Transcript
Matt Lieurance, Co-Founder of Farm Animal Refuge: The mission of Farm Animal Refuge is really to break that veil between what is food and what is friend. A lot of people invite animals into their homes and into their lives. And we love that animal. We treat them just like family. And we have this veil between those animals that we consider food and those animals we consider friend. And we just hope that people come here or find us on social media, learn about the animals, and then educate themselves and make better choices on their food in the future, their food, their clothing, their entertainment, and really help us make an impact on that level.
Hi. I'm Matt. I'm one of the co-founders of Farm Animal Refuge. Animals that come here after being rescued from the industry are a myriad of different levels of fear, different levels of trust, different levels of compassion that they've felt. Most of them do come here fearful. Most of them do come here emotionally broken, and it does take a while for us to show them that humans are actually not bad. Not all humans are bad. We do love animals that are ambassadors that wanna meet people and be ambassadors for their species. We also have animals that we haven't touched in four years, and that's completely okay with us too. Those have had experiences that we don't even know what they've gone through and what they've been through. So we want to let them live out what they feel comfortable with, but they do come here very scared, and we just hope that we can show them that we are not expecting anything from you. We just want you to live happy, healthy, and free.
One of the largest rescues we've ever done were actually groups of battery caged chickens that were released to another sanctuary, and then they ended up coming here. We took a total of 24 hens out of that situation. They were about two to two-and-a-half years old, which is the average age of when a chicken that was used in the egg industry gets slaughtered. These lucky hens were able to be released. They came here. They are able to live on dirt. They're able to see the sun. They're able to feel the wind in their feathers and live as a chicken should.
In the facilities, it's really heart-wrenching that they're kept in cages where they're not able to see the sun. They're not able to be outside. They're not able to dust bathe, and they're kept in an environment which is very unhealthy for 'em with way, way too many animals. And the air is so thick with ammonia and feces that it is miserable for them their entire lives. The chickens that come out of the egg facilities are not only depleted of resources, they're depleted of all muscle and fat. Most of their feathers are missing because of the environment that they're stayed in. They are not intellectually stimulated. So they will do self-harm and pecking, pecking at each other and themselves because they're mentally just going crazy. And then they deal with long-time effects. There's gonna be leg and feather problems. There's gonna be reproductive problems. And we try to heal them from that, but we're fighting a losing game.
Almost all animals in the food industry are ones that humans have basically invented, exploited, and adapted to a point so we can exploit that specific product out of them as much as possible, making it so we can get as much money out of that animal as possible. So these animals are bred to be unnatural, so those genetics and those traits are always gonna be there. So we are constantly trying to fix that and to compete with that while giving them the best quality of life possible.
