Oy Vey I Turned 30!

The newsletter that feels like it's carrying the weight of the world.

In June, I visited my first animal sanctuary!

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My partner and friends arranged for a private tour at Charlie’s Acres for my birthday. I’m not sure how many people would choose to spend their 30th birthday petting pigs and goats and letting chickens with mutilated beaks peck their fingers, but it was absolutely perfect for me.

Animal sanctuaries, and rescue operations that bring animals to those sanctuaries, do incredible, life-saving work. On top of keeping these rescued animals safe and healthy, many sanctuaries offer tours or activities where you can meet the animals. I avoid petting zoos, regular zoos, aquariums, or any other exploitative situation where animals are held captive for our entertainment. Thanks to sanctuaries, an ethical version of humans interacting with animals exists.

Our guide, Gustavo, has worked with these animals for years and introduced each by name. Gustavo also explained their body language and let us know if the animal was indicating that they wanted to socialize or be touched. The animals take the lead and their autonomy is respected. As someone who has learned to be hyperaware of my (reactive) dog’s every blink and flinch, I know the drill quite well. While we were meeting and greeting the animals, Gustavo also shared the stories of how the animals came to live at the sanctuary.

Unsurprisingly, many of the animals came from the food system, mainly factory farm operations. While every animal is unique, their stories–up until their rescue–unfortunately, are not. What Gustavo shared about their lives was obviously heartbreaking, but none of it was new to me. I read, learn, write, and educate about industrial animal agriculture on a daily basis. It’s currently how I pay my rent, and I’m grateful for it. I love my job. But even engaging with this subject matter at a WFH distance takes an emotional toll.

For work, I talk about animals on a scale of millions to billions. As of writing this sentence, 28,607,148,174 animals have been killed for food this year in the US, though the number goes up by dozens literally every second. For every chicken, turkey, cow, goat, and sheep we met at the sanctuary there are literally billions more whose stories will never share this happy ending. It’s devastating to think about, but this context also made meeting the rescued individuals even more special.

When I’m writing about this stuff at my desk at home, I only end up feeling overwhelmed and upset. At the sanctuary, I felt genuine joy knowing that at least a few of these animals made it out of the horrific system because, in true Jewish fashion, I see saving even a single life as saving the whole world. We can’t make sure that every cow who is constantly forcibly impregnated to produce milk for humans gets to stay with her calves instead of having them immediately ripped away to become part of the dairy or meat industry. But how amazing is it that Honey and one of her children, Benjamin, get to spend the rest of their lives together at Charlie’s Acres? Two lives against a scale of billions may seem insignificant, but this experience was an impactful reminder that even “just” two living beings rescued means two whole worlds that were saved.

Kindness and compassion can feel like limited resources. Caring about animals, or some species of animals, may not seem like a priority to some people in the context of how much bad, awful, terrible, horrifying, fucked up shit happens all the time. We all do what we have to do to get through each day. It’s hard to be a person who does see every life–human or non-human–as an entire world. That joke that goes around my side of the internet about how life would be so much easier if I were a more ignorant person really hits sometimes. But I know that caring is the least I can do.

In this new decade of my life, I want to go beyond this minimum as much as I can. I want to move through the world from a place of care. I want as many of my choices and actions as realistically possible to better support everyone and everything I care about. I also want to learn to balance the feelings of the weight of the world with moments of joy, gratitude, and appreciation. I’m holding the heartwarming feeling of giving James, an extroverted goat who is temporarily at Charlie’s Acres, ear scratchies close as a reminder that I can find those moments in the same places I find heartbreaking stories of human-caused misery.

a moment of pure happiness captured on camera

What moments of joy, big or small, have you experienced lately?

p.s. you can learn more about the Jewish value of compassion for animals from this article :)