The Pig Who Sang To The Moon

Baying for blood, mainstream media, the animal abuse industry and the Establishment have had a field day taking Jeffrey Masson to task for daring to suggest that farmed animals have evolved emotional lives.

Often touted as the bastion of left-wing intellectual ideas, the Guardian newspaper even had the audacity to invite Roger Lewis, a farmer, and Robert McCrum to write their eschewed review on The Pig Who Sang To The Moon.

Entertaining gems such as [Lewis] “ My family were farmers and butchers in South Wales from 1868… we are proud of our time-honoured country pursuits such as muck-spreading, ploughing, and selecting the fatstock for slaughter”.

Muck-spreading indeed!

Robert McCrum went as far as to say “Animal Rights are all very well. But the idea of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for our dumb friends is the kind of notion that could only make sense in a place like New Zealand [where Masson and his family reside] – or California”.

Masson's level of enquiry always aims at questioning our most basic assumptions. That meat eating is wrong, that human treachery is rife and there is something inherently dysfunctional about bringing life into the world so to kill it. What's more, he never tires of repeating these fundamental truths to a non-sympathetic audience. This brouhaha surrounding Masson's latest work shows us how narrow and how obsessed with superficial things western culture is. Never far from being plagued with the accusation of anthropomorphism, Masson once again delivers the death knoll to an established order. And there's none better for the job.

If you are familiar with his previous works, in particular, Freud: An Assault on Truth and My Father's Guru: A Journey Through Spirituality and Disillusionment then you will be aware that Jeffrey M.Masson's forte, nay, his raison d'être , is to debunk the mythology of false working models of contemporary thought. He should bask in the knowledge that every revolutionary idea ever presented has never been welcomed into the fray with open arms. Far from it. This knowledge, however, does not pay the rent so I urge animal liberationists to get behind and support Masson's considerable efforts in dragging farmed animals emotional lives to the fore for serious discussion.

His rigorous analysis is expanding the pool of “ideological immunity” for the animal rights movement and our literature. If we accept the premise that adults rarely change their most fundamental presuppositions, and if their own immunity to new ideas that doesn't corroborate with their previous ones will halt anything new from emerging, then we really start to glimpse Masson's true worth.

Jeffrey Masson displays in The Pig Who Sang To The Moon a gift for discerning the inner mechanics of animal slavery and the process of domestication but he writes equally in a way that is good for the mass market.

The mass market will enhance our “radical” viewpoint as it did with other previous serious subjects that have taken the world by storm such as existentialism just after WW2 and even vegetarianism in the 70's. Hard to believe that vegetarians were once thought of as cranks but it gives us hope and shows us what can be achieved with passion and resolve behind us

Masson is one of us who treats each animal subject in his book - the hen, the cow, the sheep, the duck, the pig - as a complete full-individual deserving of respect. Contrast that to the ghoulish deathly conditions that factory-farmed animals are forced to endure. His rage against the abominations of factory farming is always justified and if the revolution for factory farmed animals emotional rights has to begin from New Zealand or California—then I say “Bring It On”!

Click Here to read our Interview with Jeffrey Masson