A BRIEF HISTORY of FARM SANCTUARY
I don't think it would surprise anyone who knew me when I was a child that I'd someday devote my life to a cause like Farm Sanctuary. Thinking and caring about nature and animals has been important to me since I was a toddler.
I grew up in Southern California, in the Hollywood Hills near Griffith Park. Among my earliest memories is watching with total fascination the local coyotes, skunks, snakes, gophers, raccoons, and deer. I was concerned from a very young age about the harm people caused animals. I remember well the time a deer became stuck in a neighbor's chain-link fence and had to be killed; the event had a powerful impact on me.
The first time I fell in love, it was with Tiger, a tabby kitten I adopted when I was not even 10 years old. I slept on the upper bunk of my bunk bed, and Tiger used to jump all the way up to lie next to me as I was sleeping, impressing me with both his athleticism and his love. When he became sick and died a few years later, I was overcome with grief.
Despite my love for animals, it didn't occur to me not to eat them. Everyone did, including the rest of my large family (I'm the eldest of six kids). I grew up on the same basic diet eaten by most Americans, and although I did have occasional qualms about eating animals, for the most part I finished off whatever was placed in front of me. When I was a teenager, I even acted in commercials for McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken to earn college money. (These ads haven't resurfaced--with luck, they're gone for good.)
Although I wasn't a vegan when I was young, I did develop an interest in all kinds of social causes. Perhaps this was an outgrowth of what I learned at Catholic school--especially the church's basic moral teaching (central to most faiths) that the strong must protect the weak. I always wanted to make a positive difference, whether that meant volunteering with terminally ill children at Children's Hospital in Hollywood or working on campaigns with environmental groups such as Greenpeace. And I was profoundly influenced by folk musicians such as Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul and Mary, who often played at the Greek Theater in Griffith Park. Perched on the tree- covered hillside on summer nights, I would listen in on their concerts. I was also informed and inspired by some of the great activists of the 1960s and 1970s: Cesar Chavez, Gloria Steinem, Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Nader.
My interest in activism led me to examine the relationship between humans and other animals, and I soon came to realize that animal agriculture was a cruel, inefficient, and wasteful system. Then I read Frances Moore Lappe's book Diet for a Small Planet and realized that eating animals was not necessary for our health. That was the clincher. The world was going hungry, and eating animals was both cruel and completely unnecessary. And so, in 1985, I became a vegan. I was just finishing my degree in sociology at California State University, Northridge and was motivated to make a difference. My background as an activist and a new commitment to the animal rights movement led me, along with my friend Lorri Houston, with whom I founded Farm Sanctuary, to become a full-time advocate--as I've been ever since.
At the time, only a few books or articles had been written about the plight of farm animals, and there was not a lot of effort going into improving the situation. So, with the help of some friends, Lorri and I decided to tackle the issue. One of these friends owned a row house in Wilmington, Delaware; it was in bad shape, but he was willing to let us use it. So we fixed it up and, from 1986 to 1989, that house became our base of operations. Farm Sanctuary was born.
The name just occurred to us one day. Farm Sanctuary. It sounded good. We didn't have a big vision for what it would become, and we didn't have a concrete plan to start any actual farms. We just wanted to start something that would combat what we felt was a brutal and indefensible industry, and to offer a new voice and a new model.
"ONE DAY THE ABSURDITY OF THE ALMOST UNIVERSAL HUMAN BELIEF IN THE SLAVERY OF OTHER ANIMALS WILL BE PALPABLE. WE SHALL THEN HAVE DISCOVERED OUR SOULS AND BECOME WORTHIER OF SHARING THIS PLANET WITH THEM."
--MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
We began our work by visiting farms, stock-yards, and slaughterhouses to document conditions--mostly surreptitiously--and immediately began rescuing and rehabilitating animals and letting them stay in our little backyard until we could find loving homes for them.
Our first animal was Hilda.
It was 1986, and we were spending a lot of time at the Lancaster stockyards in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was a massive place, with acres and acres of stalls, pens, and alleyways--it once handled as many as 300,000 animals per year. We'd walk around taking photos, documenting the intolerable conditions. Sometimes, if we could, we'd introduce ourselves to the workers and explain our mission. They didn't get it.
Most of all, they couldn't understand our diet.
I remember one of the workers asking us, in all seriousness, "What in the world do you people eat?
Corn silage?" We'd also get questions like, "Vegetarian? Is that some kind of Eastern religion?"
Behind the stockyard's main facility was the "dead pile," where animals that died were left for the renderer, who would use their carcasses for animal feed, soap, and fertilizer. One day as we were taking photos, revolted by the clump of rotting pigs, sheep, and cows thick with buzzing maggots, one of the sheep lifted her head and looked right at us. She wasn't dead at all. Our jaws dropped, and our hearts melted.
Although we had no legal right to move her, we couldn't just leave her there, so we took her off the pile. Our assumption was that the poor creature would have to be euthanized, but after we smuggled her out, we found a veterinarian willing to examine her. As he did, Hilda--as we later named her--perked up and stood on her wobbly legs. She later recovered.
Hilda was shy and, not surprisingly, afraid of people. But within months she met Jelly Bean, a sheep we had just rescued. The two animals bonded, and for the next 10 years they were inseparable, day and night, until Hilda finally died peacefully in her sleep. We buried her at our Watkins Glen, New York, sanctuary. Jelly Bean lived a while longer until she, too, died of old age. She is also buried at Watkins Glen, not far from her lifelong friend.
We found another of our wonderful animals, Hope the pig, at an unloading area of the stock-yard. She couldn't walk, so the workers had abandoned her there. It turned out she had a broken hind leg that had been left untreated and was calcifying. So we scooped her up and brought her home.
Hope was gentle and shy. When we fed her, some of our other pigs would try to move in and take her food. One in particular, Raquel, was especially ravenous and used to push Hope aside in hopes of finishing off her meals. I would tell Raquel "no!" She knew she was in the wrong, and it turned into a game. Whenever I would feed Hope, I would position myself so I could see Raquel but she couldn't see me. Her eyes would widen, her ears would perk up, and it became clear she was thinking, "I don't see that feeder anywhere; I wonder if he is still watching or if I can get away with this." She just loved food too much.
Then one day we rescued Johnny, a much younger pig, who immediately bonded with Hope. Johnny became Hope's constant companion, and he always made sure that whenever she was fed, no one else could get at her food. Johnny and Hope loved each other and spent countless hours snuggling together in the straw bedding. But Hope was a lot older than Johnny, and when she died, Johnny was overcome with grief. Although he was still young, sadly, he died just a couple of weeks later. As far as we could tell, it was of a broken heart.
Back then (the late 1980s), we were rescuing many animals who, like Hilda and Hope, had been discarded and written off as dead, and we were spending a lot for the best veterinary care possible. At first, the vets told us point-blank that we were wasting our money and time. Why put all this effort into helping animals who were of no monetary value and who had been slated for death in the first place? It didn't make economic sense, they thought. But eventually they began to accept us. That was mostly because we always paid our bills on time and tried to be easy clients--even as we challenged the veterinarians' assumptions about farm animals.
They never quite understood our attachment to the creatures, however. Our different perspectives became especially evident the time we noticed that one of the rats on the farm wasn't looking too good. (Believe it or not, we had grown rather fond of him.) So we called the vet and told him that we thought the rodent needed to be euthanized. The vet hemmed and hawed, and pretty much told us we were crazy, but eventually he agreed to do it.
Then, a couple of weeks later, our sheep came down with parasitic worms, and we needed medicine to treat them. I took one of the worms from the sheep so I could show it to the vet to help him diagnose what type of disease the animals had.
"I have one of the worms here," I explained over the phone.
There was a long silence.
Finally, the veterinarian asked in a confused, stammering voice, "And what specifically do you want us to do for the worm?"
We never did attend to worms, but the veterinarian's reaction showed that we were pushing boundaries. (As the years have passed, I'm happy to say that an increasing number of vets are coming to appreciate farm animals as we do at Farm Sanctuary.)
As we rescued more and more animals, keeping them all in our Wilmington backyard, we noticed that the neighborhood kids were constantly peering through the fence or knocking on our door, asking if they could see and pet them. It became apparent that these creatures could play a powerful role as ambassadors. After all, Farm Sanctuary wasn't just a sanctuary--it was also an educational and transformational place. We realized we could turn Farm Sanctuary into a positive experience for visitors by sharing the rescued animals' stories. It was much easier to speak about the horrors of factory farming amid the hopeful stories of rescued animals.
To support our ongoing investigations of farms, stockyards, and slaughterhouses, and to pay for the care of our animals, we began raising money by going to zoos, ecofestivals, and animal rights conferences and handing out pamphlets we'd written about our animals. But in the early days, our most successful fund-raising tool turned out to be selling veggie hot dogs out of a Volkswagen van at Grateful Dead concerts. These concerts were basically traveling festivals, so they attracted thousands of people, most of whom were receptive to our message of love, compassion, and tofu on a bun. We were able to make several thousand dollars in a couple of days at each concert stop. It was also at a Grateful Dead concert that a so-called Deadhead gave us the idea for our first bumper sticker, which read:
If you love animals called pets,
Why do you eat animals called dinner?
We also did some vegan catering to raise funds, and sometimes that required a lot of tofu. So we searched out a source of bulk tofu, eventually finding a farmer near Avondale, Pennsylvania, who sold it. (He didn't actually grow soybeans--he bought the beans and then created the tofu.) The farmer liked us, and when he discovered our mission, he offered us the use of some of his extra acreage. His barns needed attention and improvements, but we gathered volunteers, pitched in, and created our first Farm Sanctuary on an actual farm.
Although we now had a small farm, we quickly realized that we needed a larger one. We soon found a property in Watkins Glen, in the Finger Lakes region of New York. The 175-acre plot included a seven-bedroom house, barns, tractors, and equipment--all for $100,000. We looked at it, liked it, and bought it in the fall of 1989. Like the land in Avondale, the farm needed a lot of work. For example, we found pig skulls and bones strewn around the grounds. But we got to work, and, by the summer of 1990, we were able to bring the animals up from Pennsylvania. They, and we, finally had a permanent home.
Since we opened the Watkins Glen site, we've had about 100,000 visitors. Some of them were already vegans when they showed up, and others--such as Biz Stone, the cofounder of Twitter, and Brian Greene, the theoretical physicist at Columbia University--became vegans as a result of their visits.
One of our most interesting visitors was the fur farmer whose operation was located across the street. At first our relationship was strained, but we invited him to our events, and soon his young son started volunteering for us. Then one day the fur farmer told me, "I really don't like killing the animals the way I do." He asked us what kind of vegetables we liked, and then closed down the fur farm and started growing plant foods, which he sold at a stand across the street.
Three years later, one of our members donated around 100 acres of land to Farm Sanctuary. Located near Orland, California, the property is about 150 miles north of San Francisco. (Today we have 300 acres there.) More recently we obtained another farm, this time in Acton, California, about 45 minutes north of Los Angeles and spanning 26 acres. We now own a total of more than 500 acres of land.
For the past 25 years, Farm Sanctuary has continued doing the same work as when we began: rescue, education, and advocacy.
That last piece picked up in the early 1990s, when I started discussing these issues with politicians across the country. Most people, including our elected leaders, don't realize just how much factory farms dominate American food production and how abusive their practices are toward animals. (If you'd like to know more about this system, please read my book, Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds about Animals and Food, or go to farmsanctuary.org/learn/factory-farming.)
Copyright © 2015 by Gene Baur and Gene Stone. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
