Fertile Ground USA...Celebrating the people behind the plow

by Melissa Waldron Lehner

When I arrived at the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary on a hot summer afternoon, I was greeted by Albie the three-legged goat. Not just a three-legged goat, but a three legged goat with a prosthetic. Now you don’t see that very often.

Nor is it likely that you would see a goat named Olivia who has cancer but is merrily eating all the food off your plate, or a 1,000 lb hog named Andrew who got his bacon saved, just barely rescued from a slaughterhouse. Then there is Elvis, who was supposed to be someone’s Veal Scallopini but instead is a fully grown steer living out his days eating daisies and alfalfa.

No, these are not animals you would normally see. They could have been something you may have eaten, but seeing them fully grown, romping in fields and being loved by people as much as they would their own children is a rare sight indeed.
 
It’s not tight fitting cages or hormones that these animals get at the Woodstock Animal Sanctuary, but rather, thanks to founders Jenny Brown and Doug Abel, love, food and shelter. With a slight resemblance to the The Island of Misfit Toy’s from Rankin/Bass’s 1964 stop motion animation classic, Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer, this heavenly 20 acre farm in Woodstock, New York exists just to give a home to neglected or abused farm animals. Whether they are goats found in a basement full of feces or geese collected from an abandoned parking lot covered in glass or, a poor goat like Albie, running pell-mell through Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, the trusses that once bound him trailing behind, this Sanctuary takes ‘em all.

Albie arrived at their Sanctuary in terrible shape -- having escaped most likely from one of the 100 live-kill markets in the NYC area. Soon Woodstock volunteers were picking him up and bringing him back to the farm where he was nurtured back to health. Except for the leg. “We just couldn’t save it, we tried everything,” says Jenny, in her slight Kentucky drawl. “So now he has a prosthetic, just like me.” Jenny shows me her leg. She too has a prosthetic leg – one she’s had a long time, after losing the original to cancer as a child. And like mother, like child, she had a special prosthetic made for the goat -- by her own doctor.

I stood looking at the chickens, a flock of white “broilers” who had been rescued from a Brooklyn religious ceremony and mentioned how I’d like to start an egg business someday. Jenny’s eyebrows furrowed and her dimples disappeared. “Now why’d you want to do a thing like that?”

Needless to say, Jenny is a vegan, as are all the people who work at this farm. Not only do they not eat meat, but no fish, no dairy and certainly no eggs. No fun?
Jenny stopped eating red meat at the age of 18 and then at 20 gave up fish as well. The egg sandwiches ended a few years after that. That was the hardest thing to do she said.

“I used to love egg sandwiches. Loved ‘em.”

I had to ask – what’s wrong with eating eggs? “Oh don’t get me started. Do you really want to know?” She looked at me squarely in the eye. I thought that maybe, really I didn’t.

Before founding this farm sanctuary with her husband Doug Abel, Jenny went undercover as a videographer for PETA and then for Farm Sanctuary, where she ended up doing an internship. Farm Sanctuary is a non-profit whose goal is to expose and stop the cruel practices of the food animal industry. Jenny said she was horrified by what she discovered when she went undercover at the egg hatcheries.

“If you scratch the surface of these egg hatcheries you will find a lot of disgusting practices. Do you have any idea what they do to those young chicks? Before they can ship out the girls, they have to determine the sex of the chicken when they are very young, which is in itself a very violating, violent thing to do. Then they keep the girls, and discard the boys. These hatcheries have no use for boys. So they grind them up while they are still alive, or they get dumped into garbage or suffocated. Some are even used as packaging material when the girls are shipped out in boxes. AND, these 1-3 day old chickens are shipped without food or water for over 72 hours. These little sentient beings are shipped in boxes like stemware.”

I asked Jenny if she thought there were any farms that treated animals fairly, that if they met a certain standard, would eating their meat be acceptable? Her answer: absolutely not.

When I initially emailed her about coming out to her farm to interview her, I got a firm reply when I asked her to speak on the issue of sustainability and livestock:

"To be clear about what we do and what our message is in general - we do not condone animal agriculture in any form. We fundamentally do not think that we as a society need to consume animal products and no matter how "sustainable" the practice is...lives are taken for something as trivial as the pleasure of one's palette. We adhere to a strict vegan lifestyle and encourage others to do the same--at least those who truly care about animals."

I had also made the mistake of mentioning the Animal Welfare Institute, a non profit which monitors the treatment of animals and seeks “to reduce the sum total of pain and fear inflicted on animals by humans.” They have initiated the first new food seal called Animal Welfare Approved, that works with family farms like Niman Ranch to set the highest standards for the humane treatment of farm animals. I asked her what she thought about their work, thinking she would be appreciative of their efforts. She was not.

She wrote back: "We are not Welfarists, we are Abolitionists. AWI and the Niman Ranch people make my skin crawl. I stood up at a conference and told them so."

She continued in a later email: "There is no such thing as “humane farming” because the animals always have their young torn from them to be sold or slaughtered, dairy animals are always forced to have more young and produce more milk than they would normally if left to their own devices, and "humane slaughter" is an oxymoron. "humanely" raised animals still end up at the same filthy, terrifying, nightmarish slaughterhouses where they are often boiled alive or dismembered while they are still conscious due to the speed of the lines. So, it's not my way of thinking. It's a documented fact. They are all essentially murdered--their lives taken prematurely from them because we have a taste for their flesh and mammary secretions.”

So while watching her help Albie into his prosthetic leg, I asked Jenny if she had any moments when she truly missed eating meat. “We all need to move away from a meat and dairy diet, that’s just what we have to do. It’s unhealthy, for us and for the planet. The colon cancer rate for vegetarians is so much lower. Look at me,” she stood up and showed herself off like Vanna White. “I am 37 years old and I think I look pretty good. And it’s all due to a plant based diet.”

Her farm animals sure must be happy to hear that.

Help Woodstock Animal Farm Sanctuary complete their Animal Rehab Center!

More on this issue:
A Few More Inconvenient Truths, Kathy Freston, Huffington Post, Feb 2, 2007
A Farm Boy Reflects, Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, July 31, 2008
Chicken Run, Julia Olmstead, Los Angeles Times, July 5, 2008