VEGAN-RUN YATES BY ROGER
ANIMAL SANCTUARIES DO you - as I do - sometimes ponder if we get an overly rosy picture of vegan-run animal sanctuaries? Those sunny images of visitors kissing pigs and cuddling chickens.
Cows frolicking with oversized footballs, and turkeys who want nothing more than to be cuddled all day. Don’t get me wrong, I love watching such peaceful scenes too; for one thing, it is a blessed relief from all the graphic animal use footage that flies around the social media world - but I also know that running an animal sanctuary is damn hard work, all year round, and sometimes 24/7. It’s expensive too, and takes a physical and often psychological toll on the people running them. My first experiences of helping at an animal sanctuary was in the 1980s in Liverpool. I remember the owner of the sanctuary taking heart-breaking and scary phone calls. Emotional blackmail was standard - take this animal or we’ll kill “it” was a regular threat. Somewhere in the back of my mind I had a memory of a caller saying they wanted to “swop their dog” because 100
FORÇA VEGAN
they had recently redecorated and their existing animal companion no longer “matched” the wallpaper. Over the years, I started to think I’d made that up: surely people, I started to tell myself - even speciesists - cannot be that utterly shallow. However, I met the owner several years later in Wales at a vegan event and she confirmed the memory. Vegan-run animal sanctuaries often end up being the ones that take the individual other animals no other sanctuary will burden themselves with. This often results in them trying to look after disabled other animals over a long period of time. Moreover, as a general matter, the farmed animal sanctuaries are routinely looking after other animals way beyond their “kill-by” date. Take pigs, for example. Modern day pig farming “designs” their victims to last until they are, say, 6-8 months old. After all, the animal farmer’s job is
to keep other animals living long enough and, generally speaking, healthy enough to get them to slaughter weight. The irony of having a job that involves tending to other animals’ health concerns sufficiently well enough in order to get them to the house of slaughter before they are deemed too ill to be slaughtered. Therefore, you’ll notice that pigs rescued from the pig killing industry tend to be massive individuals who may develop mobility issues way before their free-living counterparts would. This means that vet bills can be enormous. One case I often relate is about an ALF rescued pig individual the activists - they thought ironically, while others think controversially - named “Rasher.” When Rasher experienced some health problems, an agricultural vet was called out to treat him. However, the vet said that he did not really have much of a clue as to what ailed Rasher and, when asked why that was,
