What goes on plate isn’t always pretty

Author’s forays into factory farms turn into rescue operation

By Ellison Weist

Pamplin Media Group, Mar 11, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (3 Reader comments)

‘Farm Sanctuary’ by Gene Baur Touchstone

ADVERTISEMENTS

Gene Baur is a very smart man.

He is a practicing vegan and animal rights activist who has written a book about rescuing animals from the horrors of factory farming.

But as the author himself notes, his theme throughout the book is, emphatically, “Love the sinner, hate the sin.”

As a result, “Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food” does not make the carnivore reader feel akin to Attila the Hun. In the majority of the book, Baur exchanges the hysterical sob-story methods employed by some of his ilk for a straightforward account of what he’s seen and what he does.

Baur came to animal activism after growing up in California and traveling the country after college. Reading Frances Moore Lappe’s “Diet for a Small Planet” made him more aware, in his words, of “how wasteful factory farming was, how many resources were used to produce meat.”

But it was a series of visits to the now-defunct Lancaster Stockyards in Pennsylvania that propelled Baur into his life’s work.

At Lancaster he learned about “downed animals” —cows, sheep or pigs that were “lying dead or injured in the alleyways or the holding pens.”

During one of his visits in the summer of 1986, Baur came upon an injured sheep that had been tossed on what was known as the “dead pile.”

The author and his then-wife, Lorri, rescued the animal and named her Hilda. While Baur admits that the couple “did not own the sheep and therefore had no right to remove her,” he also notes that stockyard workers avoided the dead pile. “We were essentially picking through trash,” he writes.

With Hilda, a herd grows

Back at their house in Wilmington, Del., Hilda became the first animal to be rescued by the group that came to be known as Farm Sanctuary.

Eventually Baur and his growing group of volunteers rescued more animals from the stockyard in Lancaster.

In 1989 Baur and his volunteers were able to purchase a 175-acre farm in Watkins Glen, N.Y. In the early 1990s they purchased a second farm in Orland, Calif. At both facilities, rescued animals reside in “barns and shelters where the animals can come and go as they please except when, in the case of the farmed birds, they need to be protected from … predators.” Both facilities are open to the public.

Rescuing animals from factory farms is just one part of what Baur sees as his mission. The bulk of the book is devoted to his efforts to make consumers aware of the inhumane treatment of animals, such as laying hens packed tightly into cages; cramped gestation crates for sows; and the gruesome use of “maceration machines” to dispose of unwanted male chicks.

1 | 2 Next Page >>