by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson was perfectly happy being a vegetarian before he began researching his book The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals. What he discovered bothered him, so much so that he finally decided to forego some of his pleasures like cheese, milk and chocolate to become a vegan. More than the gruesome and barbaric conditions under which farm animals - an expression that he says is outdated and far too benign - are raised, treated and slaughtered, it was the emotional complexity displayed by the creatures he examined that affected him most. From the more bucolic vantage point of farm sanctuaries, he examined the behaviour of pigs, cows, goats, sheep and fowl and found that their tenderness, affection and social interaction gave them a level of sympathy he found surprising.

Masson was in town this week to deliver a talk on his book, courtesy of animal rights activists Global Action Network.

Mirror: By your own admission in the introduction, your book contains a misnomer in the title. You say it should be "farmed" rather than "farm" animals.

Jeffrey Masson: I wanted to use "farmed" but my publisher says it sounds so clumsy. It'll take probably another 10 years before people are used to it and start using it, but the truth is that these animals are not there of their own volition. Therefore, to describe them as "farm animals" almost sounds like they chose to live on a farm. But they don't choose it, we put them there. We use them for our own benefit. So they are exploited, and of course killed, and enslaved, as far as I'm concerned. Therefore "farmed" would be a better description.

M: What are the repercussions of farm animals displaying emotions on us as a society of meat eaters?

JM: It should give anybody pause. They have to consider that this animal is capable of friendship and has strong family ties, and it feels compassion and it can be sympathetic and forgive. If it can do all these things that we thought were strictly human traits, what right do I have to deprive them of all the potential to express those emotions, just to satisfy a whim of eating them?

Kittens, calves, puppies, piglets

M: Everyone that you interviewed in the book and the movie kept saying, ‘A pig or a cow acts just like a cat or a dog.' Should this be surprising? Why shouldn't farm animals act like pets?

JM: Because people have not pointed that out in a long time. It's not surprising, when you think about it. But people who've never been to a farm, people who've never had an up-close personal encounter with a pig or a cow, don't think of them as similar to dogs or cats.

For one thing, they don't think that farm animals have any relationship with us, that they would just as soon not have anything to do with us. And that's not true. If we treat them as they do in any sanctuary where the animal's not killed or tortured in any way, these animals quickly lose their fear of humans and behave very much like cats and dogs. They enjoy our presence, pigs will learn their names and come when you call them, they'll wag their tails - they display all the emotions that we're accustomed to seeing in companion animals but don't normally attribute to farm animals.

M: You also show disdain for the widely practiced scientific method of avoiding anthropomorphism. In fact, you think that some degree of anthropomorphism is necessary…

JM: It's absolutely necessary. We can't live without it. We do it with each other. If I didn't think that you were like me, I wouldn't know when you were angry or when you were happy. There's no way I can be inside your head and know what you're feeling. And it is something of a problem. Nobody can get inside the mind of another person. But we're pretty accurate when we guess what they're feeling. And I think we can do the same thing with animals. You can call it anthropomorphism, and strictly speaking it is, but then every statement that we attribute about the emotions of another human being is a piece of anthropomorphism. I think we need to make the effort to put ourselves in the place of another creature. We have to do that. And the more we do that the better, and the better we get at it. I see no reason why we shouldn't apply it across the species barrier, especially when it's simple to do.

Bad behaviourism

M: How much of what you call emotion would a scientist or a factory farmer call merely instinct?

JM: It depends on who you're talking to, of course. It was very popular, up to about 10 years ago, to ascribe everything to instincts. But the behaviourists were doing this to humans too. They were not prepared to admit that humans had an emotional life.

M: Humans? Didn't have emotional lives?

JM: Oh, yeah! They would claim that we couldn't know anything about the emotions so let's never talk about it. They would absolutely refuse. That was radical behaviourism: Let's not discuss emotional life, we can't know anything at all about anyone else's nor our own, so let's just omit it. Everything is a question of behaviour, hence the name behaviourism.

That's pretty much dead now, although there are a few die-hard scientists who would still say that. But they might say that, when a woman loses her child and is sobbing and in mourning, that's an instinct. We are hard-wired to do certain things, we still have feelings around those things, so maybe the behaviour is hardwired, but our feelings around them are not, and they differ from person to person - and probably animal to animal.

Suffer the little animals

M: In your conclusion, you argue that eating meat and caring for the welfare of the animals that we're going to wind up eating is inherently contradictory. Can't someone eat meat and still not want animals to be treated in a cruel manner?

JM: If you look at polls, 80 per cent of Americans, and I suspect that it's even higher in Canada, would prefer that the animals they eat have had a happy life and were treated humanely. The problem is, how do you define happiness? In my definition of happiness, you can't be happy if someone is going to confine you. If somebody put me in a beautiful room, you got the TV, books and all the food you want, but you're never leaving the room, I could not be happy.

Second of all, if somebody told me, ‘Look, I'm going to put you in a room and I'm going to give you absolutely everything you could possibly desire for the next five years, and then I'm going to kill you and eat you,' I could not be happy. For me, that would preclude happiness.

You can argue that animals don't know that they're going to be killed. I think that's debatable. And even if they don't, to me it just seems to be a moral point. Goodness entails living your full potential. Animals deserve the same concerns that we have for people, especially when it comes to defining what is good. And of course most animals today are raised in factory farms, so there's not even a question of their leading a happy life

M: Isn't there some sort of middle ground?

JM: I don't think so. I think that as long as we're prepared to eat them, they're going to suffer needlessly.

The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals, by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson,
Ballantine, HC, 276PP, $37.95