The Emotional World of Farm Animals (2004) - full transcript
They number more than a billion in the U.S. alone,
each with its own personality and its own sense of being.
We see them in every state, every city,
and practically every town in america,
and yet, for all intents and purposes, they remain an enigma to us.
They are the farm animals: cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, and turkeys.
They are the animals we use for meat,
yet, seldom get to meet.
Animals we are now discovering lead rich and complex emotional lives.
Join us on one man's journey;
a voyage of discovery ? into the emotional world ? of farm animals.
Jeffrey Masson is a former psychoanalyist who, nearly two decades ago,
turned his attentions to writing about the emotions of non-human animals.
His New York Times best-selling book when elephants weep,
established undenyably
that wild animals from all corners of the globe
lead lives that are filled with a complex array of emotions,
many similar to our own.
Challenged by his publisher Random House
to go where no one had gone before -
to research and write a popular book about the emotions of farm animals -
he reluctantly accepted,
and soon set out on a quest that would take him around the world and to a dozen countries.
Yet, his first stop was a sanctuary for farm animals in Vacaville, California,
less than a hundred miles from his Berkeley home.
C'mon, sweetie!
Kim Sturla is the co-founder of Animal Place.
Kim, this is a beautiful place!
Thank you, it is,
and especially this time of the year when it's so green; it's just gorgious.
So do you mean to tell me that all the animals here
have been rescued?
Each one has come from a different situation.
And with every animals there was no where else for them to go. So we were really kind of their last resort here.
And with every animals there was no where else for them to go. So we were really kind of their last resort here.
So you would say that every animal here
has had some history of personal abuse?
Most of the animals here, if not all, have had a really tough beginning,
and it's just that much more important that once they get to Animal Place
that we try to provide them with a secure.
Loving environment where they can live out the rest of their lives.
And do some of them, I mean, tell they've been abused by the way they react to you,
or does it differ for each and every animal?
You know, each and every one ?
Venus, one of the pigs, she was terribly abused and we got her as an adult.
It has taken her years?
She's about thirteen years old now
and only in the last couple of years will she actually let me pet her.
So it's a question about trust?
It's all about trust.
Do you think she looks at you and thinks ?
I don't trust this species
but this one, this woman, Kim, she seems OK.
Do you think they have thought processes like that?
Oh, my gosh, without a doubt!
Obviously, I wouldn't need to convince you
that these farm animals have emotions?
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind
that those animals have a wide array of emotions;
very similar to dogs and cats.
As a seasoned author with two dozen books to his credit,
Jeffrey knows full well that you can't write about the emotions of any animal
until you first meet and get to know them.
His first farm animal experience: Val and Susie.
Hello sweetie girl! And they don't have tusks?
Oh, the males do.
The males do!
Now are the males different than the females?
No, no.
They're all so sweet?
Oh, yes, very!
Good natured, and you can play with them?
And here's my favorite, Jeffrey.
She is the sweetest pig one could possibly meet ? Susie.
Come here, Susie! Susie!
They had their little difficulties introducing them.
Oh, so they weren't ? Oh, Susie!
What made this experience so special for Jeffrey
was learning from Kim about Val and Susie's history.
If not for Animal Place their lives would be different indeed.
In fact, they wouldn't be alive at all.
SIX MONTHS EARLIER
Little Susie and Valerie were pigs
that were born inside a research laboratory.
A cage is all they knew.
You have to understand that these little pigs had never been outside.
Hi! OK, who wants to be cooled down? Come on!
They had never felt the sunshine on them.
They had never had the ground to root in. They never had grass.
They had always lived their entire life inside a little cage
measuring probably four feet square.
That was their existence.
So they came to Animal Place and were a bit in shock,
because there were all of these other animal sounds
and they all of a sudden had freedom.
They could do whatever they wanted to do.
They arrived during the summer months
and I found, quickly found, that one of the things they loved to do
is to be cooled off when it gets too hot.
Get you cooled down!
Normally val and susie would be cooling themselves off
with mud baths, as pigs do,
but they were recently spayed and the stitches hadn't healed yet,
so we wanted to keep them clean.
So when it gets real hot here,
I make there big huge ice cube blocks in our freezer,
and I call them over to me,
and I just rub them down with ice cubes.
and they thoroughly thorooughly enjoy it ?
As I think almost any kid would when it's a hot day,
if they can't jump in a pool.
And, yeah, I just ice them all down and we just kind of play.
They get silly and romp around and i get silly with them and ?
It's a, it's just a play time for both of us.
People come here for tours and they think
Gosh, what lucky animals!
Well, you know, I see it the other way around. I mean, I feel so fortunate that I ?
I'm allowed to take care of them,
I'm allowed to be in their company,
that I can be with them every day and interact with them.
It doesn't get much better than that, to know you saved their life
and ensure that the remainder of their life is going to be good.
Ned Buyukmihci is a veterinarian,
who, with Kim, co-founded Animal Place.
Considering how their lives began,
and for the fact that they were destined from birth for the slaughter house,
the cows at Animal Place have learned from Kim and Ned
that some humans can be trusted ?
Although that trust has taken years to develop
and must be reinforced practically every day.
Jessie's story is one of these that you ?
you would think is made up.
That, that, she was about a month old and she was, she was in Colorado
and, she jumped out of the truck
and, she jumped out of the truck
when the truck was going down the freeway and she shattered her left hind leg.
You can see how badly deformed it is.
And she was just lieing there badly bruised and,
and in really bad shape,
and two people who were coming to visit Animal Place, Gene and Lorri Bauston,
happened to be on the freeway behind this truck.
It was just unbelievable!
And they see this little black form on the highway and they stoped,
and the farmer had stopped, of course,
and the farmer did not want Jessie because she was no longer valuable to him
because she couldn't be sold.
She had a fractured leg, she was down, she couldn't stand up.
And so, he gave her to Gene and Lorri who brought her to Animal Place.
We took Jessie in to, to my university hospital and radiographed her leg,
and it was very badly fractured, beyond surgical repair.
And, in fact, my colleagues said we should kill her,
And, I said: No, we'll give her a chance. we'll see what happens.
we can always kill her.
So we gave her stall rest
and within two months she was standing up and walking on the leg.
And within four or five months she was running on the leg.
Running? What a will to live!
Yeah, well, cows are known for their healing abilities.
Look at that! Now, Ned, you know dogs, you love dogs, you live around dogs.
Do you think cows are every bit as emotional as dogs ?
Just in a different way!
I mean, we read dogs very easily ? they communicate with us,
they look the way we want them to look - they look sad, they look disappointed, they look happy.
Cows are harder to read, but from what you've been telling me
they probably have most of the same emotions that dogs do.
Oh, I think they do.
I knew a steer once when I was in practice.
He was raised like a puppy would be raised,
very close to the family and isolated from other cows
so he never got to kow cows very well,
and he was like a puppy.
He ran and played and came running to the people and he would ? he'd be curious,
I'd be out there taking care of a sheep or somebody and he would run up and had to check things out.
and so he was expressing emotions,
in a dog you'd say he was happy.
Part of the problem, again, with cows is that they are not usually in a setting
where they can express those emotions or be free to express those emotions.
When you go to a typical sitution where cows are,
they're scared, they're huddled, they're nervous about human interaction
you see the emotion but it's usually fear.
An expectant mother gives birth to her offspring.
A beautiful bouncing baby boy?
All sixty pounds of him ?
Thrust from the womb in one mighty heave.
The proud mom licks her newborn for hours.
Her licking not only cleans the calf, but also helps develop strong familial ties,
that would normally last well into his first few years of life.
Cows are extraordinarily curious and social animals,
and the birth of this calf seems to heighten that curiosity among all of the surrounding females,
who move in closely for sniffs and gentle nudges.
Perhaps their way of welcoming him to his new world.
This calf, like all others before him, will never know of his proud and dignified bloodlines.
All of today's cows are descendants of the mighty auroch,
a gigantic creature nearly six feet tall,
which first appeared during the Pleistocene Period.
Magnificent paintings adorning the walls deep in the caves of Lescoux, France,
depict the auroch and signify their significant role as a prey species for prehistoric humans.
Today's cows, no matter the variety in shape, size or color,
are all descended from a single species,
whose hooves once pounded the dirt by the millions, from Europe, to Asia, to Northern Africa ?
and whose last member died in Poland in 1627.
Meeting these first few animals convinced Jeffrey
that, just like animals found in nature, farm animals have their own story to tell,
and it will be through his experiences and writing that this story will be told.
So this is Freddie.
This is Freddie.
Freddie, you like that.
Freddie was found on the freway.
SIX MONTHS EARLIER
The California highway patrol officers just found this little five-pound piglet
roaming the freway.
He was the sickest animal we had ever taken into the sanctuary.
He had beginning stages of pneumonia,
he had what's called white muscle disease, he had a mineral deficiency,
he had obvious abrasions on his back from his fall from the truck
and he had a number of other problems.
OK, Freedie.
Come on, sweetie! Come on!
OK, meal time.
Freddie was fed cow's milk by the girl who rescued him.
So when arrived at Animal Place,
we were very gradual in switching him over to a pig milk replacement.
Well, you know, when we get in a young animal,
we have to look at ways of how we can, we can nurture them,
how we can feed their stomach, and how we can feed them emotionally.
And knowing what a mother sow, how she would care for her young -
there would generally be a lot of siblings he would have,
they would be nestled up in that big old fat sow belly,
nursing on her and just getting a lot of tactile stimulation and a lot of warmth -
so, I immkediately went out and bought a baby sling
that mothers use for their newborn infants ?
and tucked Freddie inside that sling so that he could hear my heart beat,
he could hear me breathing,
he would abviously have a lot of warmth, temperature warmth from my body,
and just as my motion throughout the day, whether I'm preparing his meal,
one of his many meals that he wold eat throughout the day
because we fed him about every hour and a half,
or I'm working on my computer, that he ? I was with him.
And he seemed to gain a lot of comfort from that.
Freddie may live out his life in the security of Animal Place,
yet he will never be too far removed from the ways of his wild cousins.
Try as they may, those who today raise pigs in the confinement of commercial farms,
cannot remove through domestication the varying degrees of wildness that all pigs retain.
Born in litters of five to six, the young piglets tend to play and sleep together,
developing bonds that may last throughout their lifetime.
As they grow older and move more confidently throughout the herd,
they learn the ways of wild pigs by watching the adults around them,
especially their mother, who is never far away.
Early on, these piglets learn to root through the dirt,
sniffing out tasty morsels like roots,
which are part of their diverse diet,
along with acorns, grasses, berries, eggs, and small invertebrates.
Pigs are emotionally sensitive animals
and exhibit mood swings not unlike humans.
When the kids get too frisky, mother is not adverse to putting them in their place.
It's only his pride that is hurt,
but that's how piglets learn to make it to adulthood,
for natural mortality among piglets is quite high.
Learning to feed on their own takes months,
and during the learning curve, mother is still the best meal in town.
At six months of age, the piglets have grown large enough
to join the ranks of the other adults in the herd,
and in a short period of time they will have integrated fully into this society.
Given the opportunity to meet humans, wild pigs can exhibit a side of themselves
few of us would ever have expected.
When Jeffrey's research took him half way around the globe to Germany,
he was informed time and again about a well-known incident
that took place in the Black Forest nearly thirty years earlier.
In an extraordinary experiment back in the early 1970s,
Heinz Meinhardt, a German electrician,
set out on an assignment to draw wild pigs away from farm fields,
where they were eating everything in sight.
In the process, Meinhardt got to know each of the pigs in this large community,
and he began to see if they could ultimately accept his presence.
Meinhardt spent many months getting the pigs used to him,
gaining their trust by posing no threat to their safety or security.
Eventually, he was fully accepted.
What Meinhardt was able to accomplish with wild pigs is no less impressive
than the extraordinary relationship Diane Fossey developed
with the mountain gorillas of Rwanda:
Total acceptance. Total trust.
It didn't take Jeffrey long to realize
that, just like the wild animals he has studied and written about,
farm animals also possess individual personalities,
and all the emotions that go with it.
Jeffrey is a former psychoanalyst, not a scientist,
and as such he has often been accused of ascribing human characteristics
to non-human animals.
They even have a fancy term for it.
It's called anthropomorphism.
Yet, there are scientists who can expand their thoughts
well beyond conventional wisdom,
and in doing so, see the bigger picture that is starting to come into focus.
One of these is Marc Bekoff, professor of biology at the University of Colorado
and one of the world's leading authorities on animal emotions.
...anthropomorphic, I call it one of the "A" words.
It's kind of a dirty word.
But there's no way that I can communicate what I'm learning
and seeing and studying in an animal without being anthropomorphic.
Anthropomorphism is attributing human characteristics
to non-human beings.
If I tell you that a cow in the pasture was sad,
was lamenting her place,
I'm not saying she's sad in the same way I'm sad,
but all I had to do was look at her posture to know she was kind of sulked down,
kid of just looked lethargic.
I can't think of any other way to communicate that.
I could tell you about her dopamine and her seratonin
and I could tell you about the muscle tone in her legs and her muscles and tendons,
but that doesn't capture that she was either happy or sad.
So I think we need to be anthropomorphic,
simply taking into account the world of the animal
but using human terms to describe their behavior.
When I was growing up and being trained as an ethologist,
one of the key lessons to learn was not to anthropomorphise,
not to give animals qualities that were reserved for humans.
Leslie Rodgers is a professor of neuroscience and animal behavior
at Australia's University of New England.
but that's changed.
I mean basically it's changed since the eighties.
So it's now becoming more and more acceptable for people who study animal behavior
to at least be looking at these as possibilities and studying
where as, say, twenty to thirty years ago
this would not have been considered acceptable research,
I can say now that it is acceptable research.
The issue of emotion and thinking in animals
is now seen as something that you can study scientifically,
I mean, it's not without it's problems ? It's quite a complex thing
to put one's mind to.
So, we certainly don't have all the answers there before us,
but they are seen as problems that are worthwhile, approaching it in a scientific method.
If we just look at the cognative abilities of a chicken
in the first few days of life,
they form very good memories. they learn fantastically.
They have individual characteristics that they can recognize one individual chick from another.
They form representations, they can recognize objects that were hidden behind other things.
Very complex cognative abilities
that we've seen even as being unique to humans
are now being shown in the young domestic chick.
A couple hundred miles north of Animal Place,
over the rolling hills of Orland, California,
lies Farm Sanctuary,
which, coupled with its main facility in Watkins Glen, New York,
is one of the largest farm animal sanctuaries in the world.
Sanctuaries represent one of the few places where farm animals can really be themselves,
without the stress of the factory farming ordeal,
and, as such, are the perfect environment for ?effrey to study their true emotions.
Diane Miller is the west coast manager of this six hundred acre haven
for once-abused farm animals,
that can now look forward to a life of peace,
security, and lots of tender loving care.
Diane, I have to tell you this is the first time i've ever felt
I was bcoming intimate with a chicken, that i've held one this close to my ?
Well, I'm sorry you've been deprived.
Well, clearly I've been deprived.
I didn't realize that these animals cold become so...
interested in us, so close to us.
Is that fairly common? Can you have an intimate close relationship with a chicken?
You certainly can. I have several good friends who are chickens,
who listen to me much better than my people friends do.
And don't answer back, or sometimes do?
Sometimes they do, but they're very good listeners.
And clearly it's not just a one-sided relationship,
I mean, she's deriving pleasure from this and i'm getting pleasure from this.
I'd say she's enjoying that immensely.
She certainly has all the same potential that a person has
for intimacy and affection and caring and bonds between certain individuals.
How unusual when you think about it.
After all we don't have a history
of having behaved very kindly toward these animals, do we?
That's absolutely right.
This beautiful, beautiful turkey here. looks like a rainbow of colors.
I've never touched this before. It feels so wonderful.
I never knew that their emotions
are actually reflected on, what do you call this part of their face?
This, the long dangly here is called their snood.
Apparently it registers all of his emotions?
Right. The head, skin and neck and the snood on a tom turkey
is really a barometer of their emotions. It's how they communicate with one another.
And what happens is when a tom is feeling real good,
he's strutting and he's happy and life is good, and he's feeling good,
he'll be deep red color.
And they have the capacity to change the color, their whole skin tone, all of their head and their neck and their snood,
from totally white or light blue like you see around his eyes.
So they can go from light blue or white to all the way deep red.
And when they're happy and they're strutting and life is good, they're deep magenta red.
So, that's how they communicate with one another.
And they can do that immediately?
Right. within a few seconds.
Within a few seconds!
Turkeys are the only farm animals
bred from north American wildlife.
Benjamin Franklin considered the turkey a noble bird and often wrote of its worthiness
to be considered America's national emblem.
Had his efforts been successful, one can only wonder
if that honor might have changed the way we treat them today.
Lorri Bauston is the co-founder of Farm Sanctuary,
who wanted to make sure that jeffrey had a chance to get to know some of her special friends ?
all of whom came here as rescues from the dairy industry, or meat processors.
Well, this is loverboy, Valentino. As you can see,
he has a well-earned name. He's just basically ?
Because he's so kind?
Yeah. He's cuddly, he kind and he's lovable. he's one of the animals that consistently
is one of our best ambassadors because he's constantly coming up to visitors.
They need affection. they love affection.
I mean, he will, if he was laying down right now he'd wrap himself around you like a dog, you know, just like if you're leaning next to a dog ?
So it's not true that there's just nothing going on inside that huge head?
Oh, no. All kinds of stuff.
Mainly, he loves to give me kisses.
They're really sociable animals. they need a lot of attention. they need a lot of love.
Lorri, can you tell me about one of the most emotional moments
you've ever had with an animal?
Probably and most recently, Queenie,
who was a cow who took matters into her own hoofs and she escaped from a New York city slaughte rhouse.
The slaughter house was in a real busy area of Queens,
and she was running through the streets,
dodging cars while they were chasing her.
She was dodging bikes, pedestrians. Obviously, she was terrified and frightened and was running.
And by this time a whole force of NYPD cars had joined in the chase
trying to capture her before she hurt herself or hurt another person.
And it was an incredible scene of this animal
just running for her life through the streets of New York city.
Fortunately, she ran into a park and from there they closed the gates to the park
and they were able to kind of corral her and then wrestle her to the ground
And all the NYPD, you know, officials at that point became cowboys.
This animal who was saved from slaughter, who saved herself from slaughter,
touched millions of people, because it really was people who called into animal control saying:
Hey, this cow deserves her freedom!
Because they saw it on the news, so she moved millions of New Yorkers.
It was sad, of course, because they did have to, you know, chase her down to the ground
and tie her up so she wouldn't injure herself,
but, of course, it was instrumental in getting this cow to the safety of farm sanctuary.
I'll never forget because there was a cop there
who, once she was on the ground...
And of course she was terrified, frightened, she clearly knew
what was in store for her at the slaughter house when she ran, and the poor thing was chased and ?
He held her and he put her head in his lap and he just held her and stroked her.
And that's just the kind of magical moment we see all the time at Farm Sanctuary
where a person dos finally bond with a farm animal and realizes
that these farm animals feel and have feelings too.
She was shaking, fearful and we loaded her up into the truck
and we're trying to comfort her and tell her she's going to a wonderful place.
We got to the sanctuary and. i'll never forget this:
she stepped off the trailer and let out a big Moo, and...
See, when all the animals first come in they have to be in a separate area
to make sure they're pest-free and all that kind of stuff,
and make sure they're healthy enough before they can be with the other cattle ?
So she had to be in a separate area.
When she let out that Moo,
all of the other sanctuary cows gathered around to the closest fence
and started mooing back.
And then she started mooing, and they started mooing,
And there was this whole incredible loving exchange.
So the cows are mooing and we're crying...
And it was just such an incredible wonderful feeling!
She really felt at home and the other cattle really made her feel at home.
And I just again saw, you know, they're no different than us.
Queenie will spend the rest of her life at Farm Sanctuary,
and by all rights will never experience another moment of fear.
But how can we be so sure about how she feels?
Marc Bekoff: Often times a lucky animal escapes from or is released from a slaughter house condition,
and winds up on a sanctuary.
And when you study these animals, you see very clearly how emotional they are.
They go through this period of maybe lack of trust - they're not sure -
to a very slow bonding,
and you see their demeanor change: their posture, their stance, their gate.
If they vocalize, if they have expressive faces.
And you see that over time, they let their guard down.
And the reason that they're doing that is they're not sure,
And when you start making claims about whether an animal is sure about something,
you're saying that that animal is experiencing feelings.
And you need to make this very slow transition from a feeling of mistrust to a feeling of trust.
Once Jeffrey got to meet these farm animals - the cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, and turkeys -
spend time with them, observe their interactions with others of their kind,
and watch their personalities unfold before his eyes
it made him wonder if we can ever truly associate
the sentient animals with the meat on our dinner plates.
Queenie is but a dramatic example of what he is refering to.
In reality, she's no different from the billions of farm animals
raised every year for slaughter.
The hundreds of phone calls to Animal Control pleading to save Queenie's life,
did just that!
As a psychoanalyst, Jeffrey had to wonder.
In the minds of all the caring people who made those calls,
what qualities did Queenie possess that the millions of cows,
pigs, sheep, chickens, or turkeys waiting in line to be killed ? did not?
The answer seemed obvious to him: none.
One element of Jeffrfey's research has remained unresolved in his mind.
the organized programs that allow school children to spend months raising farm animals,
naming them like a companion animal, caring for them every day,
exhibiting them with all due pride, then, just like that, giving them up for slaughter.
He asked Jim Mason,
a farm boy turned lawyer and animal activist,
and co-author of the ground-breaking book Animal Factories, published back in 1990.
Jim's history with this goes back to his early teens.
I was deemed to be big enough then to help with the
what we call working the calves, which means castrating them,
de-horning them, and clipping their ears and doing all these painful things.
And as a young child they let me watch all of this. So I knew it was terrible.
I saw the terror in the animals. I saw the violance and the struggling with them and everything.
And yet that day it was my turn to go out and help with all this.
And I remember as we were going over the fence I started crying
because I knew what I was going to have to do.
And my uncle said, and his exact words, they ring in my ears, he said:
If you don't straighten up and act like a man,
we'll send you back to the house with the girls.
You're a sissy if you don't go with us.
When I was on a farm at that age
I actually didn't belong to farm kid groups, but my brother did.
And there were a lot of other kinds of groups like that that prepared you to be a farmer.
One of the most common projects is raising like a heffer or a pig or a steer or something for show.
Then they go to the state fair and show these animals
and they win ribbons.
You see these kids that spend so much time with these animals
and really get attached to them almost like pets.
And then comes the time when they have to part ways with that animal.
They have to go to slaughter. They have to go to auction.
And often it's very traumatic for these kids.
Even though you've been close to this animal,
you've groomed it and maybe slept with it for weeks
it has to go to market.
This is how they say it, when you get your first animal they tell you:
You always cry with your first animal, but you get used to it.
You get used to it...
I'm like, what do you mean by that, you know, I mean you get used to it.
OK. You get used to the fact that something you get attached to for months is taken from you and killed.
I mean, how are you supposed to get used to that? I couldn't get used to it.
Misty Vina is a high-school student from San Jose, California,
who went through this program only once, with a steer she named Ferdinand.
I had him for ten months and it was every day I was out there ?
It would have been easier if we had planned for him to be slaughtered from the start.
He wasn't supposed to be.
So it's kind of it came like out of nowhere on me.
I was out there, I'd get up at five o'clock or five-thirty every morning
and be out at school two hours before it started
and I'd go out there, I'd stay out there for a for while in the morning, feed him and everything
and then i'd be out there lunch most of the time.
And then I had two periods of agriculture and I was usually out there before then anyways,
and I'd stay after school until four-thirty every day after school with him.
At first, I thought: What am i doing with a cow? This is so stupid, right?
It was a steer and its like, this is
I thought it was going to be easy
And then he turned into, seriously, I always told everybody he's like a big puppy.
I would call him and he would come over to me and he'd put his nose in his halter for me...
And it's like when I went to visit him, they had him at the fair.
And I went over there and I called his name and
his little ear turned up and he turned around and he started mooing,
And I started crying, and everyone was like: There she goes again. And I'm like?
For people to say they don't have emotions, they don't know you're there, it's not true.
The idea of discovery and proof of an internal emotional event
is harder to prove, harder to control, and harder to justify
in what sense that should be taken on board by anybody and for what reason.
Gisella Kaplan is a professor of animal behavior
at Australia's University of New England.
I'm absolutely convinced that across the animal world,
including our farm animals, certainly we know it of our pets.
We know when they cry, we know when they're sad,
we know when they have grief, as pet owners.
The same may apply even to animals that for centuries have been domesticated.
But I've no doubt that those factors exist very strongly.
The changes that have transpired in our understanding
and perception and empathy for farm animals
were not ones that occurred overnight.
Nor is it easy to bookmark the points in history at which they have taken place.
I think we're looking at a period of at least three hundred years of change,
starting about 1700, when people first began to realize
that humans and the other species are built on the same anatomical template.
Davis Fraser is a professor of animal welfare
at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
We're not only built on the same anatomical template,
but we share a common ancestry as well.
Through the work of people like Jane Goodall,
we have come to see animals, even in scientific study,
not just as date points
helping to establish some kind of average or norm for the species,
but more as persons with individual life histories
and their own emotional and intellectual life.
So we've seen a gradual change over three centuries,
a rapid change over the last few decades.
And for the farm animals this means that ways of raising animals
that seemed perfectly modern and progressive even ten or twenty years ago,
are becoming increasingly out of step with modern values.
In terms of the complex emotions possessed by farm animals,
a popular analogy can easily be applied:
we may not be able to define it, but we certainly know it when we see it.
Every day researchers are breaking new ground
and allowing us solid glimpses into the emotional makeup of these animals.
In June of 2004, researchers at Babraham institute,
part of England's Cambridge University,
announced they had discovered some profound qualities possessed by sheep.
Qualities which will doubtless shed new light
on our perception of the emotional and intellectual capacities of these animals.
Individual sheep, it seems, can recognize up to fifty other sheep
by facial features alone,
and remember each of their faces after two years of separation.
This recognition is based on facial characteristics
that may differ by as little as 5-percent.
It was also established that sheep have an overwhelmingly favorable response
to humans that smile or laugh,
as opposed to humans that frown or scowl.
In the words of chief researcher neuroscientist dr. Keith Kendrick:
This does open up the possibility that they have
much richer emotional lives than we would give them credit for.
Dr. Kendrick and his team believe these findings may offer
valuable insights into human conditions like autism and schizophrenia.
On a small farm in Machipango, Virginia, Jeffrey visits dr. Karen Davis,
founder of United Poultry Concern, a non-profit organization
dedicated to public education on the humane treatment
and unique qualities of birds raised for food production.
Have you come to see them as...
as creatures with a healthy inner life, with a zest for life?
Is this, is this a fantasy I have?
Jeffrey, it is not a fantasy.
Good, I'm glad to hear that.
Chickens are very lively birds. They come from the jungles of South-East Asia.
They live in extended family flocks
that break up into small groups throughout the day.
They like to dustbathe in the early to mid-afternoon,
and also they take sunbaths,
which are also vital to their health and wellbeing, hygiene, and proper nutritional health.
They're making sounds.
Yes.
Now, I firmly believe that we
have yet to crack the code of most animal communication.
I agree.
What we hear is ordinary sounds, or probably very specific things.
Do you have any idea what they're saying?
Chickens are very vocal birds,
and they would be calling to each other over large areas of space
in the tropical forest where they come from.
Roosters, for example, make what they call locator calls,
where they will let other roosters with their hens know where they are.
They keep tabs on each other.
They will notify one another about overhead predators, like a hawk,
and they certainly notify each other about food sources,
and probably many things in the environment
that may elude us.
But they are not just making noises.
The further into his writing Jeffrey get,
the more he realizes that when referring to the emotions of farm animals,
he has to take into account the effect their emotions have on our emotions.
Every place he has been to, everyone he has talked with ?
they all have stories of deep-felt personal experiences,
where the emotions of the animals they have gotten to know have, in-kind, affected emotions of their own.
No one who has spent considerable quality time with these animals
comes away, it seems, without having experienced some sense of wonderment -
thoughts and feelings they never for a moment felt could be attributed
to pigs, cows, sheep, chickens or turkeys.
And when those who have lived the experience, see it happening to others around them,
it often becomes a magical moment.
Jan Hamilton is the founder of Wilderness Ranch in Loveland, Colorado.
We rescued turkeys off of a dead pile.
There were literally four hundred or so turkeys piled up on this dead pile.
And so they were in every stage of decay and dying, and some of them were alive.
We brought fourteen turkeys home.
We had a group of community service kids working out here,
and one of the kids that was there was the toughest kid I've ever seen out here.
I thought it was almost hopeless to have her out here.
And she observed the turkeys coming in
and saw that we were picking maggotts off of them and trying to keep them alive
syringe feeding them and what bad shape they were in.
And the next week she was much more civil.
And the following week she actually was helping and asking questions
and being really involved in what we were doing.
And, at the end of the time she was here, I asked her:
What made the difference, what happened, what happened with you?
And she said the turkeys really got to her,
and that they had been abused as she had been and she could see the connection.
And as she left she said: What you do here is really awesome.
The reason that I do this
is because I know that animals have feelings,
I know they have relationships,
and that they deserve like every other being
to have the full expression of their essence, whatever that is.
And that's what we want to teach here, that's what this is all about for me.
It's not that I think farm animals are more important or more interesting
than any other creature on the earth.
We all deserve to live in harmony and abundance,
and the way to get there is by respecting each other,
and that's what Wilderness Ranch is all about.
From the day Jeffrey started to write this book,
he was sure he'd learned just enough about farm animals over his lifetime
to know where his research would lead him.
Few times in his life, he admits, has he been so wrong.
If I'm guilty of underestimating the ability these animals have
to relate to us on such a profound emotional level,
believe me, I am but one among millions.
We accept dogs and cats into our lives
so freely, so readily, so lovingly.
Yet, after an entire year of traveling throughout the world,
visiting farm animal sanctuaries,
where, for the most part, these animals can just be themselves,
I'm beginning to wonder
how we came to discriminate between a pig and a dog, or a chicken and a cat?
Where did it start, and why?
There are no simple answers, no profound words of wisdom to impart here.
All I can do as a writer is tell you, in as honest a manor as possible,
my experiences, and the stories of those who have dedicated their lives
to bettering our understanding of these magnificent animals.
The experiences I have had with farm animals are some I will never forget.
Yet, these are my experiences;
and just like me on the day I began to research this book,
experiences of your own are just a mouse-click away.
See for yourself.
Somewhere near you is a place where you can go
and meet a pig, a cow, a chicken or a turkey.
With your sense of curiosity fully in play,
I think you'll be surprised at what you'll find.
Their emotions may impact your emotions forever.
each with its own personality and its own sense of being.
We see them in every state, every city,
and practically every town in america,
and yet, for all intents and purposes, they remain an enigma to us.
They are the farm animals: cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, and turkeys.
They are the animals we use for meat,
yet, seldom get to meet.
Animals we are now discovering lead rich and complex emotional lives.
Join us on one man's journey;
a voyage of discovery ? into the emotional world ? of farm animals.
Jeffrey Masson is a former psychoanalyist who, nearly two decades ago,
turned his attentions to writing about the emotions of non-human animals.
His New York Times best-selling book when elephants weep,
established undenyably
that wild animals from all corners of the globe
lead lives that are filled with a complex array of emotions,
many similar to our own.
Challenged by his publisher Random House
to go where no one had gone before -
to research and write a popular book about the emotions of farm animals -
he reluctantly accepted,
and soon set out on a quest that would take him around the world and to a dozen countries.
Yet, his first stop was a sanctuary for farm animals in Vacaville, California,
less than a hundred miles from his Berkeley home.
C'mon, sweetie!
Kim Sturla is the co-founder of Animal Place.
Kim, this is a beautiful place!
Thank you, it is,
and especially this time of the year when it's so green; it's just gorgious.
So do you mean to tell me that all the animals here
have been rescued?
Each one has come from a different situation.
And with every animals there was no where else for them to go. So we were really kind of their last resort here.
And with every animals there was no where else for them to go. So we were really kind of their last resort here.
So you would say that every animal here
has had some history of personal abuse?
Most of the animals here, if not all, have had a really tough beginning,
and it's just that much more important that once they get to Animal Place
that we try to provide them with a secure.
Loving environment where they can live out the rest of their lives.
And do some of them, I mean, tell they've been abused by the way they react to you,
or does it differ for each and every animal?
You know, each and every one ?
Venus, one of the pigs, she was terribly abused and we got her as an adult.
It has taken her years?
She's about thirteen years old now
and only in the last couple of years will she actually let me pet her.
So it's a question about trust?
It's all about trust.
Do you think she looks at you and thinks ?
I don't trust this species
but this one, this woman, Kim, she seems OK.
Do you think they have thought processes like that?
Oh, my gosh, without a doubt!
Obviously, I wouldn't need to convince you
that these farm animals have emotions?
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind
that those animals have a wide array of emotions;
very similar to dogs and cats.
As a seasoned author with two dozen books to his credit,
Jeffrey knows full well that you can't write about the emotions of any animal
until you first meet and get to know them.
His first farm animal experience: Val and Susie.
Hello sweetie girl! And they don't have tusks?
Oh, the males do.
The males do!
Now are the males different than the females?
No, no.
They're all so sweet?
Oh, yes, very!
Good natured, and you can play with them?
And here's my favorite, Jeffrey.
She is the sweetest pig one could possibly meet ? Susie.
Come here, Susie! Susie!
They had their little difficulties introducing them.
Oh, so they weren't ? Oh, Susie!
What made this experience so special for Jeffrey
was learning from Kim about Val and Susie's history.
If not for Animal Place their lives would be different indeed.
In fact, they wouldn't be alive at all.
SIX MONTHS EARLIER
Little Susie and Valerie were pigs
that were born inside a research laboratory.
A cage is all they knew.
You have to understand that these little pigs had never been outside.
Hi! OK, who wants to be cooled down? Come on!
They had never felt the sunshine on them.
They had never had the ground to root in. They never had grass.
They had always lived their entire life inside a little cage
measuring probably four feet square.
That was their existence.
So they came to Animal Place and were a bit in shock,
because there were all of these other animal sounds
and they all of a sudden had freedom.
They could do whatever they wanted to do.
They arrived during the summer months
and I found, quickly found, that one of the things they loved to do
is to be cooled off when it gets too hot.
Get you cooled down!
Normally val and susie would be cooling themselves off
with mud baths, as pigs do,
but they were recently spayed and the stitches hadn't healed yet,
so we wanted to keep them clean.
So when it gets real hot here,
I make there big huge ice cube blocks in our freezer,
and I call them over to me,
and I just rub them down with ice cubes.
and they thoroughly thorooughly enjoy it ?
As I think almost any kid would when it's a hot day,
if they can't jump in a pool.
And, yeah, I just ice them all down and we just kind of play.
They get silly and romp around and i get silly with them and ?
It's a, it's just a play time for both of us.
People come here for tours and they think
Gosh, what lucky animals!
Well, you know, I see it the other way around. I mean, I feel so fortunate that I ?
I'm allowed to take care of them,
I'm allowed to be in their company,
that I can be with them every day and interact with them.
It doesn't get much better than that, to know you saved their life
and ensure that the remainder of their life is going to be good.
Ned Buyukmihci is a veterinarian,
who, with Kim, co-founded Animal Place.
Considering how their lives began,
and for the fact that they were destined from birth for the slaughter house,
the cows at Animal Place have learned from Kim and Ned
that some humans can be trusted ?
Although that trust has taken years to develop
and must be reinforced practically every day.
Jessie's story is one of these that you ?
you would think is made up.
That, that, she was about a month old and she was, she was in Colorado
and, she jumped out of the truck
and, she jumped out of the truck
when the truck was going down the freeway and she shattered her left hind leg.
You can see how badly deformed it is.
And she was just lieing there badly bruised and,
and in really bad shape,
and two people who were coming to visit Animal Place, Gene and Lorri Bauston,
happened to be on the freeway behind this truck.
It was just unbelievable!
And they see this little black form on the highway and they stoped,
and the farmer had stopped, of course,
and the farmer did not want Jessie because she was no longer valuable to him
because she couldn't be sold.
She had a fractured leg, she was down, she couldn't stand up.
And so, he gave her to Gene and Lorri who brought her to Animal Place.
We took Jessie in to, to my university hospital and radiographed her leg,
and it was very badly fractured, beyond surgical repair.
And, in fact, my colleagues said we should kill her,
And, I said: No, we'll give her a chance. we'll see what happens.
we can always kill her.
So we gave her stall rest
and within two months she was standing up and walking on the leg.
And within four or five months she was running on the leg.
Running? What a will to live!
Yeah, well, cows are known for their healing abilities.
Look at that! Now, Ned, you know dogs, you love dogs, you live around dogs.
Do you think cows are every bit as emotional as dogs ?
Just in a different way!
I mean, we read dogs very easily ? they communicate with us,
they look the way we want them to look - they look sad, they look disappointed, they look happy.
Cows are harder to read, but from what you've been telling me
they probably have most of the same emotions that dogs do.
Oh, I think they do.
I knew a steer once when I was in practice.
He was raised like a puppy would be raised,
very close to the family and isolated from other cows
so he never got to kow cows very well,
and he was like a puppy.
He ran and played and came running to the people and he would ? he'd be curious,
I'd be out there taking care of a sheep or somebody and he would run up and had to check things out.
and so he was expressing emotions,
in a dog you'd say he was happy.
Part of the problem, again, with cows is that they are not usually in a setting
where they can express those emotions or be free to express those emotions.
When you go to a typical sitution where cows are,
they're scared, they're huddled, they're nervous about human interaction
you see the emotion but it's usually fear.
An expectant mother gives birth to her offspring.
A beautiful bouncing baby boy?
All sixty pounds of him ?
Thrust from the womb in one mighty heave.
The proud mom licks her newborn for hours.
Her licking not only cleans the calf, but also helps develop strong familial ties,
that would normally last well into his first few years of life.
Cows are extraordinarily curious and social animals,
and the birth of this calf seems to heighten that curiosity among all of the surrounding females,
who move in closely for sniffs and gentle nudges.
Perhaps their way of welcoming him to his new world.
This calf, like all others before him, will never know of his proud and dignified bloodlines.
All of today's cows are descendants of the mighty auroch,
a gigantic creature nearly six feet tall,
which first appeared during the Pleistocene Period.
Magnificent paintings adorning the walls deep in the caves of Lescoux, France,
depict the auroch and signify their significant role as a prey species for prehistoric humans.
Today's cows, no matter the variety in shape, size or color,
are all descended from a single species,
whose hooves once pounded the dirt by the millions, from Europe, to Asia, to Northern Africa ?
and whose last member died in Poland in 1627.
Meeting these first few animals convinced Jeffrey
that, just like animals found in nature, farm animals have their own story to tell,
and it will be through his experiences and writing that this story will be told.
So this is Freddie.
This is Freddie.
Freddie, you like that.
Freddie was found on the freway.
SIX MONTHS EARLIER
The California highway patrol officers just found this little five-pound piglet
roaming the freway.
He was the sickest animal we had ever taken into the sanctuary.
He had beginning stages of pneumonia,
he had what's called white muscle disease, he had a mineral deficiency,
he had obvious abrasions on his back from his fall from the truck
and he had a number of other problems.
OK, Freedie.
Come on, sweetie! Come on!
OK, meal time.
Freddie was fed cow's milk by the girl who rescued him.
So when arrived at Animal Place,
we were very gradual in switching him over to a pig milk replacement.
Well, you know, when we get in a young animal,
we have to look at ways of how we can, we can nurture them,
how we can feed their stomach, and how we can feed them emotionally.
And knowing what a mother sow, how she would care for her young -
there would generally be a lot of siblings he would have,
they would be nestled up in that big old fat sow belly,
nursing on her and just getting a lot of tactile stimulation and a lot of warmth -
so, I immkediately went out and bought a baby sling
that mothers use for their newborn infants ?
and tucked Freddie inside that sling so that he could hear my heart beat,
he could hear me breathing,
he would abviously have a lot of warmth, temperature warmth from my body,
and just as my motion throughout the day, whether I'm preparing his meal,
one of his many meals that he wold eat throughout the day
because we fed him about every hour and a half,
or I'm working on my computer, that he ? I was with him.
And he seemed to gain a lot of comfort from that.
Freddie may live out his life in the security of Animal Place,
yet he will never be too far removed from the ways of his wild cousins.
Try as they may, those who today raise pigs in the confinement of commercial farms,
cannot remove through domestication the varying degrees of wildness that all pigs retain.
Born in litters of five to six, the young piglets tend to play and sleep together,
developing bonds that may last throughout their lifetime.
As they grow older and move more confidently throughout the herd,
they learn the ways of wild pigs by watching the adults around them,
especially their mother, who is never far away.
Early on, these piglets learn to root through the dirt,
sniffing out tasty morsels like roots,
which are part of their diverse diet,
along with acorns, grasses, berries, eggs, and small invertebrates.
Pigs are emotionally sensitive animals
and exhibit mood swings not unlike humans.
When the kids get too frisky, mother is not adverse to putting them in their place.
It's only his pride that is hurt,
but that's how piglets learn to make it to adulthood,
for natural mortality among piglets is quite high.
Learning to feed on their own takes months,
and during the learning curve, mother is still the best meal in town.
At six months of age, the piglets have grown large enough
to join the ranks of the other adults in the herd,
and in a short period of time they will have integrated fully into this society.
Given the opportunity to meet humans, wild pigs can exhibit a side of themselves
few of us would ever have expected.
When Jeffrey's research took him half way around the globe to Germany,
he was informed time and again about a well-known incident
that took place in the Black Forest nearly thirty years earlier.
In an extraordinary experiment back in the early 1970s,
Heinz Meinhardt, a German electrician,
set out on an assignment to draw wild pigs away from farm fields,
where they were eating everything in sight.
In the process, Meinhardt got to know each of the pigs in this large community,
and he began to see if they could ultimately accept his presence.
Meinhardt spent many months getting the pigs used to him,
gaining their trust by posing no threat to their safety or security.
Eventually, he was fully accepted.
What Meinhardt was able to accomplish with wild pigs is no less impressive
than the extraordinary relationship Diane Fossey developed
with the mountain gorillas of Rwanda:
Total acceptance. Total trust.
It didn't take Jeffrey long to realize
that, just like the wild animals he has studied and written about,
farm animals also possess individual personalities,
and all the emotions that go with it.
Jeffrey is a former psychoanalyst, not a scientist,
and as such he has often been accused of ascribing human characteristics
to non-human animals.
They even have a fancy term for it.
It's called anthropomorphism.
Yet, there are scientists who can expand their thoughts
well beyond conventional wisdom,
and in doing so, see the bigger picture that is starting to come into focus.
One of these is Marc Bekoff, professor of biology at the University of Colorado
and one of the world's leading authorities on animal emotions.
...anthropomorphic, I call it one of the "A" words.
It's kind of a dirty word.
But there's no way that I can communicate what I'm learning
and seeing and studying in an animal without being anthropomorphic.
Anthropomorphism is attributing human characteristics
to non-human beings.
If I tell you that a cow in the pasture was sad,
was lamenting her place,
I'm not saying she's sad in the same way I'm sad,
but all I had to do was look at her posture to know she was kind of sulked down,
kid of just looked lethargic.
I can't think of any other way to communicate that.
I could tell you about her dopamine and her seratonin
and I could tell you about the muscle tone in her legs and her muscles and tendons,
but that doesn't capture that she was either happy or sad.
So I think we need to be anthropomorphic,
simply taking into account the world of the animal
but using human terms to describe their behavior.
When I was growing up and being trained as an ethologist,
one of the key lessons to learn was not to anthropomorphise,
not to give animals qualities that were reserved for humans.
Leslie Rodgers is a professor of neuroscience and animal behavior
at Australia's University of New England.
but that's changed.
I mean basically it's changed since the eighties.
So it's now becoming more and more acceptable for people who study animal behavior
to at least be looking at these as possibilities and studying
where as, say, twenty to thirty years ago
this would not have been considered acceptable research,
I can say now that it is acceptable research.
The issue of emotion and thinking in animals
is now seen as something that you can study scientifically,
I mean, it's not without it's problems ? It's quite a complex thing
to put one's mind to.
So, we certainly don't have all the answers there before us,
but they are seen as problems that are worthwhile, approaching it in a scientific method.
If we just look at the cognative abilities of a chicken
in the first few days of life,
they form very good memories. they learn fantastically.
They have individual characteristics that they can recognize one individual chick from another.
They form representations, they can recognize objects that were hidden behind other things.
Very complex cognative abilities
that we've seen even as being unique to humans
are now being shown in the young domestic chick.
A couple hundred miles north of Animal Place,
over the rolling hills of Orland, California,
lies Farm Sanctuary,
which, coupled with its main facility in Watkins Glen, New York,
is one of the largest farm animal sanctuaries in the world.
Sanctuaries represent one of the few places where farm animals can really be themselves,
without the stress of the factory farming ordeal,
and, as such, are the perfect environment for ?effrey to study their true emotions.
Diane Miller is the west coast manager of this six hundred acre haven
for once-abused farm animals,
that can now look forward to a life of peace,
security, and lots of tender loving care.
Diane, I have to tell you this is the first time i've ever felt
I was bcoming intimate with a chicken, that i've held one this close to my ?
Well, I'm sorry you've been deprived.
Well, clearly I've been deprived.
I didn't realize that these animals cold become so...
interested in us, so close to us.
Is that fairly common? Can you have an intimate close relationship with a chicken?
You certainly can. I have several good friends who are chickens,
who listen to me much better than my people friends do.
And don't answer back, or sometimes do?
Sometimes they do, but they're very good listeners.
And clearly it's not just a one-sided relationship,
I mean, she's deriving pleasure from this and i'm getting pleasure from this.
I'd say she's enjoying that immensely.
She certainly has all the same potential that a person has
for intimacy and affection and caring and bonds between certain individuals.
How unusual when you think about it.
After all we don't have a history
of having behaved very kindly toward these animals, do we?
That's absolutely right.
This beautiful, beautiful turkey here. looks like a rainbow of colors.
I've never touched this before. It feels so wonderful.
I never knew that their emotions
are actually reflected on, what do you call this part of their face?
This, the long dangly here is called their snood.
Apparently it registers all of his emotions?
Right. The head, skin and neck and the snood on a tom turkey
is really a barometer of their emotions. It's how they communicate with one another.
And what happens is when a tom is feeling real good,
he's strutting and he's happy and life is good, and he's feeling good,
he'll be deep red color.
And they have the capacity to change the color, their whole skin tone, all of their head and their neck and their snood,
from totally white or light blue like you see around his eyes.
So they can go from light blue or white to all the way deep red.
And when they're happy and they're strutting and life is good, they're deep magenta red.
So, that's how they communicate with one another.
And they can do that immediately?
Right. within a few seconds.
Within a few seconds!
Turkeys are the only farm animals
bred from north American wildlife.
Benjamin Franklin considered the turkey a noble bird and often wrote of its worthiness
to be considered America's national emblem.
Had his efforts been successful, one can only wonder
if that honor might have changed the way we treat them today.
Lorri Bauston is the co-founder of Farm Sanctuary,
who wanted to make sure that jeffrey had a chance to get to know some of her special friends ?
all of whom came here as rescues from the dairy industry, or meat processors.
Well, this is loverboy, Valentino. As you can see,
he has a well-earned name. He's just basically ?
Because he's so kind?
Yeah. He's cuddly, he kind and he's lovable. he's one of the animals that consistently
is one of our best ambassadors because he's constantly coming up to visitors.
They need affection. they love affection.
I mean, he will, if he was laying down right now he'd wrap himself around you like a dog, you know, just like if you're leaning next to a dog ?
So it's not true that there's just nothing going on inside that huge head?
Oh, no. All kinds of stuff.
Mainly, he loves to give me kisses.
They're really sociable animals. they need a lot of attention. they need a lot of love.
Lorri, can you tell me about one of the most emotional moments
you've ever had with an animal?
Probably and most recently, Queenie,
who was a cow who took matters into her own hoofs and she escaped from a New York city slaughte rhouse.
The slaughter house was in a real busy area of Queens,
and she was running through the streets,
dodging cars while they were chasing her.
She was dodging bikes, pedestrians. Obviously, she was terrified and frightened and was running.
And by this time a whole force of NYPD cars had joined in the chase
trying to capture her before she hurt herself or hurt another person.
And it was an incredible scene of this animal
just running for her life through the streets of New York city.
Fortunately, she ran into a park and from there they closed the gates to the park
and they were able to kind of corral her and then wrestle her to the ground
And all the NYPD, you know, officials at that point became cowboys.
This animal who was saved from slaughter, who saved herself from slaughter,
touched millions of people, because it really was people who called into animal control saying:
Hey, this cow deserves her freedom!
Because they saw it on the news, so she moved millions of New Yorkers.
It was sad, of course, because they did have to, you know, chase her down to the ground
and tie her up so she wouldn't injure herself,
but, of course, it was instrumental in getting this cow to the safety of farm sanctuary.
I'll never forget because there was a cop there
who, once she was on the ground...
And of course she was terrified, frightened, she clearly knew
what was in store for her at the slaughter house when she ran, and the poor thing was chased and ?
He held her and he put her head in his lap and he just held her and stroked her.
And that's just the kind of magical moment we see all the time at Farm Sanctuary
where a person dos finally bond with a farm animal and realizes
that these farm animals feel and have feelings too.
She was shaking, fearful and we loaded her up into the truck
and we're trying to comfort her and tell her she's going to a wonderful place.
We got to the sanctuary and. i'll never forget this:
she stepped off the trailer and let out a big Moo, and...
See, when all the animals first come in they have to be in a separate area
to make sure they're pest-free and all that kind of stuff,
and make sure they're healthy enough before they can be with the other cattle ?
So she had to be in a separate area.
When she let out that Moo,
all of the other sanctuary cows gathered around to the closest fence
and started mooing back.
And then she started mooing, and they started mooing,
And there was this whole incredible loving exchange.
So the cows are mooing and we're crying...
And it was just such an incredible wonderful feeling!
She really felt at home and the other cattle really made her feel at home.
And I just again saw, you know, they're no different than us.
Queenie will spend the rest of her life at Farm Sanctuary,
and by all rights will never experience another moment of fear.
But how can we be so sure about how she feels?
Marc Bekoff: Often times a lucky animal escapes from or is released from a slaughter house condition,
and winds up on a sanctuary.
And when you study these animals, you see very clearly how emotional they are.
They go through this period of maybe lack of trust - they're not sure -
to a very slow bonding,
and you see their demeanor change: their posture, their stance, their gate.
If they vocalize, if they have expressive faces.
And you see that over time, they let their guard down.
And the reason that they're doing that is they're not sure,
And when you start making claims about whether an animal is sure about something,
you're saying that that animal is experiencing feelings.
And you need to make this very slow transition from a feeling of mistrust to a feeling of trust.
Once Jeffrey got to meet these farm animals - the cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, and turkeys -
spend time with them, observe their interactions with others of their kind,
and watch their personalities unfold before his eyes
it made him wonder if we can ever truly associate
the sentient animals with the meat on our dinner plates.
Queenie is but a dramatic example of what he is refering to.
In reality, she's no different from the billions of farm animals
raised every year for slaughter.
The hundreds of phone calls to Animal Control pleading to save Queenie's life,
did just that!
As a psychoanalyst, Jeffrey had to wonder.
In the minds of all the caring people who made those calls,
what qualities did Queenie possess that the millions of cows,
pigs, sheep, chickens, or turkeys waiting in line to be killed ? did not?
The answer seemed obvious to him: none.
One element of Jeffrfey's research has remained unresolved in his mind.
the organized programs that allow school children to spend months raising farm animals,
naming them like a companion animal, caring for them every day,
exhibiting them with all due pride, then, just like that, giving them up for slaughter.
He asked Jim Mason,
a farm boy turned lawyer and animal activist,
and co-author of the ground-breaking book Animal Factories, published back in 1990.
Jim's history with this goes back to his early teens.
I was deemed to be big enough then to help with the
what we call working the calves, which means castrating them,
de-horning them, and clipping their ears and doing all these painful things.
And as a young child they let me watch all of this. So I knew it was terrible.
I saw the terror in the animals. I saw the violance and the struggling with them and everything.
And yet that day it was my turn to go out and help with all this.
And I remember as we were going over the fence I started crying
because I knew what I was going to have to do.
And my uncle said, and his exact words, they ring in my ears, he said:
If you don't straighten up and act like a man,
we'll send you back to the house with the girls.
You're a sissy if you don't go with us.
When I was on a farm at that age
I actually didn't belong to farm kid groups, but my brother did.
And there were a lot of other kinds of groups like that that prepared you to be a farmer.
One of the most common projects is raising like a heffer or a pig or a steer or something for show.
Then they go to the state fair and show these animals
and they win ribbons.
You see these kids that spend so much time with these animals
and really get attached to them almost like pets.
And then comes the time when they have to part ways with that animal.
They have to go to slaughter. They have to go to auction.
And often it's very traumatic for these kids.
Even though you've been close to this animal,
you've groomed it and maybe slept with it for weeks
it has to go to market.
This is how they say it, when you get your first animal they tell you:
You always cry with your first animal, but you get used to it.
You get used to it...
I'm like, what do you mean by that, you know, I mean you get used to it.
OK. You get used to the fact that something you get attached to for months is taken from you and killed.
I mean, how are you supposed to get used to that? I couldn't get used to it.
Misty Vina is a high-school student from San Jose, California,
who went through this program only once, with a steer she named Ferdinand.
I had him for ten months and it was every day I was out there ?
It would have been easier if we had planned for him to be slaughtered from the start.
He wasn't supposed to be.
So it's kind of it came like out of nowhere on me.
I was out there, I'd get up at five o'clock or five-thirty every morning
and be out at school two hours before it started
and I'd go out there, I'd stay out there for a for while in the morning, feed him and everything
and then i'd be out there lunch most of the time.
And then I had two periods of agriculture and I was usually out there before then anyways,
and I'd stay after school until four-thirty every day after school with him.
At first, I thought: What am i doing with a cow? This is so stupid, right?
It was a steer and its like, this is
I thought it was going to be easy
And then he turned into, seriously, I always told everybody he's like a big puppy.
I would call him and he would come over to me and he'd put his nose in his halter for me...
And it's like when I went to visit him, they had him at the fair.
And I went over there and I called his name and
his little ear turned up and he turned around and he started mooing,
And I started crying, and everyone was like: There she goes again. And I'm like?
For people to say they don't have emotions, they don't know you're there, it's not true.
The idea of discovery and proof of an internal emotional event
is harder to prove, harder to control, and harder to justify
in what sense that should be taken on board by anybody and for what reason.
Gisella Kaplan is a professor of animal behavior
at Australia's University of New England.
I'm absolutely convinced that across the animal world,
including our farm animals, certainly we know it of our pets.
We know when they cry, we know when they're sad,
we know when they have grief, as pet owners.
The same may apply even to animals that for centuries have been domesticated.
But I've no doubt that those factors exist very strongly.
The changes that have transpired in our understanding
and perception and empathy for farm animals
were not ones that occurred overnight.
Nor is it easy to bookmark the points in history at which they have taken place.
I think we're looking at a period of at least three hundred years of change,
starting about 1700, when people first began to realize
that humans and the other species are built on the same anatomical template.
Davis Fraser is a professor of animal welfare
at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
We're not only built on the same anatomical template,
but we share a common ancestry as well.
Through the work of people like Jane Goodall,
we have come to see animals, even in scientific study,
not just as date points
helping to establish some kind of average or norm for the species,
but more as persons with individual life histories
and their own emotional and intellectual life.
So we've seen a gradual change over three centuries,
a rapid change over the last few decades.
And for the farm animals this means that ways of raising animals
that seemed perfectly modern and progressive even ten or twenty years ago,
are becoming increasingly out of step with modern values.
In terms of the complex emotions possessed by farm animals,
a popular analogy can easily be applied:
we may not be able to define it, but we certainly know it when we see it.
Every day researchers are breaking new ground
and allowing us solid glimpses into the emotional makeup of these animals.
In June of 2004, researchers at Babraham institute,
part of England's Cambridge University,
announced they had discovered some profound qualities possessed by sheep.
Qualities which will doubtless shed new light
on our perception of the emotional and intellectual capacities of these animals.
Individual sheep, it seems, can recognize up to fifty other sheep
by facial features alone,
and remember each of their faces after two years of separation.
This recognition is based on facial characteristics
that may differ by as little as 5-percent.
It was also established that sheep have an overwhelmingly favorable response
to humans that smile or laugh,
as opposed to humans that frown or scowl.
In the words of chief researcher neuroscientist dr. Keith Kendrick:
This does open up the possibility that they have
much richer emotional lives than we would give them credit for.
Dr. Kendrick and his team believe these findings may offer
valuable insights into human conditions like autism and schizophrenia.
On a small farm in Machipango, Virginia, Jeffrey visits dr. Karen Davis,
founder of United Poultry Concern, a non-profit organization
dedicated to public education on the humane treatment
and unique qualities of birds raised for food production.
Have you come to see them as...
as creatures with a healthy inner life, with a zest for life?
Is this, is this a fantasy I have?
Jeffrey, it is not a fantasy.
Good, I'm glad to hear that.
Chickens are very lively birds. They come from the jungles of South-East Asia.
They live in extended family flocks
that break up into small groups throughout the day.
They like to dustbathe in the early to mid-afternoon,
and also they take sunbaths,
which are also vital to their health and wellbeing, hygiene, and proper nutritional health.
They're making sounds.
Yes.
Now, I firmly believe that we
have yet to crack the code of most animal communication.
I agree.
What we hear is ordinary sounds, or probably very specific things.
Do you have any idea what they're saying?
Chickens are very vocal birds,
and they would be calling to each other over large areas of space
in the tropical forest where they come from.
Roosters, for example, make what they call locator calls,
where they will let other roosters with their hens know where they are.
They keep tabs on each other.
They will notify one another about overhead predators, like a hawk,
and they certainly notify each other about food sources,
and probably many things in the environment
that may elude us.
But they are not just making noises.
The further into his writing Jeffrey get,
the more he realizes that when referring to the emotions of farm animals,
he has to take into account the effect their emotions have on our emotions.
Every place he has been to, everyone he has talked with ?
they all have stories of deep-felt personal experiences,
where the emotions of the animals they have gotten to know have, in-kind, affected emotions of their own.
No one who has spent considerable quality time with these animals
comes away, it seems, without having experienced some sense of wonderment -
thoughts and feelings they never for a moment felt could be attributed
to pigs, cows, sheep, chickens or turkeys.
And when those who have lived the experience, see it happening to others around them,
it often becomes a magical moment.
Jan Hamilton is the founder of Wilderness Ranch in Loveland, Colorado.
We rescued turkeys off of a dead pile.
There were literally four hundred or so turkeys piled up on this dead pile.
And so they were in every stage of decay and dying, and some of them were alive.
We brought fourteen turkeys home.
We had a group of community service kids working out here,
and one of the kids that was there was the toughest kid I've ever seen out here.
I thought it was almost hopeless to have her out here.
And she observed the turkeys coming in
and saw that we were picking maggotts off of them and trying to keep them alive
syringe feeding them and what bad shape they were in.
And the next week she was much more civil.
And the following week she actually was helping and asking questions
and being really involved in what we were doing.
And, at the end of the time she was here, I asked her:
What made the difference, what happened, what happened with you?
And she said the turkeys really got to her,
and that they had been abused as she had been and she could see the connection.
And as she left she said: What you do here is really awesome.
The reason that I do this
is because I know that animals have feelings,
I know they have relationships,
and that they deserve like every other being
to have the full expression of their essence, whatever that is.
And that's what we want to teach here, that's what this is all about for me.
It's not that I think farm animals are more important or more interesting
than any other creature on the earth.
We all deserve to live in harmony and abundance,
and the way to get there is by respecting each other,
and that's what Wilderness Ranch is all about.
From the day Jeffrey started to write this book,
he was sure he'd learned just enough about farm animals over his lifetime
to know where his research would lead him.
Few times in his life, he admits, has he been so wrong.
If I'm guilty of underestimating the ability these animals have
to relate to us on such a profound emotional level,
believe me, I am but one among millions.
We accept dogs and cats into our lives
so freely, so readily, so lovingly.
Yet, after an entire year of traveling throughout the world,
visiting farm animal sanctuaries,
where, for the most part, these animals can just be themselves,
I'm beginning to wonder
how we came to discriminate between a pig and a dog, or a chicken and a cat?
Where did it start, and why?
There are no simple answers, no profound words of wisdom to impart here.
All I can do as a writer is tell you, in as honest a manor as possible,
my experiences, and the stories of those who have dedicated their lives
to bettering our understanding of these magnificent animals.
The experiences I have had with farm animals are some I will never forget.
Yet, these are my experiences;
and just like me on the day I began to research this book,
experiences of your own are just a mouse-click away.
See for yourself.
Somewhere near you is a place where you can go
and meet a pig, a cow, a chicken or a turkey.
With your sense of curiosity fully in play,
I think you'll be surprised at what you'll find.
Their emotions may impact your emotions forever.