Like any bestselling author with more than 20 books to his credit, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson has attracted criticism. Yet when he started writing about the inner lives of animals--in books such as When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (co-authored with Susan McCarthy) and Dogs Never Lie About Love: Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs--his detractors got more serious. Some called his ideas "unorthodox, " "far-fetched " and "pseudo-scientific nonsense." And those were among the kinder observations.

Many in the farm industry see Masson as downright subversive--someone trying to stir up trouble by inviting people to perceive that animals have feelings and are unhappy living in confinement. The author is not deterred. He is convinced that all animals, not just dogs and cats, are sentient beings who display a full range of emotions, including hope, love, grief and even happiness. An animal is happy, he contends, if it can live according to its nature. While his viewpoint is generally rejected by behaviorists, animal lovers around the world applaud it.

In his latest book, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals, Masson asserts that the animals humans routinely eat have feelings, intelligence, thoughts, emotions and even dreams. He recounts stories of pigs dying of broken hearts, of a ram who mourns the death of a cow, of a newborn calf and a mother who are separated and then call for each other until they are hoarse. As a result of writing this book, for which he spent five years studying farm animals and interviewing those who seek to protect them, Masson has converted from a vegetarian to a "vegan " lifestyle, neither eating nor using any animal products.

The Pig Who Sang to the Moon has become fodder for his opponents and doctrine for animal-rights activists, turning the former religious studies instructor into an international celebrity. Not only does he tell stories of animals experiencing joy, sorrow and compassion, but he also posits that they fear death. "Farm animals, " he asserts, "may understand and dread the fate that awaits them." One such anecdote is the story of two pigs that went to extraordinary lengths to escape slaughter in England and won the hearts of locals. "For some people, " Masson writes, "it was the first time they realized that a pig does not want to die."

READ THE FULL STORY HERE

Get your advice directly from the most successful people on the planet.

AudioMotivation.com has gathered together the world's most powerful and effective audio programs directly from the most popular and well-respected motivational speakers and teachers in the world today!

PLUS... right now, only until midnight on Saturday, March 12, they've added a ton of bonus material for their newest members. AudioMotivation.com

The ground-hugging mayapple plans its growth two years into the future, based on computations of weather patterns. And many who visit the redwoods of the Northwest come away awed by the trees' survival for millenniums - a journey that, for some trees, precedes the Parthenon.

As trowel-wielding scientists dig up a trove of new findings, even those skeptical of the evolving paradigm of "plant intelligence" acknowledge that, down to the simplest magnolia or fern, flora have the smarts of the forest.

Some scientists say they carefully consider their environment, speculate on the future, conquer territory and enemies, and are often capable of forethought - revelations that could affect everyone from gardeners to philosophers.

Indeed, extraordinary new findings on how plants investigate and respond to their environments are part of a sprouting debate over the nature of intelligence itself.

"The attitude of people is changing quite substantially," says Anthony Trewavas, a plant biochemist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and a prominent scholar of plant intelligence. "The idea of intelligence is going from the very narrow view that it's just human to something that's much more generally found in life."

To be sure, there are no signs of Socratic logic or Shakespearean thought, and the subject of plant "brains" has sparked heated exchanges at botany conferences. Plants, skeptics scoff, surely don't fall in love, bake soufflés, or ponder poetry. And can a simple reaction to one's environment truly qualify as active, intentional reasoning?

But the late Nobel Prize-winning plant geneticist Barbara McClintock called plant cells "thoughtful." Darwin wrote about root-tip "brains." Not only can plants communicate with each other and with insects by coded gas exhalations, scientists say now, they can perform Euclidean geometry calculations through cellular computations and, like a peeved boss, remember the tiniest transgression for months.

To a growing number of biologists, the fact that plants are now known to challenge and exert power over other species is proof of a basic intellect.

"If intelligence is the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge, then, absolutely, plants are intelligent," agrees Leslie Sieburth, a biologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE