Letter From A Vegan World

Dear Friends and Fellow Activists,

At a time when most animal rights organizations are actively promoting, advocating and rewarding "humane" animal products and farming methods, I am writing to you on behalf of three of the recipients of that mercy.

To the industry, they are known as production units #6, #35, and #67,595. To the "compassionate" consumer, they are known as feel-good labels: "organic dairy", "rose veal", "free-range eggs". To welfare advocates, they are known as "humane alternatives". To each other, they are known as mother, son, sister, friend. To themselves, they are simply what you and I are to ourselves: a self-aware, self-contained world of subjective experiences, feelings, fears, memories – someone with the absolute certainty that his or her life is worth living.

#6, is a first time mother. She is frantic. Her baby is missing. She is pacing desperately up and down the paddock, bellowing and crying, and calling for her lost boy, fearing the worst, having her fears confirmed. She is one of the thousands of defenseless females born into a quaint, verdant, organic dairy farm. She will spend her entire short life grieving the loss of baby after baby. She will be milked relentlessly through repeated cycles of pregnancies and bereavements. Her only experience of motherhood will be that of a mother's worst loss. In the prime of her life, her body will give, her spirit will break, her milk "production" will decline, and she will be sent to a horrifying slaughter, along with other grieving, defeated, "spent" mothers like herself.

She is the face of organic milk.
#35 is a two-days old baby, his umbilical chord is still attached, his coat is still slick with birth fluids, his eyes are unfocused, his legs, wobbly. He is crying pitifully for his mother. No one answers. He will live his entire short life an orphan, his only experience of mother love will be one of yearning for it, his only experience of emotional connection, one of absence. Soon, the memory of his mother, her face, her voice, her scent, will fade, but the painful, irrepressible longing for her warmth will still be there. At four months old, he and other orphans like himself will be corralled into trucks and hauled to slaughter. As he will be dragged onto the killing floor, he will still be looking for his mother, still desperately needing her nurturing presence, especially at that dark time when he will be frightened and needing her more than ever in the midst of the terrible sights, and sounds, and scents of death all around him and, in his despair, in his want for a shred of consolation and protection, he, like most baby calves, will try to suckle the fingers of his killers.

He is the face of the "rose" veal we are encouraging "responsible restaurant leaders" to use. #67,595 is one of the 80,000 birds in a family-owned "free-range" egg facility. She has never seen the sun, or felt the grass under her feet, she has never met her mother. Her eyes are burning with the sting of ammonia fumes, her featherless body is covered with bruises and abrasions, her bones are brittle from the constant drain of egg production, her severed beak is throbbing in pain. She is exhausted, depleted and defeated. After a lifetime of social, psychological, emotional, physical deprivation, she copes by pecking neurotically at phantom targets for hours on end. She is two years old and her life is over. Her egg production has declined, and she will be disposed of by the cheapest means possible – she will be gassed along with the other 80,000 birds in her community. It will take three full work days to finish the job. For two long days, she will hear the sounds and breathe the smells of her sisters being killed in the gas drums outside her shed. On the third day, it will be her turn. She will be grabbed by the legs and taken outdoors for the first time in her life and, like every single one of the 80,000 "spent" hens, like every single one of the 50 billion annual victims of our appetite, she will fight to go on living, and she will accept no explanation and no justification for being robbed of her pathetic only life.

She is the face of the "free-range" eggs we are encouraging college campuses, businesses and consumers to use.
These are the "beneficiaries" of the "humane farming practices" that we, the animals' defenders, are developing, promoting, and publicly rewarding by encouraging "compassionate" consumers to buy the products of what we know to be nothing but misery. "Humane" practices that, if any of us were forced to endure, none of us would experience as humane.

We, the activists, know that there is no such thing as compassionate, responsible or ethical farming on any scale. We know that the only humane and ethical alternative is vegan living.

Why are so few of us telling the truth? Why are we describing "free-range" products as "humane" when we know the horror such practices inflict on their victims? Why are we lying to the public, and ourselves, that "compassionate" animal farming is anything but a myth, a marketing scheme, a deceptive label? Why are so many of us offering up the lives of animals by encouraging the consumption of their flesh, eggs and milk, when our only duty is to fight for their lives as if they were our own? Why are we promoting the practice of consuming animals when we know it to be brutal, inexcusable, unconscionable and completely unnecessary? Why are we rewarding consumers for demanding more of the the very thing we are struggling to eliminate? Why are we strengthening and rewarding the worlds' entrenched speciesist assumptions, when our job, our only job, as vegan educators and activists, is to challenge and change those assumptions by offering a new model of thinking about nonhuman animals, a new model of interacting with them, a new practice of living, a new way of being in the world?

Many of us justify our endorsement of "humane" animal products and our pursuit of welfare reforms by saying that the world is not ready to change, that it may never go vegan, that the most we can hope to accomplish in the meantime is to reduce the suffering of today's doomed animals. But this is not true. This is not a fact. It is a fear – a fear of action, a failure of will, a self- defeating attitude and, ultimately, a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The truth is, the world can change. Indeed, the world has changed many times before, and it has changed in ways that seemed impossible at the time. The truth is, the world will change, but only if we work towards creating that change. It will stay the same if we, the self-proclaimed agents of change, encourage it to stay the same. It will change if all of us tell the whole truth that there is no such thing as humane animal farming, or animal use of any kind, the truth that the only humane alternative is vegan living, the truth that animal farming on any scale is an ethical and environmental disaster, the truth that animals are persons like you and me who happen to be nonhuman and who have the same inherent right to life and liberty as you and I. The truth that vegan living is not a "lifestyle choice", but a moral imperative.

We can do better. Indeed, we have an obligation to do better.

I invite you to see for yourselves how much can be accomplished when a small group of dedicated activists commits all of its time and resources to vegan education that is consistent with, not undermining of, our ultimate goal – Animal Liberation – and when the Go Vegan message is central to every single one of its communications, from online resources, to printed literature, to ads, demos, and billboards, to outreach events, to the in-depth exploration of farmed animal personhood detailed in the individual portraits published on the Prairie Blog.

On a shoestring budget, with an all-volunteer core of vegan educators who are determined to tell the whole truth about meat, dairy and egg production, a small, grassroots organization like Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary has built something that large, wealthy organizations have not only failed to bring forth, but have consistently undermined through years of anti-vegan advocacy: A vibrant vegan world growing in the middle of the nonvegan world, a place where the animal refugees are regarded and represented as the persons they rightly are, a place where the human residents advocate tirelessly for nothing less than total liberation, a Free State in the heart of the human-subjugated world, a place where the principles of abolition are applied in word, thought, and deed. A vegan enclave whose very presence has already changed the world's physical, political, psychological and spiritual geography.

I invite you to experience it for yourselves. Join us in our struggle to expand its reach. Help us make it borderless.

Joanna Lucas
Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary

Sun Day

Melvin has been strutting up and down the hallway since dawn, hoisting his enormous body across the 20 step stretch from the kitchen to the front door where he lingers, swaying unsteadily from side to side like a tower of mismatched dishes, gazing expectantly into the driveway, trilling sweet things at it, puffing his chest, arching his wings, looking for something, waiting, stirring, shimmering, shuffling his feet... After a while, he turns around slowly, laboriously, toilsomely, and drags himself back to the kitchen, heaving, and wheezing and staggering on gouty legs, then embarks again on the arduous, 20 step trek to the front door, parading in full celebration gear, big as a carnival float and as jubilantly bedecked as one.

It's Sunday. At least that's what our calendars say – Sunday, the cusp of a new week – but, to Melvin, in Melvin's sense of time, it's something else, something brighter and luckier.

He was rescued from a local flesh farm and brought to Peaceful Prairie with his five brothers when they were all very young, barely four months old, still soft in their feathers and tender in their voices – 6 newborn planets wobbling in their axes, orbiting the grasslands and the ferns with a buoyancy in their round, befeathered selves that almost felt like laughter – and, for a brief time after their arrival at the sanctuary, that first Spring, Summer and Fall of freedom, they were grounded so firmly in the hope of things, the wings of things, the rapture of things, the giddy promise of things, the endless summer of things, that they seemed inextinguishable – 6 new suns, shining the warmth of their attention towards everything in their world with such constancy, such enthusiasm, such intensity, that it felt like love.

Everything they could see, smell, touch, taste, hear was embraced as nothing less than an earthly delight: the salty-mossy-fruity-fenny-bitter-acrid-sweet scents of grasses, the hedgerows, and the grasslands, and the bogs, the ravishing rain, the mud-luscious puddles, the iridescent hues of feathers and of snow, the sap-oozing milkweeds, the languidly stretched fields, the knotted thickets of bramble, the sweet, sapid, scintillating sights, scents, sounds of life all around them, the very dirt under their feet, and everyone walking on it. But almost as soon as they entered this welcoming world, it started to ebb away from them. Imperceptibly at first, but then faster and faster, harder and harder, punishing them where it had rewarded, pummeling them where it had caressed.

As Melvin, George, Stanley, Alfred, Elmer and Archie became progressively crippled, their genetically manipulated bodies growing around them like tumors, engulfing them in their grip, crushing themselves under their own weight, suffocating, choking, destroying themselves in the name of our "turkey dinners", their ability to participate in life diminished and, with it, so did their openness to its gifts. Their daily cavalcades into the open fields became slower and slower, shorter and shorter, fewer and fewer, and then, eventually, not at all: George, Stanley, Alfred, Elmer and Archie died one by one, and, with each of them, a whole world of consciousness, memories, yearnings, everything each of them knew and remembered ceased to exist with him, the face of each, the scent of his body, his enthusiasm, his intelligence was gone with him.

After each loss, Melvin's own light dimmed, as if disconnected from a power source. And, as the burden of sorrows, ailments and age accumulated, it took him longer and longer to return to bold, brilliant, demanding life.

But he always did. He lifted himself from sadnesses that grew deeper and deeper with each new loss, and he embarked again on his long, burning journeys all the way from his barn to the trailer, where the visitors were, and resumed the bruising, exhilarating toil of following them around, wheezing and coughing, his lungs and heart barely keeping up with his giant body, his legs deformed under its weight. He dragged himself back to the world he loved – improbable and sublime, like a house on legs, like a ship on dry sand – and savored each of its dwindling gifts: straw-scented shade, sweet grass and cracked corn, Shylo's friendship, Chris' voice, Michele's presence, visitors he had charmed, and visitors he had yet to enchant. And he loved life with all her faults, and forgave her many trespasses.

Then, one day, he did not. When Shylo, his last remaining friend died, he isolated himself in the back of the barn and refused to leave. Morning after morning, the gates would fling open and everyone would rush out to greet the day, but Melvin did not. He remained rooted in the same dark spot and refused to leave. He did not move, he did not turn, he did not look away from the wall.

Day after day, we'd find him in the same secluded nook, alone, listless, expecting nothing, demanding nothing, taking everything without joy, interest or protest, as though it was all happening to someone else. And nothing, not the promise of treats, nor the presence of visitors, nor any of the things he had so relished, could make him want to leave his self-imposed exile. If we hadn't physically carried him outside, he would have remained in exactly the same spot, staring at the wall in front of him from morning till night, his back turned to the world he had so loved.

He shut the world out with such finality that he seemed more crushingly, more irrevocably gone than Shylo himself. That mysterious something that had resurrected him before, that obscure and irrepressible something that had restored his great broken heart so many times before, seemed irretrievable now. His body slumped, his eyes drained of light, his spirit wilted. He stopped preening, he stopped communicating, he stopped showering the world with his rapt attention, he stood there silent and still, anchored in place by a sort of strange devotion, as if waiting for something, an end or a return. When the weather turned cold, we brought him inside the house. And that's where he still is today, sharing his shriveled world with the shut-ins, the frail, the old, the ill, the crippled who are there for a while or for the rest of their lives. Not much has changed. Despite the constant care and attention, he is still withdrawn, still solitary, still uncommunicative, still reluctant to move.

Except on Sundays.

On Sundays, he stirs before everyone else, aflutter with his old excitement, anticipating something good, and already singing to this good thing, strutting for it, trilling turkey tunes to it – a big, crippled bird, dancing for joy when he can barely walk, trumpeting for joy when he can barely breathe. Acting as if the lost world of green fields, endless summers, thriving tribe of turkey toms was there again, swaggering about the room with laughter about him, displaying his plumage in a magnificent show of glistening feathers, hoisting his aching body across the room, dragging himself on swollen joints, covering the 20 long, painful steps from the kitchen to the front door, waiting, stirring, shimmering, shuffling his feet, atwitter with expectation, until he finally hears the sound he's been waiting for: Ruth's car pulling into the driveway.

Then he kicks the door with his left foot and demands something he vehemently rejects the rest of the time: to go out. We open the door and he swaggers out in the yard in full parade gear, his wattle quickened scarlet, his tail fanned out like a triumphal chariot wheel, his neck arched like a rainbow, his wings stretched all the way to the ground and held taut with robust, muscular grace. Ruth is here! And he acts as though the miraculous, spellbinding, rapturous days of his youth are back again, alive and present with the rich, red pulse of life – not remembered like a story, but felt, known, believed like a scent, like bread baking. Ruth is here! And he follows her around, quivering and shaking on gouty legs, and issuing forth a most astonishing array of flowing sounds punctuated by percussive feather pops in the tips of his wings, his burdened heart all aglow, his lungs filled not with mere oxygen but with something else, something imperious, something invincible, a force, not a substance – a shot of livingness straight into the throbbing heart with all its folly, wisdom, ache and yearning to be nothing but loved.

By evening, Ruth, has come and gone for another week and Melvin is still abuzz, ablaze, abloom with the swarm of the day, and relives it well into the night. Of all the people he sees every day, of all the souls he shares the house with, of all the volunteers gracing the sanctuary every week, only Ruth sweetens his heart till it remembers life's most beautiful song – is! is! is!

Joanna Lucas
© 2008 Joanna Lucas

Coming Home

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Portugese version:
De Volta Para Casa

I don't know how they experienced their arrival at the sanctuary – that moment when the van doors opened and the light of day filled their eyes for the first time in their lives – but I know that, for one breathless moment, when we first looked at the 100 souls safely tucked inside, we didn't see the tangled mess of soiled feathers, the open sores, the broken bones, the chopped off beaks, the mocked lives. All we saw – in one breath of infinite relief and elation – was 100 souls who will go on breathing. And, for one instant, the glow of their living presence obscured everything else – the wreckage we'd made of their lives for our amusement, the despair still engulfing the 50 billion left behind, the darkness of a humanity that imposes untold misery for a taste.

For one rich instant, we luxuriated in the sweetness of those 100 happy endings. Then, we embraced anew the toil of rising, standing, bearing, shouldering, suffering, nurturing 100 new beginnings.

The 100 birds who were now gazing at the open sky for the first time in their lives, were industry trash, "spent" hens rescued from a "free-range" egg facility where they had endured a lifetime of physical, social and psychological deprivation, females whose depleted bodies were no longer able to churn out eggs at the unnaturally high rate of production they had been forced to sustain all of their young lives, and were being sent to slaughter to be replaced with a new generation of victims whose bodies would be used up in a fraction of their life span and then mass killed, erased from existence, scrubbed from awareness, not a trace of their earthly existence left over, not a feather, not a song, not a child, not a dream.

Nothing in their captive lives had prepared them for freedom. Born in incubators and raised by machines in isolation from mothers, families or communities who could teach them the skills and strengths that living requires, they had no social skills that would gain them acceptance in a free bird community, no language that was comprehensible to chickens outside their gulag and, after a lifetime of systematic abuse, most had lost even the ability to nurture themselves. Yet there they were. Asked to live and be free.
For the first few minutes, they were eerily silent. No one peeped, no one one moved. They just watched us with the breath of frail creatures. Some lengthened their bare necks and peered at the sun-filled world with silent, briny eyes, blinking, looking at the great outdoors with eyes unaccustomed to daylight, open spaces, or any other sight except the bareness of the windowless shed they had been confined to since infancy. Others slumped with infinite fatigue, caving within themselves – shoulders sinking, wings dragging, heads drooping, too weak and weary to even look up. A couple were dead, their cooling bodies wilted over their still warm eggs, their feathers stirring hauntingly in the living breeze, their eyes lidded so completely that they seemed to never have existed, to never have illuminated that face, shut with such finality, as though determined to keep the horrors of the world finally, safely, irreversibly out.

Everyone remained still and silent until Chris climbed into the van and started gently lifting one by one into Michele's cupped hands. Then, in one instant, the entire group went into a blind panic. They ran to the back of the van screaming, swarming, climbing on each other's backs, trying frantically to hide or escape, huddling together for a shred of comfort, an extra millimeter of protection, an extra millisecond of existence, still attached to the mockery we'd made of their lives, still trying to save them, still hoping (for what?).

As gently as we handled them, held them, cradled them before putting them on the straw-covered ground, they still cried out in fear for their pathetic only lives. That was the only sound we heard them utter that day and for many days to come – the sound of fear, pain, despair – the tragic record of a life of torment. And, with each rebirth, with each new bird lifted from the bleakness of her past onto a free future, we felt both the giddiness of life that was released at last, finally free to become, and the weight, the call, the tug, the stab in the heart of the lives left behind, still trembling in fear, still stirring faintly with absurd, irrepressible hope.
When they first touched the straw-covered ground, most of them just stood there, motionless for a minute or two, looking around, bewildered, exhausted, rocking from foot to foot as though rehearsing a walk they were about to take for the first time in their lives – the first astonished steps into a life that was finally free to begin – stepping in place for a few beats, then staggering to one of the corners of the barn and joining one of the two huddles that were quickly forming there. And that's where they stayed. For a long while, none of them ventured out in the middle of the open barn. They remained hidden in their corner huddles, still and silent except to stir or sound in fear.

It was painful to watch. They didn't seem to know the simplest, most natural of all things: how to be in their own bodies, how to inhabit their own lives. They were moved by a peculiar sort of alertness, an alertness I'd never seen before. They were keenly aware of everything around them, reacting to the slightest move, faintest rustle, softest sound – the drop of a leaf making the entire flock cower as if struck by a physical blow to the body. But, at the same time, they seemed strangely disconnected from everything including, or especially, their own battered selves, inhabiting their mournful, bedraggled, besmirched lives with a sort of eerie, forlorn detachment, a sort of sorrowful resignation, most of them making no attempt to preen their filth-encrusted feathers, mend their wounds, protect their frail bones, or replenish their starved and parched bodies. Each, dragging into this new life the devastated landscape of her past – the amputated beaks, the hunched backs, the slumping shoulders, the brittle bones, the featherless patches covered in bruises and abrasions, the defeated gaze, the uncertain gait.You could see, in the mutilated face of each bird, the record of her struggle to escape the hot knife that seared off her beak in a cloud of acrid smoke: The beak was cut all the way to the root, or severed at an angle, or the jaw had splintered and protruded from under the shattered upper part, or there's was a lump at the end of the beak, a strange, botched attempt at self healing, or a tumor had developed in response to the trauma and obstructed the nostrils. You could see in what direction each bird had desperately yanked her head to escape the blade – down, or up, or sideways – you could see how violently she had writhed and how wide the scream had opened her beak as the knife cut through bone, cartilage and soft tissue – the beak is severed straight or at an angle, its tip is rounded or flat, or the lower jaw forks and splinters, or the upper part is missing altogether, or the tips are melted into a round opening, frozen into a permanent expression of bewilderment, a grotesque semblance of lips puckered in a kiss.
But you could also see, with infinite gratitude and sadness, the inner light of each bird's life, her golden beauty, her intense yearning to live and become still glowing through the darkness.

That day, and for weeks to come, many stayed huddled together, seeking a meager measure of warmth and solace under the battered wings of another. They refused to leave the barn, keeping themselves tucked in an out-of-the-way corner and gazing at the great, big, happening world outdoors from inside the shed. Others focused exclusively on the patch of world immediately in front of them and air-pecked neurotically, for hours on end, at invisible targets.

Some, tried to make themselves invisible, squeezing themselves in the nearest, smallest nook, even if the space was barely large enough to mask their faces. You could see them trying to disappear inside these absurd bunkers, their bodies and scraggly tails sticking out, but their faces hidden, their eyes covered, protected from the unbearable, overwhelming, frightening sights and sounds of life. They stood frozen in their meager, pathetic hiding places, heart racing, body trembling, wishing for nothing but an end to the terror, a sliver of comfort and peace.

A few bold souls ventured out in the open middle of the barn, seemingly certain that herein lied the thing they had yearned for all of their young lives – whatever that thing was to a person condemned to a desolate environment – mind nourishment? knowledge? a sense of possibility? Their curiosity, their need to feed their starved minds, was stronger than caution.
One intrepid young hen jumped into a grain bowl not because she wanted to eat – nourishment could wait – but because she wanted to do something she had been denied her entire life: take a dustbath. You could hear her fluttering and scuttling inside the bowl, burrowing in the grain, covering herself in it, throwing it in the air like confetti and, as the beads scrubbed and cleansed her scab-encrusted skin, what was left of her feathers fluffed like a ragged rose, her brittle wings and legs went akimbo in ecstatic abandonment, her eyes rolled up dreamily, lids weighed down with the sweet weight of delight. The first dustbath of her life.

Next to her, at a nearby water bowl, three hens gathered around and drank, unhurriedly, as though they had all the time in the world – they did! – dipping their mutilated beaks in fresh water, letting the cool mirth of each sip roll down the tongue, one glittering drop always hanging at the tip, eyes closed, heads thrown back, chins lifted to high heaven, beak parted as if in a silent song to the open sky.
And then there was the young hen who hadn't moved from the spot where she was first laid down. Who was still leaning against the perch ladder, one wing draped over the lowest rung, the other hanging down to the ground as though trying to hold herself up, keep her balance or regain it.

When gently nudged, she staggered as far as the nearest water bowl and parked herself there, went no further. She just stood there, the angle of her folded comb pointing to a frightened, dazed eye. Many of them froze this way when they first set foot on free ground, unsure what to do, where to go, unsure what to do with the fact that there WAS somewhere to go, a horizon that stretched farther than the prison wall they'd seen all of their barren lives, a space that was filled with something they had never experienced in their entire lives – open sky, sunlight, birdsong, the scents of a living earth – and a floor that cushioned the foot, rustled, murmured and yielded sweetly under each step, a floor that did not punish every step like the wire mesh floors they'd walked on all their lives – a floor covered in straw!

But this little hen never moved. She stood frozen in the same spot for hours, unable or unwilling to eat or drink even though food and water was only a few inches away.
While the others were busy experiencing their very first moments of bewildered freedom however they could, staggering in a daze, or clumsily searching for a vague something, or hiding away, or huddling together, she just stood there alone in her soiled, bedraggled feathers, her belly down encrusted with the filth she had been forced to live in all her life, her featherless neck rubbed raw, the stump of her upper beak barely long enough to cover her tongue, her lower jaw splintered and extending pathetically in mid air like a begging hand. She didn't even look around, as though the effort of seeing, of absorbing anything more, was too much. As though she had no reason to anticipate anything but more anguish, more pain, more abuse, more of the bleakness she'd experienced growing up in the line of egg production.
Hours later, she was still in the same spot, inert, stunned, disconnected, barely alive. But now she had laid an egg and was standing over it as though over something completely foreign, something that had never been part of her body. There she was, barely able to sustain her own life but still churning out the eggs that were draining her. There she was, surrounded by a world that finally, incredibly, improbably, wished her life, but still unable to return to full life, still depleting herself by retching more eggs, still standing dazed and alone in the middle of the open barn.

I don't know what she felt as she stood there, defeated on her first day of life and freedom, but I know that what we felt even more intensely than sorrow for her wounded life, was searing shame. Shame for the devastation that we – the moral animals, the only animals with a choice, the absolute power holders of the animal kingdom – inflict daily, intentionally, unnecessarily on the weak, the downtrodden, the hapless innocents of the world. Shame for the fact that we do it for something as frivolous as a taste, a taste that can be so easily, so elegantly, so abundantly replicated from cruelty-free sources. Shame for our depraved appetites. Shame for our perverted humanity. Shame for our absolute corruption.
By morning, she took her first stiff, self-willed steps, her first astonished steps into life that was finally free to begin. She stepped into her free life quietly, easily, the way we step into our vegan lives – not as though entering a new and foreign world, but as though returning to a deeply familiar one, as though coming home.

Joanna Lucas
© 2007 Joanna Lucas

The Faces of "Free-Range" Farming

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Joanna Lucas

A Wing And A Prayer

Before that bad December spell, that stretch of dark days when the fury of three consecutive blizzards left them trapped without heat, food or water in a frozen barn, Libby and Clara had pretty much ignored each other. It's not that they disliked each other, it's just that, other than gender and species, they didn't have much else in common.

They were different persons, with different temperaments, different interests and abilities, different histories, different memories, different perceptions of the world, different expectations, different ways of coping, different crosses to bear. They inhabited different worlds, with different inner climates, different emotional geographies, different pleasures and perils of the soul, different soulscapes.

They hardly even looked like they belonged to the same species – Clara, manipulated to grow grotesquely large for flesh production, Libby, bred to stay sparrow-small for egg production – and, when they first arrived at the sanctuary, before they had had a chance to learn the complex song structures developed, used, and passed down by generations of free sanctuary chickens, they didn't even sing the same language.

Clara peeped in the insular language of her death camp – the desolate birdsong developed by baby birds in grim isolation from mother, family, community and nature, and lacking the very sounds to communicate those fundamental sentient experiences.

Libby was the last remaining minstrel of the idiosyncratic language of her gulag – the stammering semblance of a chicken language eked out by her fellow captive orphans, and extinguished with them, its last sounds of despair uttered on the way to slaughter.

Both had absorbed those tragic languages and, with them, the despair inherent in their meaning. Both arrived at PPS with their weird, choppy, stammering, incomprehensibly structured sounds, their crippled lives, their mutilated bodies, their dark memories. But each carried her old burdens and her new freedom differently.

Libby aimed for the sky, she seemed always to barely touch the ground she walked on, always seemingly detached from the physical, constraining, bothersome weight of the earth. Clara, on the other hand, treaded in the thick of life. For better or for worse, she remained firmly rooted in the good, the bad, the possible of her immediate, tangible world.

You could see her lovingly, attentively, avidly studying, whatever patch of yard she could still get to in her progressively disabled body, and savoring every minute detail of it – the quantity of grain, its type and color and texture, maybe even the number of pecks it took to collect it, the thickness of the straw on the ground, its warmth and texture, the coolness of each patch of grass at different times of day, the best dustbathing spots, the comings and goings of others, the precise movement, sound and scent patterns of things. Given that she was trapped in a body programmed from birth to harm, wound and betray itself for human entertainment, it's not surprising that she gravitated towards things, places, and persons she could predict. It's not surprising that she craved the sense of safety and stability inherent in those small, good, solid things whose integrity was so unlike her disintegrating body.

It's not surprising that she derived a measure of joy, pleasure, possibility from the small, good, predictable things in her life, the things that were miraculously still there, that she could miraculously still touch, that were still flooding her senses, still stirring feelings, still able to evoke something deeply good at times – a sense of comfort, a sense of promise, a sense of hope – and still able to lift the burden of life for a brief moment. The taste of grapes, sweet grain, blueberry muffins, the small, safe, warm confine of Chris's lap, the feel of Michele's hair caressing her back, the bliss of a preening session, the physical presence, closeness, warmth of her few friends – these were things she could still count on.

But, as you got to know Clara better, you realized that, even without the cross of her growing disability, she would have still kept the same close and constant connection with the concrete, tangible details of her life, she would still have given the same warm attention to what was there to touch, taste, see, smell, hear. She was an earthy soul, grounded for better or for worse in the thingness of things, the material, physical details of her daily life. She liked the things she could measure precisely, and return to without surprises. She was a map maker of sorts and everything figured tenderly in the constantly revised map of her diminishing world – even Libby, that spectacular comet-like event that blazed out of the barn at dawn, and blazed back in at dusk with reassuring regularity. Perhaps, especially Libby, that creature who was in enviable constant motion, never in one place, hardly touching the ground she walked on, always floating seemingly just above it, barely connected with any tangible thing, zooming fairly-like from place to place in fast, silent and spectacular motion, gliding silently in and out of sight like smoke, always on the edge of your vision, always in motion, never in one place long enough to be watched but always watchful, and always aware of everyone's every move.Even flightless as she was, Libby's entire being spelled "bird". There was something winged, weightless, lithe, spirit-like about her. And, even though she had had the flight bred out of her, she was more evocative of flight and freedom than a condor.

She was a sky-bound creature and neither her flightless wings, nor her mangled leg, nor her amputated foot diminished the impression that she was lighter than air. And, the more you knew Libby, the more you realized that her being sky-bound, aerial, gravity-defying was not an impression as much as it was the physical manifestation of who she was. She seemed grounded not in the tangible reality of things, the way Clara was, but in a sort of active disbelief of it.

She didn't see the concrete things that Clara compulsively, lovingly collected, she imagined something else. She didn't see the tumbling weed that you, Clara and I saw, she imagined something else – perhaps a fox, or a strange bird, or a fantastical foe... She didn't see a sputtering hose, a patch of tall grass, a broken ladder, she imagined something else – a snake?, a jungle?, a horizontal tree? She was burdened with the blessing of an active imagination. She bolted at the slightest rustle of grass, she refused to enter certain barns, she went to great lengths to avoid certain grassy spots, circling them cautiously, leaving plenty of distance between her and their invisible border, as though they were inhabited by a clear and present danger, she refused to approach strings and cords, she spooked at the sound of tractor engines... but she also celebrated things invisible to the rest of us. Out of the blue, and for no apparent reason, she would start flapping her wings, shaking her head, prancing, strutting, dancing, letting out joyful sounds, and celebrating something that, though imperceptible to anyone else, was real and well worth rejoicing to her. Some invisible joyful thing had just happened (or perhaps was sensed, or recalled, or anticipated, or imagined) and Libby was the happy recipient.We're not sure exactly what she saw at any given time, but we're sure she didn't see what you, Clara, and I saw. Unlike Clara, who was grounded for better or for worse in the burden and the blessing of her physical reality, who saw cause and effect much the way we do (water droplets = rain, not a betentacled entity tapping Libby's back with 10,000 needles), Libby seemed to make connections based on something closer to myth and imagination than concrete reality, something based more on how things felt (to her) than what things were.

For as connected as Clara was with what WAS there – the tart, tingly, tangible, glittering thingness of things – Libby was connected with what MAY be there – the winged possibility of things.

They were different persons, Libby and Clara – different temperaments, different interests and abilities, different histories, different memories, different perceptions of the world, different expectations, different ways of coping, different crosses to bear. They inhabited different worlds, with different inner climates, different emotional geographies, different pleasures and perils of the soul, different soulscapes.

And if, that December night they embraced each other with such urgency, such unflinching certainty, it wasn't because the shared experience of pain, fear, and trauma melded their individual differences into the common foundation of similar experience, but probably precisely because it didn't, probably precisely because it increased their sense of difference and otherness.

When the third of seven back-to-back blizzards hit Eastern Colorado that December and buried the entire sanctuary under 8 feet of snow, Libby and Clara were trapped in their barns without any heat, food, water, or dry straw for 24 desperate hours.

They were trapped in their dark, frozen barn, with the wind howling outside, and the roof rattling, and the barn walls shaking, and the inside of the barn slowly filling with snow, and the food and water supplies dwindling, and the breath of death, the physical sensation of defeat tangibly felt all around them, and Chris and Michele desperately digging on the other side of the snow-covered door, and our muffled voices betraying an ever growing despair, and the rhythm of our movements betraying a deeper and deeper exhaustion. For 24 hours, Libby and Clara were trapped together.

Sparrow-small Libby, who could have easily climbed on Clara's broad back to escape the frozen straw below, or who could have easily burrowed under Clara's ample breast to escape the cold, extended her minuscule wing over Clara's giant back and covered a fraction of its raw, shivering baldness. It was an absurd, ineffectual gesture and certainly not felt as warmth-giving by either one of them. But, all day and all night, through a crack in the only barn wall that wasn't completely obscured by snow, we could see the two of them huddled together in this pathetic, absurd, sublime embrace, Libby's moth-wing extended to cover a fraction of Clara's giant, featherless back, Clara's chin caressing the top of Libby's head.

We don't know what Libby imagined was happening at that moment, or what Clara knew was happening, but there they were, two winged persons, the smallest sanctuary resident taking a giant bird under her moth-wing. And, on the other side of the frozen door, there we were, two bare-handed humans digging escape tunnels with our rickety shovels, clearing the cosmic mass of snow one teaspoon at a time.

And all of us, on both sides of the frozen door, knowing with a certainty deeper than language, deeper than species, that our seemingly ineffectual gestures were absolutely necessary. All of us expressing in action, in will, in heart – not in words, not in song, not in sound – the certainty, deeper than language, deeper than species, that ultimately the only thing that saves us, delivers us, redeems us, and ultimately the only thing that survives even the smallest, weakest, most vulnerable one of us, is that form of supreme, unconditional benevolence known and needed by all sentient souls because our very lives depend on it, that benevolence collectively imagined, desired, invoked, deeply felt and concretely experienced as love. Not love for someone similar – a mirror image, a clone – but love for someone completely different. A mysterious other.And there we were, all of us stranded in the middle of a frozen world, fighting the darkness with two teaspoon shovels and a moth-wing, affirming life in the middle of mass extinction, hope in the middle of cosmic despair, light in the middle of the darkest night. There we all were, laboring, toiling, struggling, hoping against all hope to unfreeze the world with a flightless wing and a wordless prayer. We did. We do. Every day of our vegan lives.

Joanna Lucas
© 2007 Joanna Lucas

Herd Mentality

I know why I want to be Hillary's friend. She is interesting, she is gentle, she is beautiful, she is full of being and of happening and full of praise for being and for happening, she is full of knowledge, insights, and subjective experiences I can't even imagine, she is selfless, she is strong, she is subtle, she is brimming with social, emotional and ethical intelligence.

I can also guess why Hillary has no interest in being my friend. She grew up on an industrial-scale farm that exploited thousands of sheep for wool, meat and dairy, a place where human contact, though sporadic, was always traumatic, always filled with terror, pain, insult, humiliation, and loss – something to fear and to flee, something that sent waves of horror throughout the entire herd. From a very young age, she absorbed the collective fright that flooded her community every time they were chased, cornered, shoved into chutes, corralled, grabbed one by one, bound, and subjected to painful, invasive, and terrifying procedures.

So, part of her reservation is probably the memory of abuse. But most of her distance seems to come from something else, something closer to certainty and strength than fear and helplessness. Unlike Bijou and Seymour, who were raised in isolation as "experimental research subjects" and were in close, daily contact with humans, Hillary was raised by sheep and learned early on the identity, the wisdom, the language, the myths, the terrors, the rewards, the duties, the errors, the ethics, and the pleasures of her society and her species. She knows who she is. And if, after years of living in the peace and safety of the sanctuary, she still avoids us – gently, sweetly, almost politely, as though declining a well-meaning but decidedly odd, ill-fitting offer – it's not so much because we frighten her, but simply because we have nothing interesting or useful to offer her or her friends.

We have no insights that she or her friends would find useful or interesting, no good answers to her most important questions, no tips for where the good grasses grow, no appreciation of the flavors that are most exquisite to a sheep's palate, no discernment of the scents that are most pleasing to a sheep's nose, or most redolent to her brain, her memory, her heart, no ability to either hear or understand the sounds she finds meaningful, soothing, exciting, evocative, no organ to detect the subtle signals she receives from her environment – the rustle of insect wings, the breeze on the face of the pond, the pulse of the earth under feet, the shifts in consciousness we are unaware of but that she rides like waves, waves that move the entire flock from place to place like silent currents – we have no grasp on what she finds beautiful, meaningful, sacred.

We have no connection with, and no access to the poetic, happening, boundless world she inhabits, the mystic world where beauty is not a thing, but a feeling, a state of mind, a felt presence, a state of pure harmony, a world that is not fractured into 171,476 separate words but exists as one continuous breath that informs the whole being, the heart, the brain, the senses, a poetic world that begins and exists only past the edge of language. We have no access to this fluid universe that Hillary inhabits effortlessly, this living ocean teeming with rich and strange understandings. We look at the world (theirs and ours) from the outside, from a surface we keep willfully cold, and hard, and shallow – a steel cover of words and rationalizations cast over an ocean teeming with life, and heart, and hurt, and redemption.

And we tend to misinterpret even what little of her world we do manage to see. We come face to face with the exquisite democracy that a sheep community is – a community whose every member accepts, expects and is trusted to be of service to the others, an equal participant in leadership, in compliance and in solving the problems and tasks at hand, like protection, like finding grazing grounds, or safe camping grounds – and we deride it as stupidity.

We watch beings like Hillary lead and follow with equal ease – sometimes taking charge – when she has the answer that her family needs at that moment (where the good grasses grow, or where the deepest shade stretches, where the safest, most peaceful or most enrapturing spot in the entire sanctuary happens to be unfolding) – other times following – when any other group member indicates that they know where to find what the herd needs or craves at that time – and we call it mindless submission.

We see someone like Hillary stay effortlessly and fluidly connected with every member of her community, we see her community respond to her and one another with equal alertness – staying visually and psychologically connected at all times, communicating the good, the bad, the perilous news of every living moment in ways that, though too subtle for us to understand, are unmistakably clear to them, remaining alert to every sign of danger or delight, being aware of every inner and outer happening, every feeling, every sound, every subtle shift in facial expressions, mood, movement, or tone, and always prompt and precise in communicating it – we see their deeply intuitive way of being in the world and we call it dumbness.

We watch how she, a completely vulnerable, completely defenseless being, reacts to danger – not by running away, not by hiding, but by huddling with her family, by adding her mass, her body, her will, her life to the group, poised to face the assault together, ready to take what beatings may come, standing united for better or for worse, each individual offering his or her bulk, his or her body, his or her life to the group, thus making the group stronger, more resilient, more impervious to attack, more invulnerable, safer – we watch these everyday acts of supreme solidarity, selfless service and courage, and we discount them as "instinct". We watch someone like Hillary act out of an imperative to serve, and we call it self-interest.

We come face to face with someone as accomplished as her and turn her very identity into an insult – a "sheep".

It's easy to see why Hillary avoids us. What is harder to see is that we are secretly relieved that she does. To know Hillary, to truly know her, to know her as a person not a pet, an equal not a slave, is to be forced to see what we strenuously avoid seeing – our own gaping shortcomings.

In Hillary's presence, it becomes blatantly obvious how much less gifted we are than she is at all of the important things in life – love, peace, equality, service, responsibility, selflessness, connection, loyalty, trust, insight, bliss, gratitude for simply being and for happening.

Next to a being who is so acutely aware of self and others, we appear confused, utterly confused with our profoundly thwarted humanity, our deeply distorted sense of personal and species identity, so profoundly confused that we believe ourselves to be hunters when we are the quintessential prey, imagining ourselves to be carnivores when we have the physiology, anatomy and psychology of herbivores, believing ourselves to be the wise "stewards" of a world we've raped and pillaged to ashes, fancying ourselves to be more intelligent than all of the other miraculous species on earth, when we don't even know what species we are – apes? wolves? sharks? vultures?...

Next to a being who lives on flowers, we can smell the lingering scent of our own heinous crimes long after we become vegan – our own carrion breath, our own rotten egg belches, our own cheese-scented sweat, our own blood encrusted fingers.

Next to a being who is so profoundly peaceful and democratic, so harmoniously connected with her world, so flawlessly integrated in her environment – habitat on her back – we appear terminally unaware, selfish, violent and brutal, like the monsters of our own worst nightmares, with our naked bodies wrapped in dead skins or sheets of tangled sheep hair, sprouting tentacle-like legs and arms, the better to hold and strangle the world and everything in it, forever standing on our hind legs, in constant attack posture, in a never-ending assault on the Earth always taking, cutting, killing, controlling, always "improving" life that is already luminously, profoundly perfect in its every quivering detail.

Next to a being whose instinct to serve her community is more powerful than her instinct to save her own life, next to someone who would bear excruciating pain in silence rather than expose the community to danger, someone who would stand with the group and face danger and death together rather than scatter and run for her life when attacked, we appear hopelessly selfish and cowardly, pathetically incomplete and unfinished.

Hillary is what we, the Consumers of the world, admire, envy, want to be, and may never become: full and useful Citizens of the world.

Joanna Lucas
© 2007 Joanna Lucas