Jane Merryman

Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals. Ballantine Books, 2003.

I picked up The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals partly because of its intriguing title and partly because I recently acquired a pair of chickens . I haven’t lived around farm animals and I thought I owed it to my new charges to learn something about them. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t live up to the promise of its title, but spends most of its 300 pages detailing the horrors humans apply to farm animals on the way to slaughtering them. Since I already know more than I want to know about this subject, I prefer to pass at this time, but someone doing a junior high school assignment on our treatment of egg-laying hens and veal calves might want to use this book as a resource.

I admit that I only leafed in a desultory way through most of the book, but I did read the entire chapter on chickens. Besides being forced to learn a lot about how hens are cooped up in tiny, filthy cages, the only (partially) useful bit of information I picked up was that humans haven’t made much of an effort to get to know chickens. We just throw out some feed, collect their eggs, wring their necks, and serve them up for Sunday dinner. The author claims we haven’t taken the time to discover the personalities of our chickens, but I wanted to ask, have chickens taken any time to get to know us? They don’t run up and give us a sloppy tongue to the face when we arrive home. Or roll over for a sensuous tummy rub or lie silently at our feet as we drink our coffee and read the paper. For this reason, we have pretty much written them off. And, of course, they are not potty-trainable, an unforgivable sin.

When I added two hens to my garden as live slug and earwig destroyers working my hosta bed, I got much more. Sure, I can’t say that they “love” me, but they certainly have become more attached to me than I could ever have imagined. Felicity, the red one, likes to sit in my lap when I take my tea and sandwich out under the strawberry tree. She settles in and purrs—well, that’s what I call her soft clucking that sounds like pure contentment. On occasion she perches on my shoulder as I make my garden rounds. Black-and-white Silvie is smaller and has less self-confidence. Although she would like to do all the things Felicity does with such evident pleasure, Silvie is still too skittish. But when I haven’t been outside for a while, she peers in through the glass of the French door, now and then pecking at it. If she sights me moving about somewhere inside, it’s squawk, squawk, squawk until I come out and talk to her. Are these behaviors indicative of an emotional life? Beats me. I wish Mr. Masson had given me more clues. Try his When Elephants Weep—it’s far better.