The Emotional World of Farm Animals

Here is an interesting video about something that most people never even think about: the rich and often complex emotional lives of farm animals.

The film follows Jeffrey Masson, the best-selling author of nine books about the emotional lives of animals, as he travels around America visiting various animal sanctuaries and learning the stories of animals who have escaped from, or been rescued from, the slaughterhouses and talking to the people who now provide them with a safe and secure home.

The documentary also interviews many scientific specialists from all over the world to back up what should be obvious in the first place, that animals are just as capable of having an emotional life as people are, and they respond to situations that arise in their lives in much the same way as people do. They are not the same as people, of course, but they show every sign of having the same needs, fears and desires.

Commodification is one of the ways that we manage to ignore the consequences of our actions, and animals have now been turned into commodities. I wonder how many people who pick up sterilised packets of meat in Tescos would eat the same amount of meat if they had to rear and kill the animals themselves, when they can survive very well without it? In any case they would surely have a different attitude to what they were doing.