Walk for Farm Animals: New York City

I walked. To take a stand against factory farming, a black mark on the heart and soul of humankind. To support the animals who live at Farm Sanctuary's Watkins Glen, New York and Orland, California shelters, who have endured the horrors of this very system. To spread the good word about a veg-lifestyle.


Upon seeing the large crowd in Central Park for Farm Sanctuary's Walk for Farm Animals (one of many walks nationwide), I thought of Michael Stipe's words in R.E.M.'s call to activism in "These Days."

"All the people gather...We are young despite the years. We are concern. We are hope despite times. Take this joy wherever you go."

This chicken and cow put a smile on the faces of the people they encountered, including my own.


President and Co-Founder Gene Baur's "Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals in Food" dispels all those childhood visions we have of happy cows, chickens and pigs out on open field with the red barn. Very few of the 10 billion land animals killed for food know such conditions. He introduces us to some of the animals Farm Sanctuary has rescued over the years.


I have a November birthday, and when my family asks what I want, my answer is always the same: a turkey from Farm Sanctuary! Learn about the Adopt-A-Turkey program, where for $30, you can sponsor a turkey that lives at their shelters. Sign their petition urging President Obama to send the turkeys pardoned each year at the White House to Farm Sanctuary.


I was so coveting the raffle prizes, including this one which included a $50 gift certificate to Blossom Cafe, one of my favorite vegan restaurants in New York City, which serves the best vegan chocolate cake, ever (in my humble opinion). Didn't win.

Every walker got an apple for breakfast, and assorted bagged lunches. Mine included a breakfast empanada from V-Spot Cafe. A humane way to refuel after our walk.


Eating chocolate for charity, oh yes! Rescue Chocolate donates all of its net profits to animal rescue organizations around the country, and its featured charity in October was Farm Sanctuary. Worth every penny of the $5 cost per bar. I wish I had some now...


Dapper Joshua Katcher (check out The Discerning Brute) was a featured speaker as was Leanne Mai-ly Hilgart from Vaute Coture, a super-stylish vegan fashion house. She also designed our walk t-shirts that simply but eloquently stated, "Compassion for All." Why do so many show compassion for cats and dogs, but choose to ignore the horrors of factory farming simply because it doesn't suit them?

I'm just saying, this man, NBA champion John Salley: a vegan! He was the shining New York City walk marshal.

Gene Baur spoke about in our world there is so much beyond our control. We can't stop the war. The state of our economy can leave us feeling helpless. But we can control our food choices.


Today is election day, and I hope every citizen of age is going to vote. I'll be enthusiastically voting at the booth, but I'll continue to vote against factory farming whenever I can when I sit down to eat, and hope you will too. No one can make ideal food choices all the time (I certainly don't), but we can strive for them as much as we can.

I vote: for family farms, clean waterways and air, animal and worker rights, and a better world than what exists now. Farm Sanctuary is helping us get to that better world, and I thank them.

Save The Date: For the Earth, Animals, and Your Fellow Citizens

Three causes, all very close to my heart, I wanted to share with those in my area.

Help fulfill Action Against Hunger's goal of reaching 100 tons of food for their food drive on Sunday, October 3rd in northern New Jersey. Click here for the dropoff locations and most needed items. Please, if you can afford to, donate food to this very worthy cause.



Gather by candlelight, enjoy music based on water themes, and hear readings of river stories at the Hackensack River Story Night to benefit BergenSWAN. This all takes place Friday, October 1st, at 8:00 pm, at the Church of Holy Communion in Norwood, New Jersey. Tickets are $25. Learn more.

BergenSWAN's good work is evident in Pascack Brook County Park in Westwood, New Jersey, where I so admire the trees they planted this year. On the way to my local farms and the park, I drive by the Emerson Woods Preserve, which they were crucial in helping to preserve, and participated in a clean-up of those very woods with them a few years ago. Your money will be well-spent. Communities need these environmental friends and watchdogs.

A favorite ode to the river is certainly Natalie Merchant's Where I Go.


Farm Sanctuary's annual Walk for Farm Animals, a nationwide event to raise awareness and funds, is coming to New York City's Central Park on Sunday, October 24th. Come here Farm Sanctuary Co-founder and President Gene Baur, enjoy a bagged vegan lunch, a raffle and much more.

The Biggest Loser celebrity trainer Bob Harper is the first-ever celebrity spokesperson for the Walk for Farm Animals. Read his interview here.



One of my earliest entries on this blog was about my visit to the Watkins Glen, New York, sanctuary, which I had to visit after reading Gene Baur's moving and compelling Farm Sanctuary. I enjoyed vegan eats all around town, and have fond memories of my visit there.

Event Alert: Gene Baur to speak at the New York Public Library on Tuesday, August 18th

Farm Sanctuary President and Co-founder Gene Baur will be speaking at the New York Public Library this Tuesday, August 18th at 6:30 p.m. He will be reading excerpts from his best-selling book, Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food. This event is free and open to the public. Learn more.

You can order his book online, or check it out at your local library. Flashback to his visit to Borders Columbus Circle.

In other news, Farm Sanctuary's annual Walk for Farm Animals to raise money as well as awareness about factory farming is right around the corner. In my area, the walks will take place in Princeton, NJ, on Sunday, September 20th and New York City on Sunday, October 4th. See all the dates. Their new blog Walk Talk follows all the exciting details.

Extreme Cruelty on an Ohio Pig Farm to Be Exposed on HBO

Footage of suffering endured by animals on industrialized farms is often only seen if you visit an animal welfare group's web site or YouTube page. On occasion, the footage will make the evening news, such as the Humane Society's undercover videos of workers trying to force downed cows to their feet with forklifts and a hose and water so they can walk to slaughter in its investigation of Hallmark Meat Packing Co.

However, the public will get a look at the horrors of an industrialized pig farm on Monday, March 16, when HBO premieres Death on a Factory Farm. The documentary follows the undercover investigation of Wiles Hog Farm in Creston, Ohio, by The Humane Farming Association (HFA), and the subsequent court case. Among the gory findings of the HFA's investigators: piglets being thrown into crates from across a room, an unhealthy piglet being slammed against a wall to euthanize it, and an ill sow being hung by a chain from a forklift until it choked to death.

What happened at this farm is not unusual. As Gene Baur, the President of Farm Sanctuary often reminds us, bad has become normal on today's factory farms. Gestation crates, which restrict impregnated pigs from being able to turn around, have become the standard. A life lived completely against nature, all to save a few cents.

This film airs at a crucial time: when Americans are turning to cheap food sources, including fast food, in droves, as the economy remains anemic. Yet there is an unseen price tag associated with cheap food, and that price is paid by animals in the forms of unusually cruel confinement to save pennies for their producers; workers, who abandon their humanity; the environment; and our own morality, as we have come to value cheap food at any cost whatsoever.

Resources:
Learn more about the HBO special.
Humane Farming Association
PETA's Top 10 Reasons Not to Eat Pigs.

Tom Vilsack To Be Ag Secretary: Animal Groups React

As you may have heard by now, former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack is Barack Obama's choice to head the Department of Agriculture. Notably, two of the nation's leading animals rights crusaders offered a mixed reaction.

The Humane Society seemed pleased. Writing in his blog, Animals & Politics, Michael Markarian, president of the Humane Society Legislative Fund, said Vilsack was the top choice of head the USDA.

"As governor of Iowa, Vilsack advocated for bills to toughen the state's penalties for animal fighting. He stood up to the puppy mill industry and vetoed a bill in 2006 that would have weakened protections for pets by reclassifying dogs as "farm products." He also...vetoed legislation in 2001 that would have allowed the sport hunting of mourning doves for the first time in decades."

Farm Sanctuary, the nation's leading farm animal protection group, was more critical in its statement, given by Gene Baur, president and co-founder.

"Vilsack has an uneven track record when it comes to farm animals and fighting factory farming. He has supported some animal protection measures and has at times stood up to Big Ag, yet he has also taken actions that are not in the best interest of farm animals or rural communities. During his tenure as governor of Iowa, the state saw a proliferation of massive hog farms, and we saw these hog farms first-hand this summer when we rescued pigs from the flooding in southeastern Iowa."

While a historic shift has come to Washington on a campaign that had a central theme of "change," we humans are creatures of habit, and change in practice is harder to implement than change in theory. That is why it is more important than ever to be emblodended by victories such a Proposition 2 in California, and keep the fight going. The animals are depending on all of us.

Farm Sanctuary Book Signing

Booklist called Gene Baur's book, "Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food" a "life-altering read." For me it was, literally. I was influenced to become a vegan by various elements, including a speech by Ingrid Newkirk and books such as Fast Food Nation, but it was a passage in Gene's book that completely put me off from egg consumption for good.

When talking about witnessing the practice of disposing of unwanted chicks in a device used for processing grain or sand, which is alarmingly ordinary in the trade, he writes, "What stays with me most is the terrible irony of these newly hatched chicks, symbols of spring and rebirth, who'd been driven to fight their way out of their shell by the instinct to live we all share, only to be ground up alive and turned into manure. And all because, in the industry's eyes, they have no value."

I had the pleasure of hearing Gene speak on his book tour at Borders Columbus Circle. He reiterated that sadly, 'bad has become normal' in the farming industry, but presented a message of hope. He raised our spirits, reminding us that change is incremental. Proposition 2 in California, a measure overwhelmingly approved by voters last November that bans the use of veal crates, gestation crates for breeding pigs, and battery cages for egg-laying hens, was an enormous victory, and it is just the beginning.

And he writes, in a sentiment we all need to be reminded of, that "animals show us the enjoyment of simple pleasure and of being in the moment. They teach us that we are of the world. And they tell us that, beneath the skin, we're all bodies together."


Order the book, and follow Gene Baur's blog.

The stars shined in Columbus Circle, and on Gene and the activists...

Not lucky enough to have caught Gene on his book tour? You can listen to his inspiring speech here.

Also, check out Gene's Post-Prop 2 Victory Interview:

What do you do between the horns of the day?

asks Michael Stipe in R.E.M.'s "I Believe."



Each day, I try and take 15 minutes and do something proactive for animals. That could mean visiting the PETA Action Center and sending out a quick e-mail (many are form letters and you simply need to fill out your name and address). Or e-mailing Dunkin' Donuts and asking them to add soy milk so I can indulge in a soy cappuccino (imagine the consequence of a major chain adding this to their menu).

Some days, I score small personal victories. Recently, I asked at my publishing job if they would supply soy milk for the office refrigerator for coffee/tea, tofu cream cheese for our Friday bagels, and a cheeseless veggie pizza for our Wednesday pizza luncheons. I got all three with no challenge, and to my pleasant surprise, co-workers are experimenting with the cream cheese, devouring the vegan pizza, and are fast depleting the Zen soy milk supply. I also suggested Gene Baur's Farm Sanctuary as the "Book of the Day," to my local library system, and it was soon featured on the home page of their county-wide web site.

Always ask. I think of the ASPCA motto, "We are their voice." We have to be.

With Election Day 2008 now a memory, we must not forget our activist spirit. Whatever you do for animals, whether it's attending an anti-fur protest, writing a letter to a company or to the editor of a local paper, or asking your local coffee shop for soy milk, do it with pride, and do it without apology.

To quote "Begin the Begin," another song off of R.E.M.'s brilliant Life's Rich Pageant, "Silence means security, silence means approval." And words we should all live by, "The finest example is you."