Abolitionist: Why are scientists still saying, "Cows don't weep real tears"?

Jeffrey Masson: Weeping is one of those traits humans like to keep for themselves. We don’t like to think that other animals besides us can experience real compassion, or deep altruism, or that they shed real tears, or that they have dreams about their own past, or even that they see as many colors as we do! We love to think of our species as unique, and anyone who comes along to demonstrate it is not true, will generally be met with hostility. I know. I made the simple observation (in When Elephants Weep) that other animals experienced emotions every bit as complex as our own, and the scientific world was up in arms. Less today, and that is grounds for satisfaction.

Abolitionist: What did you learn from your experiences that you didn’t know before?

Jeffrey Masson: Almost everything I learned I did not know before. I had never lived around farmed animals and so was completely unprepared for what I found. In a nutshell, what I learned was that these animals are every bit as complex as our more familiar companion animals. They are capable of friendships, they have distinct personalities, they can experience loneliness, boredom, and are as capable of joy and pleasure as any other animal, including the human animal. That we treat them as if they were simple commodities, pieces of inanimate matter, is the great shame of our time.

Abolitionist: Questioning the purpose of a pig can be as complex as the same questions about the purpose of human life. Tell us your thoughts here please Jeff.

Jeffrey Masson: When people have said to me: The purpose of the life of a pig is to be eaten, and they say something like this all the time, I have always been dumbfounded. Who tells them these lies?

When do they first hear them? How do you go about getting them to see that the purpose of any animal is to live the life it evolved to live. If somebody told you: the purpose of human life is to make money, surely you could see through this lie right away. So why should it be so difficult to realize that no animal was ever content to be the meal of another?

Why do ALL animals, humans include, run from predators? We all want to live. We all want to do the things nature allows us to do: feel the wind in our hair, smell the plants around us, see the beauty of the forest when we wander in it, seek out companions, lie in the sun — the very things that every animal wants to do. The purpose of life is to realize that other sentient creatures have a purpose in life too!

Abolitionist: Legitimate, effective activists view issues as problems amenable to solutions. What's the solution here?

Jeffrey Masson: The only antidote to ignorance is more knowledge. That is slowly happening.

Abolitionist: What's your next project Jeff?

Jeffrey Masson: I am just completing an Encyclopedia of my 100 Favorite Animals. Big task that I should not have taken on, but I have learned a great deal about animals I would not otherwise have studied, butterflies, beetles, and stick-insects, for example!