The Pig Who Sang to the Moon by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Author:Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307417299
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Is Shakespeare’s portrayal of the cow wailing the loss of her beloved calf anthropomorphism? No one who has ever observed it doubts that a cow mourns the loss of her calf. Even farmers know that the longer the cow has known her calf, the more profound the grief, which is one reason most farmers remove the calf almost immediately after birth. Familiarity breeds love.

When we think about this love on the part of both animals, it becomes difficult to understand the human passion for veal, still very much alive in France and Italy among other countries. Most people, however, once they learn the details of the “life” of a veal calf, take their first step on the path to vegetarianism and foreswear veal for life. In the United States and in many parts of Europe, the sale of veal plummets once consumers understand the facts.

When given the opportunity, cows withdraw from the herd when they calve, isolating themselves as much as possible. The calf is then hidden, or “lies out” from the herd, and is only able to join when the “king” bull approves. But it is the rare and compassionate farmer who allows the cow to withdraw and give birth as she was meant to do.

The Torah teaches:

If, along the road, you chance upon a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs and the mother sitting over the fledglings or on the eggs, do not take the mother together with her young. Let the mother go, and take only the young, in order that you may fare well and have a long life. (Deuteronomy 22:6)

In his commentary on this Torah passage, the medieval commentator Nachmanides quotes Maimonides’s theory that this commandment was given “in order to admonish us against killing the young within the mother’s sight, for animals feel great distress under such circumstances. There is no difference between the distress of man and the distress of animals for their young, since the love of the mother and her tenderness to the children of her womb are not the result of reasoning but the result of feeling, which even animals experience.”128

Our guilt about killing an animal in a particularly cruel way seems to go back to ancient times. There is an unusual passage in a Muslim holy book that reflects this: “The Holy Prophet said to a man who was sharpening his knife in the presence of the animal: ‘Do you intend inflicting death on the animal twice—once by sharpening the knife within its sight, and once by cutting its throat?’ ”129 Apart from the sentiment mentioned, this passage takes for granted that animals have consciousness and can anticipate (in this case with terror) the future. In any case, both the Jewish and the Islamic tradition have expressed similar observations based on a deep sense of moral outrage.

Everyone does not share the moral outrage, of course. I went to an annual agricultural show outside of Auckland, in New Zealand. There are contests for

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