My Next Vegan Step

May 20, 2013

My Next Vegan Step

As I have shared with you, my readers, I have been making the changes necessary to climb back on the vegan train. I'm eating clean and green and my determination to do so from a point of education caused me to watch many documentaries to stir myself into action. My efforts to learn as much as I can about factory farming propelled me to visit a farm animal sanctuary on Saturday. I found one online located in Ocala, about 1 1/2 hrs from my home.

Borrowing a car from my friend again, I made the drive, on that beautiful May day. Ocala is horse country and everything is so pretty. The farm sanctuary, also very lovely, clean and well maintained was a surprise to me. I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't that. I was greeted by a young woman, named Logan, who runs the place by herself. She gave me some background information on herself saying she started working with animals as a vet tech, then moved to working at a zoo and then made the move to the sanctuary. Soon the previous owner gave it up and Logan took over. She slowly became vegetarian and then vegan. It was not an overnight decision. She said until she saw the animals as individuals and not just a bunch of chickens or goats, she did not feel compelled to forego eating animal flesh. Embracing animals as individuals with different needs and personalities took time on the sanctuary.

The 10 of us there that day toured the property with Logan. She gave us the background histories on many of the animals saying that some came from profound abuse and neglect situations, like the horses; some came from hoarding situations, like the African tortoises; some came from uninformed owners, like people who bought chicks and ducklings for their children for Easter or purchased a goat or pot bellied pig to be a part of a wedding party with no forethought as to what would happen to this living, breathing being when they were "done with it". Many animals were actually rescued from factory farms, smuggled out by workers like the thousands of turkey chicks each and every year. They are sent to sanctuaries all over the country.

We visited with cows, sheep, goats and hogs basking in mud pits, wild mustangs from way out west sent by the Bureau of Land Management. And Logan herself will drive her truck and trailer to nearby states to pick up animals that need rescuing.

The volunteers that day were mostly college kids...and me...but we set about cleaning one of the barns and each of those stalls. One stall housed a cow, named Matthew, who had eaten a toxic plant as a youngster and ended up with some kind of condition which required him to be separated from other cows forever. He was a carrier of something (sorry, I didn't take notes).

Another stall had a crippled goat, named Butterscotch, who gets physical therapy once a day and ambulates in a wheelchair designed just for her.

Another stall holds two sheep who are new additions and need to be quarantined from the rest of the sheep for 4 weeks.

The stories are endless. This sanctuary, like others, is a 501(3)(c) non profit and it survives on funding by private citizens. The cost of running the place must be enormous. But after observing the place, doing some work and interacting with the residents, eating slaughtered animal flesh becomes that much more repellant.

I asked about factory farms in Florida and was pleasantly surprised to find that because the state has stringent laws on space requirements for the animals, factory farms do not currently exist. Of course, those that were here just moved out of the state!

I did discover that there is more than one slaughter house for horses. Especially there in Ocala, home of the horse industry here in Florida. This flesh is used MAINLY in dog foods.