This week we had the chance to go to a farm sanctuary where they rescue farm animals from awful situations and let them live out their lives in peaceful surroundings. As we walked through, our tour guide told us the individual story of each animal--the terrible circumstances it had come from and how it had overcome and recovered there at the farm. She even told us about the little personality quirks each of them had, their gentle nature, and how they were now serving to help educate people. Animals have incredible resilience and, when given the right kind of care, just blossom.
Even the turkeys and the chickens, who you wouldn't traditionally think of as friendly, just walked right up to us and let us pet them and just hung out with us.
The pigs loved having their bellies rubbed and even kicked their back legs like a dog does during a belly rub!

This cow was so gentle and sweet--I thought her coloring was just beautiful too.
This is a dog they are fostering until they can find a home. He was rescued from Mexico and only has three legs, but he is the sweetest little dog. He played with Melia for about a half hour while we were waiting for the tour. He was very playful and got around just fine.

I have recently looked into the subject of farm animals and the conditions in most of our country's large scale farming facilities and I've found it really just deplorable. I think it would sicken most people. But most of us just go to the grocery store, buy our meat and don't take thought for where it comes from. There are no laws protecting farm animals because they are thought of only as commodities instead of actual living beings who deserve respect and proper care. I'm not a vegan or vegetarian. I'm not saying that we should be. I'm saying that things need to change. Some simple things that we do are buy organic, free range meat where the conditions the animals live in are better. We are also cutting back on the amount of meat and animal products we eat. One thing I'm definitely saying is that laws need to be changed to make conditions better for the animals that are spending their lives suffering through terrible conditions and ultimately giving their lives for our use. Farm Sanctuary and many volunteers have worked tirelessly and have gotten Proposition 2 on the ballot. It's an effort to ban some of the most cruel confinement systems used by the large-scale farming facilities. Here's basically what it will do:

If voters vote yes on November 4th 2008 California will no longer enable the use of:

• Veal crates - narrow wooden enclosures, just 2 feet wide, which prevent calves from turning around, lying down easily and even walking for the extent of their short lives.
• Gestation crates - 2-by-7 feet metal enclosures that confine 400-pound breeding sows (pigs used to supply the pork industry with piglets) for most of their four to five year lives. Prevented from taking more than a step forward or backward, and unable to turn around, sows will live their lives in these crates and are freed only briefly to be moved to similarly restrictive farrowing crates to give birth.
• Battery cages - small wire cages in which several hens are packed together so tightly that they are unable to even stretch their wings. Never touching the ground, the lifetime living space allotted to each hen is less a sheet of copy paper. Battery cages are used to confine 95 percent of all laying hens in the U.S. and allow giant egg farms to pack hundreds of thousands of hens into a single shed.

All these confinement systems are so cruel that they are already banned throughout much of Europe. In the U.S., a growing number of restaurants, supermarkets and even producers have pledged to stop using them, based on their inherent cruelty.

I think Ghandi said it best: "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."