A Personal Account
I arrived at Farm Sanctuary’s California shelter at Orland (CA, USA) at the end of a personal era. I had just graduated from college, and was going to begin a masters’ degree in social work the following August. A week prior, at my University’s commencement ceremonies, I received my diploma surrounded by friends and family, master of my environment after four years of working to make it my home, and feeling completely confident in myself and what I stood for.
A week later, completely alone and waiting at a deserted bus station in Chico, CA, waiting for the intern coordinator to pick me up, I was terrified.
From the very beginning—as early as the application process—my experience with Farm Sanctuary forced me to examine myself and the way I lived my life. It required that I make decisions about the person I was, and the person I wanted to be. And perhaps the reason embarking on a two-month long farm adventure scared me the most, it forced me to let parts of myself, my life, and my consciousness go in order to make way for a more whole way of being. I felt the cycles of death and rebirth almost daily throughout the sweltering summer months in Orland, and have learned more and become more resilient from them than I ever thought possible.
I was not even vegetarian when I applied for the internship (Farm Sanctuary requires that all interns be vegan for the duration of their internship),
but was blessed to live with four fellow interns with varying experience with vegan cooking. I anticipated a vegan lifestyle to be at least somewhat of a sacrifice, but was surprised to find that I felt more fulfilled—and much less sick after eating—with this newfound diet. As the habits that I had developed and staunchly maintained for two decades died (with a minimum of mourning, I might add), I found new joy and variety in eating. I suddenly relished meals, preparing them for myself, and the sense of community in eating that developed with my vegan compadres. The experience of re-learning something I thought was non-negotiable gave me permission to rework my concept of the world.
Again and again, it was the animals that taught us lessons. The goats—who had endured abuse at the hands of a neglectful owner—embodied unconditional love and affection. Dawn, a surrogate mother for two orphaned calves and a rather sickly old steer, was a living testament to selflessness and protection. The pigs, who ultimately collapsed immobile under their unnatural weight as they aged, still shone with a fiery passion for life (and food). In spite of the horrific treatment that humans put each and every one of them through, each and every animal exuded the very best things about being alive—love, energy, and a pure sense of gratitude for the very small comforts we provided them.
The most profound lessons came from the situations that challenged us the most. We visited an agricultural school at a local university. While intended to be a place of growth and learning for the future farmers of America, the acres of desolate “farmland” (mostly concrete paddocks and wire-mesh cages) reeked of death and dismemberment. The experience culminated as we watched, horrified, as a blood-stained butcher nonchalantly slaughtered a sheep. For the remainder of the visit, we witnessed the other animals, walking corpses, exist—and nothing more, just exist--in their cramped lifestyles as the eerie scent of death loomed throughout the entire farm. Actually seeing creatures die and anxiously wait for their deaths brought the issue into clear focus and stark life. This was no longer a philosophical argument or a lively discussion for the dinner table only to be abandoned when a tasty veal dish was available; this was tangible suffering and murder we were dealing with, right down to a look of sheer terror and desperation in the eye of an animal about to die. That day gave me a sense of urgency about social change—vegan and otherwise—that I don’t think I had really possessed before.
As difficult as watching the deaths of anonymous animals was, the passing of animals we had cultivated relationships with was the most challenging part of farm life. Summer on the farm is one of the hardest on the animals, due to the extreme California heat (every day I was there was at least 105 degrees, up to 120 one day) coupled with their biological fragility (a characteristic inadvertently bred by the farming industry). The passing of one animal was particularly hard to take. Vonnie, an eight year old Yorkshire pig, passed after a long, intense struggle with a mysterious illness. Her mother, Bridget, also lived on the farm, and was purported to be the world’s oldest pig at 14 years. Vonnie held on to life longer than any vet thought she would—she held on weeks past her last food or drink. She fought, and we fought with her too—I remember spending several hours trying to get her to drink Gatorade to help insulate her against the heat, to no avail. We brought her fruit, veggies, anything we could think of to try to entice her to eat, also to no avail. But even as her bodily systems shut down, we could still see the personality, the vigor, that had made her so special to us in the first place. We were exhausted and devastated when we finally did lose her—and the other pigs definitely recognized that one of their clan was missing. But our efforts did not feel futile; to fight with an animal until—and only succumb to life’s will when she was ready—was more empowering than I could have imagined. I had never worked in such close partnership with human or animal to provide as comfortable, humane treatment as we gave to Vonnie in her last weeks. I learned very important lessons from both Vonnie’s fight and her acceptance when the time came, and I find myself thinking back to her when I struggle to control that which is out of my grasp.
But much more important than any personal growth that I was lucky enough to experience during my two months at Farm Sanctuary was the fact that the animal agriculture industry had lost another customer. Eric Marcus, in his book Meat Market, estimates that a person who shuns animal products will save 2,000 animals over the course of the subsequent fifty years. My personal transformation, while of course important to me, is more meaningful when taken in the context of the suffering that the world endures. Because of a summer internship—an experience where some people my age file and make copies—I have embarked down a path to spare thousands of animals from cruel lives and even crueler deaths. I have seen firsthand exactly why “even dairy” (a common misunderstanding for people who haven’t been educated about the dairy industry) is a major problem, and can speak eloquently on behalf of the voiceless. I can now tell people who are on the cusp of making humane eating choices: I did it, and I know you can too. My every act in every day is now a living testament to my experience that cruelty-free living is fulfilling and powerful. The animals and people I was lucky enough to grow with for two months in 2004 made it every clear that there is a better way to live, and gave birth to the notion that I could--truly, actively-- be a part of changing the world for the better.
