Gene Baur at Farm Sanctuary, 2007.
Gene Baur
He's an activist, author and the president of
Farm Sanctuary,
the first animal rescue organization dedicated to farmed animals, which
he co-founded in 1986. He is the author of the 2008 book
Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food
Farm Sanctuary's 25th Anniversary video:
| He was motivated to start the organization after he began investigating factory farms, stockyards and slaughterhouses in the 1980s. He felt that the conditions he observed were unacceptable. The first animal they rescued was a downed sheep named Hilda. She was found on a pile of dead animals at a stockyard. |
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Farm Sanctuary campaigns to prevent cruelty and to encourage legal and policy reforms that promote respect and compassion for farm animals. They run two shelters where they care for hundreds of animals rescued from slaughterhouses, factory farms and stockyards. You can visit either their New York shelter or their California shelters.
The New York shelter of
Farm Sanctuary.
Quotes by Gene Baur:
| "I grew up without thinking much about the fact that I was eating animals until one day when I was struck by a chicken dinner that my mother had prepared. I saw the bird, on his or her back, with wings and legs attached, and I was turned off of eating meat. But everyone around me was eating animals, and the practice was normalized, and as time went and the memory of that dead bird faded, my meat consumption picked up again." |
| "I decided to stop eating animals in 1985. And I went vegan pretty much right after I went vegetarian because it was all connected. You know, killing animals for meat or exploiting them and having them killed after they produce milk or eggs was pretty much the same in my mind. So I went vegan and wanted to do something to combat this problem, to raise awareness of this problem and to make change, and so Farm Sanctuary was founded in 1986 and at the time we wanted to go into these places, document conditions, so we could expose them. We would find living animals left for dead, and that’s how the sanctuaries began." |
| "We operate two sanctuaries; one in New York and one in California for animals rescued from cruel situations. We educate people about how these animals have been treated on factory farms, and about the fact that they are living, feeling creatures and that we don’t have to kill and eat them. We can live as vegans, and so we promote a vegan lifestyle. We also work to pass laws to prevent some of the worst cruelties such as confining animals in small cages where they can’t move for their whole lives. So we work to rescue animals, to educate people, and to advocate for reform." |
| "Farm Sanctuary is a place where vegan is normal. So we encourage people to come visit Farm Sanctuary to meet the animals, but also to be among others who share their values and their concerns and who live a vegan lifestyle." |
| "One of the greatest rewards of being vegan is living in a way that is consistent with my values. Many consumers feel uneasy about their food choices because they want to see themselves as compassionate and responsible, but they are purchasing foods that are the result of factory farming abuses and violence and out of sync with their values." |
| In his book Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food, Gene Baur wrote: |
| "Best of all, I have learned something about forgiveness. It's amazing to me that these creatures born into the cold and mechanized existence of factory farming, where the appearance of any human being only spelled more pain, could ever again bestow their trust, much less their friendship, on anyone of our species. Yet somehow they did, and it is a beautiful thing to see. If these farmed animals, after all they have been through, can still learn to respect humanity, then surely we can learn to respect them." |
| "I think it’s important for people to recognize that every day, they make choices that have profound consequences. One of those decisions we make each day is what to eat. And it’s something that people unfortunately are not mindful enough of, and tragically, people are eating in a way that is resulting in the deaths of billions of animals and also horrible health problems for our human population and destruction of the planet’s ecosystem. So, every day, we make one of the most important choices when we decide what to eat, and I just hope people will think more about it." |
| "I would love to see vegan becoming normal. I think that vegan products will become more normalized, and the word ‘vegan’ won’t be looked at askance or in the sort of negative way it has been historically" |
| "With awareness, consumers will begin to make more sensible choices, more healthy choices. ... As the true costs of our chic food become more well understood, I think not only will we see personal choices moving in a better direction, but see some policy changes moving the same way." |
| "life on a sustainable organic farm is certainly better for a chicken or pig than a capital sentence on a CAFO [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, a.k.a. factory farm], but in both cases the creature's fate is the same: an early death at the hand of the slaughterer. That the farmer works with the best methods and sells his meat to knowledgeable consumers at a local market — instead of wholesale to Smithfield or Tyson — makes a difference, but killing is still killing. At our farm up in Watkins Glen, there was a farmer across the street who used to raise beef cattle. He described how they have a great life and the calves are raised with the mother. And then one day the farmer comes out with a gun to the back of their head and they're gone." |
| "I think our relationship with farm animals is fundamentally one of exploitation. It's about whether we respect them or not." |
Quotes are from his 2011 interview with TIME, his 2008 interview with About.com, his 2008 interview with MinnPost, his 2010 interview with kiss me, i'm vegan and his 2010 interview with Vegan Mainstream.
Image of the New York shelter taken by Wanda Embar, Vegan Peace.
Copyright © 2011 by Wanda Embar and its licensors. All Rights Reserved.
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