'Pig Years' and 'What the Chicken Knows' consider the interior worlds of farm animals

NPR's Book of the Day

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 29 November 2024

⏱️ 20 minutes

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Summary

Today's books take readers into the secret lives of farm animals. The first, Pig Years, is a memoir by the writer Ellen Gaydos, who began working as a farmhand at 18 years old. In Pig Years, she writes lyrically about working with, raising and admiring pigs–all while knowing they'll one day be slaughtered. In today's episode, we revisit a conversation between Gaydos and NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben about the intimacy of working with people and animals on the farm. Next, author Sy Montgomery has written more than 34 books about creatures, including turtles and octopi. Her latest project is a book about chickens. What the Chicken Knows is an homage that relishes all we don't know about the birds. In today's episode, Montgomery speaks with Here & Now's Peter O'Dowd about chickens' surprising signs of intelligence and what to do when a rooster attacks.

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1:29.7	Thanks a lot. Back with the show.
1:33.8	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. The theme of the pot today could be
1:38.9	the secret lives of farm animals. And I don't mean that in a kind of cuty, cartoony sort of way. But instead,
1:45.4	the books we'll hear about today presents the lives of these animals with details that I'd
1:50.6	never considered before. In a bit, we'll hear about the pecking order of chickens. But first,
	...

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