AR-News: Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia) review of "The Pig Who Sang to the Moon"

[Karen Dawn]

(The Courier Mail takes letters at:
http://www.thecouriermail.news.com.au/extras/forms/letter.htm )

Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia)

April 3, 2004 Saturday

BAM; Pg. M08

 For the love of a pig

 Ben Eltham


This may be illogical cant to make us feel guilty about eating animals, but
Ben Eltham can't resist it

JEFFREY  Masson's The Pig Who Sang to the Moon is a muddled, illogical and
at times simple-minded stroll through the emotional lives of farm animals.

It's also warm, good-hearted and, deep down, disconcertingly right.

For Masson poses a question that is difficult for a thinking, ethical person
to answer: If we know that killing an animal is cruel and causes it pain,
and we know that we don't have to eat meat, why do we keep doing it?

Unfortunately for Masson, the problem is, of course, that most of us don't
care. Many of us happen to really enjoy that succulent steak bleeding
magnificently on our plate at dinner, and we wake untroubled by nightmares
next morning to sizzling bacon for breakfast.

No matter how often we are regaled with the horrors of industrialised
farming, a lot of us simply like eating meat.

Faced with this (to him) puzzling problem, Masson treads an eccentric and at
times dotty path through the arguments for animal rights, abandoning all
attempts at logical analysis, and instead trying to charm us into
vegetarianism.

Thus the eponymous singing pig, one of his countless anecdotes, this one
about the delightful New Zealand sow who likes to serenade the full moon.

If you only met her, Masson says to his reader, you too would not want to
eat her. Look how much personality she has!

Masson is on to something here: We wouldn't eat our favourite pet, after
all. His approach is thus roughly to explain what excellent pets a range of
farm animals would make.

Pigs, for example, are intelligent, sensitive animals, goats playful and
cheeky, cows noble carers for their young, and chooks silly, amusing
companions whose scatty peregrinations and love of a dust bath show their
truly adorable nature.

A common expression in Masson's book is how much farm animals love to do
certain things: chickens love dust baths, pigs love mud, goats love playing
up to a hierarchy, geese and ducks love swimming in still ponds.

Used as an observation of animal behaviour, such terminology is no doubt
useful, even illuminating.

But Masson is prepared to go much further, quite happy to imply agency,
intelligence and even cognition to essentially every animal he meets.

It's an attitude that will infuriate plenty of scientists, philosophers and
other intelligent people.

Masson's anecdotes about pigs escaping from a truck on the way to the
abattoir and dragging their owners from perilous bogs are touching, but are
they correct?

Do the pigs and cows really know what their fate is?

In the end, one gets the impression that Masson doesn't care. He just loves
animals, and he's prepared to use any number of charming anecdotes, dubious
sources and scientific reports quoted out of context to convince us to stop
causing their suffering and death.

There are holes in Masson's logic you could drive a cattle train through.

For example, his chief method of determining what it is that makes farm
animals happy is to look at their wild ancestors and their typical behaviour
in the wild.

Hence, a chicken is essentially a domesticated jungle fowl, and to be truly
happy needs a rooster and plenty of leaf litter on the forest floor to
scratch in. This is why free-range hens are happier.

Of course, there's a logical inconsistency here. It doesn't take a Charles
Darwin (whose talismanic name Masson invokes frequently) to realise that a
similar examination of human hunter-gatherers suggests that really happy
male humans like to hunt and eat meat.

And to an alien looking down on humanity, many of our male sporting rituals
will no doubt seem like ancient pack instincts expressed in a domesticated
race.

Suffice to say, Masson is no Peter Singer.

BUT the kernel of Masson's argument remains troubling. We clearly don't need
to eat meat to survive, no matter how much pleasure it gives us, and the
true nature of industrialised meat production is so horrifying that we
prefer to remain blissfully ignorant about how that egg or steak got to our
plate.

If animals have emotions, feel pain and possess even some level of
intelligence -- and the science is ever firmer by the day that they do --
then the farms we create are nothing less than Auschwitzes for them.

Indeed, the true horror of the Nazi death camps seems to be in precisely
their comparability to abattoirs and slaughterhouses, and their equation of
humanity to lambs to the slaughter, cattle in trucks.

By cunningly, slyly attacking our conception of animals as less feeling than
humans, by relentlessly and charmingly pulling on our heartstrings, Masson
asks us to think through the daily consequences of our liking for meat.

I've been vegetarian for nine years now, but The Pig Who Sang to the Moon
made me think of turning vegan, the better to assuage my conscience over
those calves removed from their mothers, every day, just because I fancy a
spot of cheese on my toast.

The Pig Who Sang to the Moon

by Jeffrey Masson (Jonathon Cape, $55). Ben Eltham is one of the organisers
of the Straight Out of Brisbane arts festival.