The Pig Who Sang to the Moon by Jeffrey Masson

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"The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals" is the book that inspired us to start CockadoodleMoo. In it, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson goes through different farm animals such as pigs, cows and chickens, explaining how they're treated on farms today and how, in the wild, they would behave. Here's an excerpt (see the original book for footnote citations; P.S. the book is also available on audio):


Perhaps if we had realized they are birds, with all the wonderful characteristics of birds, we would have paid closer attention to the ways in which chickens can enchant us. Take dust-bathing, for example. We call it a bath because the chicken finds a small indentation of dry earth and then proceeds to immerse herself in it as into a warm bath. The earth cleans her feathers. The first time I saw a chicken taking a dust bath, stretching out one iridescent wing and holding it up to the sunshine, then settling into the warmth of the afternoon only to fly effortlessly to a tree to roost in the evening, I was astonished. I did not know a chicken could fly into a tree. My surprise was a product of pure ignorance. I simply did not know chickens...


Karen Davis is one of the foremost authorities on the lives of chickens and the founder of United Poultry Concerns, an organization in the United States dedicated to promoting knowledge about them. She tells me that chickens confined their entire lives will still perform "vacuum" dust baths in wire cages, so strong is their instinct to keep themselves clean. It is an empty gesture, for they can only behave as if they were outside, with real dirt to revel in. And of course, the minute they are let out into a natural environment with real dirt, they will immediately dust-bathe. If you go to a farm where chickens are allowed to roam free you will see them taking such baths frequently. It cleans their feathers, removes parasites, and gives them enormous pleasure. ...


[R]ecent research seems to indicate that chickens have important things to say to one another, critical things that can mean the difference between life and death. Not only that, there also appears to be what scientists call an "audience effect" in chicken calls. What sound a chicken makes entirely depends on who the audience is. A rooster makes one sound if he wants to tell a hen about food and quite another one when he wants to alert the whole brood to the danger of a looming predator. He is not, as previously thought, merely making random vocalizations; he is communicating essential information. He is, in effect, talking. Roosters are well aware to whom they are addressing their sounds, and at last scientists are recognizing an increasingly wide range of verbal calls. The sounds have been there all along; what has been missing is our knowledge. In fact, this has become a hot area of scientific research, with evolutionary biologists like Peter Marler at the University of California at Davis actively engaged in furthering our knowledge. For instance, a rooster is capable of indicating to the hen the quality of the food he tastes through the type of calls he makes. Moreover, the rooster seems capable of deception. In order to call the hen to his side when he reckons that she has ventured too far away, he will use a food call, even though there may be no food present. If this "is deliberate deception it provides evidence for complex cognitive ability not previously recognized in the chicken" writes the leading researcher on the brain of the chicken, Lesley Rogers. 


Karen Davis, in her excellent book "Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs," points out that each rooster can recognize the crow of at least thirty other roosters:


If a rooster spots danger, he sends up a shrill cry. The other roosters echo the cry. Thereupon, the whole flock will often start up a loud, incessant, drum-beating chorus with all members facing the direction of the first alarm, or scattering for cover in the opposite direction. When it looks safe again, an "all clear?" query goes out from the rooster, first one, followed by the others, in their various new places. Eventually the bird who first raised the alarm sends up the "all clear" crow, and a series of locator crows confirms where every other rooster and his sub-flock are at this point.


... The mother hen — a phrase that has come to signify good mothering in humans — may appear to be doing nothing but feeding herself, at least to the naive observer. To the person trained to see what is truly going on, she is in fact imparting essential knowledge to her chicks. Christine Nicol and Stuart Pope from the Department of Farm animal Science at the University of Bristol demonstrated this conclusively in 1996 when they gave hens unpalatable food, colored blue, which the hens learned to avoid. What would happen when their chicks were brought in and were also given this unpalatable food, but were too young to know? Would their mothers intervene? No experiment of this kind had ever been attempted before. It turned out that the mother hens did respond and attempt to get their chicks to avoid the bad food. They knew that what the cicks were eating was not good for them and were teaching them what to eat. The scientists involved said they were "sensitive to perceived chick error."


However, any such purposeful communication has been rendered irrelevant by Western factory farming mechanisms, which bring the chicks its food by conveyor belt. Today, chickens are one of the fastest growing creatures on earth, genetically altered to grown twice as fast as normal — fast food on legs, bred to be fried and eaten within seven weeks of emerging from the egg. Others are permitted to grow into egg-laying machines, caged by the thousands in mighty sheds without a glimpse of the sun-dappled light of their natural habitat. Many people now go through life without seeing a hen in any other form than a corpse. Nearly a quart of all commercially reared birds are lame and experience excruciating chronic pain. Scientists like the veterinary professor John Webster of the University of Bristol School of Veterinary Medicine, who exposed this situation, have been accused of being speculative, or worse, anthropomorphic. But recently, an experiment was carried out where chickens were offered two different feeds, one with carprofen, an anti-inflammatory drug with analgesic properties, and another without it. The lame chickens preferred the food with the medication, showing "that lame broiler chickens are in pain and that this pain causes them distress from which they seek relief." Have we abused our power? Are we indifferent to the suffering we create?