Product Description

This is a book about farm animals - chickens, cows, sheep and goats - and what they think and feel. As with his previous bestsellers on animal emotions, Jeffrey Masson reveals that these creatures, so often despised or abused, feel complex emotions - among them love, loyalty, friendship, sadness, grief and sorrow. The domesticated animals which live on our farms are very little removed from their wild ancestors, and keep the emotions that belong to those animals when they lived free. This means that the confinement farm animals are subjected to is painful to them and that those enduring factory farm conditions are suffering little less than torture. Thinking about the wild ancestors of farm animals allows us to answer many questions that were once considered unanswerable. Those answers, however uncomfortable, are at last providing insights into the personalities and needs of the animals on whom we depend.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #118930 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From the Publisher
The first ever book to tell us what pigs (and cows and sheep and chickens) think and feel.

About the Author
Jeffrey Masson served as Projects Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives in London. He has written three bestselling books on animal emotions. He lives in New Zealand.

Customer Reviews

Wasted opportunity
I was so hopeful of this book, but ultimately I found it presented a string of anecdotes that were mildly interesting at best. I have been vegetarian for 17 years and I agree with many of the elements presented by Masson, however, I feel his argument is too one sided and black and white. I hate the all or nothing attitude he has to farming animals - in the last chapter he says that if a farmer was to ask him how he could treat his animals better - Masson says he would simply tell him to stop killing them. He can not palate the thought of showing compassion to the animals, only for them to be slaughtered. The reality is that most people do eat meat and it is farmed for that purpose. An improvement in their quality of life for the period in which they are alive has got to be better than life of mere suffering. I think we should accept that some people will always eat animals (anything else is utopian and unhelpful) and that it is better for us to work towards increasing the respect people have for farm animals, in the hope that this will lead to ethical farming. Some improvements are always better than none and nothing will change overnight.

Ultimately I wish that I'd never read this book, because it just made me despair at how alienating the authors views are.

AMAZING BOOK
This is deffinatly a book for you if you are either Vegan/Vegetarian or you absolutly love animals...

It stirs such emotion inside of you, both happy and sad...
it's a shame what we do to the animals and this book seems tot let you know what we do to them, it's very sad.

Animals are wonderful creatures, it's wonderful to see inside of their minds through Jefferroy Masson.

Wonderful book !!!!!