Podcast Transcript
Hope
Welcome to the Hope for the Animals Podcast, sponsored by United Poultry Concerns. I’m your host, Hope Bohanec. You can find all our past shows by going to our website, Hope for the Animals Podcast.org. And you can reach me there with your thoughts and questions, I would love to hear from you.
So today on the podcast we have an interview with Tracey Glover from Sweet Peeps Sanctuary. So I want to start an ongoing series that we’re going to call the Microsanctuary Series, where we’re going to feature a different microsanctuary. And I want to have this series maybe once a month or once every other month, we’ll see how it goes, but certainly through the summer. And, I’ve just been enchanted and fascinated by the microsanctuaries on social media and Facebook, and Tracey is going to talk more about what a microsanctuary is. Basically it’s a rescue of animals, and not necessarily farmed animals, it could be any animals really, but this movement is mostly around farmed animals, and it’s really rescue on a smaller scale. So doing it just in your backyard or on a smaller piece of land, and being able to give more individualized attention, maybe animals that are more in need, physically or emotionally. And like I said, I’ve just kind of been enchanted by the online presence and stories of the chickens and their sweet shenanigans all on Facebook and social media. So I thought it would be fun to feature some of these wonderful sanctuaries and have them talk about the microsanctuary experience, and we’re going to start today with Sweet Peeps Sanctuary.
But first I want to do a film review briefly on the Netflix documentary Seaspiracy. There’s a lot of buzz around this film, you’ve probably seen the logo or heard about it, and I hope that you watch it if you haven’t already. I want to offer some thoughts on this movie, Seaspiracy. So I don’t know that I really need to give a spoiler warning if you haven’t seen it. For the most part with documentaries, I think you kind of know going in, what you’re getting into, or what it’s about but I am going to get in some of the detail, probably not too much, but some possibly, and I also want to give a content warning. If you haven’t seen the film yet, there are numerous places in the film where there is graphic violence against marine life, so just be aware of that going in.
Seaspiracy is kind of a follow up to Cowspiracy, the film from 2014 that was very popular, but this one focuses on marine life and ultimately fish where the film takes you on a journey to get there. I think it’s a good length, it’s an hour and a half. I generally like documentaries to be shorter rather than longer, but I was entertained the entire time. I think that there was even more suspense and intrigue than Cowspiracy. And there was this whole action movie part where they went out with Sea Shepherd on their ships cracking down on illegal fishing. And if you remember the TV show Whale Wars that featured Sea Shepherd, there’s this segment in the film that’s “fish wars.” It’s got that same high adrenaline action footage. So it wasn’t just your typical boring documentary with talking heads, there was certainly a story happening, there was action. So, the hour and a half went by pretty quickly, it didn’t seem to drag.
One more thing about the overall feeling of the film, then I’ll get into the story and some details, but it was just so validating to watch. As a 30-year vegan who has researched and talked about the fishing industry for decades, they were saying things and citing studies that I have been screaming into the void for decades. It was just so confirming and satisfying to have this film that is in the top 10 on Netflix around the world. It’s been in the top 10 in the UK, Ireland, Hong Kong, Croatia, Singapore, Switzerland and all over the world, and having it say all the things that vegans have been saying about the fishing industry for so many years, it just felt so good. It was really validating.
So Kip Anderson was the focus of Cowspiracy and he was a producer on this film, but this one is focused on another filmmaker, Ali Tabizi, I believe is how you pronounce his name. Ali goes on a similar journey that we saw Kip go on in Cowspiracy where he’s concerned about the oceans, so he is picking up trash on the beach and he’s avoiding straws and doing all the things that the environmental groups tell you to do. But as he’s digging deeper into the issue, he discovers the bigger, more impactful fishing industry is actually doing way more damage. But it takes, kind of a while to get there and I think that was actually good.
They started the film with cetaceans, with whales and dolphins. And I think they did this because people really love whales and dolphins. I mean, everybody can kind of agree that they love whales and dolphins, there’s this connection there. And it’s that thing where it’s okay to care about wildlife, especially large, sometimes cute or beautiful wildlife like Panda bears and polar bears, but we can kill chickens by the billions. And I think there’s a similar thing here with the whales, but the connection to the fishing industry is so deeply entwined with what is happening to the whales and dolphins, so I think it was a good inroad to the issue. So they go to Taiji, Japan, where there is the infamous Taiji dolphin slaughter, and they kill up to 700 dolphins a year, which was the subject of another film called The Cove, a very powerful film in the early 2000s. And it was disheartening to realize that this is still going on 20 years later after that film that won so many awards and was so popular, that film, The Cove. It’s sad to know that that is still happening and that that film didn’t actually change anything. But we learned there that for every one dolphin that’s captured in this area and sold to marine parks, and can be sold for up to $100,000 to marine parks, there’s 12 dolphins that are just killed. They’re just slaughtered. For every one dolphin captured, 12 dolphins were killed. Why? The fishing industry doesn’t want the competition for the fewer and fewer fish in the ocean. So they killed dolphins so there’s less of them eating the fish that they want to capture and kill and sell to humans. Then we learn that France kills 10 times more dolphins than Taiji Japan, up to 10,000 dolphins a year in the fishing industry and how they’re killed is in the bycatch, the non-target fish that are killed in the indiscriminate fishing nets and the longline fishing. So, when they’re fishing for the fish that people are buying, there are so many other beings, non-target fish as well as marine mammals and seabirds and other marine life that is killed in the bycatch, sometimes called “by-kill,” because nobody comes out alive from these nets. And I actually talk more about this in another podcast, the Reason for Vegan Series 9: The Fishing Industry Exposed, and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes so if you want to dive a little deeper into the fishing industry and how they work and the bycatch issue, I recommend listening to that one as well.
Then they get into sustainable labels like “dolphin-safe,” and that blue label you may have seen called “certified sustainable seafood,” it’s a little blue label that’s issued by the Marine Stewardship Council, a very popular label on seafood. This is where they get into some of what critics call the “gotcha” interviews with environmental groups, where the representatives that they’re interviewing are stumbling and squirming around these uncomfortable, but very reasonable questions that Ali is asking about these labels. And they did this in Cowspiracy and they really got criticized for it. But I don’t like calling this “gotcha” journalism. It’s hard-hitting, in-depth reporting, and it’s asking the hard questions, which is good journalism. I mean, these people should be able to explain and justify and stand behind what they do. I don’t want to reveal too much here because these parts are really eye opening if you haven’t seen the movie yet.
The other thing that I learned in this section and found really disturbing was they talked about how there are people who are paid to be fishing observers. Fishing Observers go out randomly on the vessels to observe and make sure that whatever sustainable label is being put on the seafood, that sustainable fishing is being adhered to. But what they uncovered was that many of these observers are paid off to be kept quiet about what’s going on. Others are killed. They’re shot, thrown overboard to drown. It’s terrible. I was really shocked at this, and it seemed like groups that certify the seafood, the Earth Island Institute, the Marine Stewardship Council, that they should be keeping track and protecting these people. I mean, they’re paying these people to do this observation work, shouldn’t they be sure that they survived the voyage? Make sure they’re still alive? It’s horrible. That was just really absolutely shocking.
So then they moved into plastics and plastic pollution in the ocean, and this is another place where I was really cheering when I heard the information that I again have been yelling to the empty rafters, they talked about how everyone is focused on straws and trying to get people not to use straws but straws make up only 0.03% of the plastic pollution in the ocean. And in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that floating island of plastic trash between California and Hawaii, 46% of that trash, almost half of the trash, is fishing gear. It’s ropes and nets and floats, all from the fishing industry, all plastic. The ropes that they use for the nets, they’re nylon, and nylon is plastic. So again, just so validating. It’s so frustrating to not have plastic pollution organizations talking about this.
Something else that they covered that I was surprised to see them talk about because honestly, I didn’t think anyone else knew about this other than me and the people that I’ve talked to, the people that have come to my fish talk, and of course the scientists who discovered it, but they talked about how fish waste absorbs carbon from the atmosphere making the entire ocean a carbon sink. But because we have depleted the ocean of fish, it’s hastening climate change because it has reduced the amount of fish waste, and therefore reducing the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon. I was really really happy for them to reveal this, to talk about this. So critical.
The part where I feel that I learned the most was the section on human slavery in the industry. I knew a bit about this, I knew what went on, but I didn’t know the details, and they really dug in and it was awful. They had first-hand accounts, actually from Taiwanese men, and it was just heartbreaking, what they had gone through. They were being coerced into going out, thinking that it’s a job, but then they’re beaten and starved and never paid, there’s no money and there’s no way for them to get off the boat for possibly months or years, it was awful. They had a really interesting animation segment here where they showed the enslaved person’s experience and, oh, it was brutal. I’m really grateful that they included that.
Not surprisingly, the film has already had a series of criticisms from ocean conservation groups and other environmental groups, groups that were targeted by the film, and they’re debunking some of the studies, saying that it was misinformation or misinterpreted. And I don’t want to dismiss this because this is a huge issue in the vegan movement, we should always use good data, good science. The truth is horrible enough. We don’t need to exaggerate it, and that can leave us open to criticism, to being dismissed.
I do think that their sources were good, at least most of them. I can’t vouch for all of it, but I think this for two reasons. One, on many of the screenshots they were using when they were talking about a study or some science, they put the source of the information in a footnote at the bottom of the screen. I don’t think they’ve done that in the other films. I could be wrong but I don’t remember noticing it, but I certainly noticed it with this one. At the bottom right hand corner of the screen, there was often a footnote from the study they were citing. The other reason why I think it’s good science and why I know it is, at least a lot of it, is it’s the same studies that I’ve been citing for years. I was really shocked to see that a lot of it was the same stuff that I had been researching since I’ve been deeply researching this issue. They use a lot of the same stats and I knew that those were from good peer-reviewed studies and reliable sources. But really, even if half of what the film says is true, the oceans and the fishes are in trouble, and so are we.
I’m going to wrap up here soon, but I do have a couple of critiques. Now certainly, I feel that overall, the film was just awesome and I do highly recommend it, but there are just a couple things I’d like to mention that maybe could have been improved. One is that I feel that they relied too heavily on US experts, even though they went all around the world for the footage. I mean, most of the film is filmed in other countries, they were in Japan, Taiwan and Scotland, and lots of other places. So for instance, in Taiji, I’m sure that there must be Japanese groups working on this dolphin slaughter issue. I mean, after it’s been exposed for 15 years from The Cove movie. Maybe there’s not, but I would bet that there are at least independent activists working on it there, if not full organizations, and I just wish we could have heard from them. And I totally get this kind of film is very hard to make, there’s probably a ton of logistics and possibly would have had to have interpreters and subtitles, and it might have just been too hard. But when I hear about animal issues in other countries, I just always think of the activists there that are on the ground, doing the work, day in and day out, that don’t get any recognition. And we’ll hear about the issue from a US talking head, generally a white guy, you know? So I wish that we could have heard from some of the activists who were in these places, working on these issues, because I know that they are there.
My other criticism is that they did at the very end have a brief section on fish pain and sentience and emotion on the actual individual fishes, but it was really brief and not very in-depth. I would really like to have seen a longer, stronger section on fishes’ lives and why we shouldn’t kill fish, as individuals, not just as an integral part of the ocean, you know, not just the environmental issue. That was disappointing. They kind of made light of it. They had this interview where the person was talking about how fish communicate through fish flatulence, and they laughed about it and it wasn’t satisfying enough to me. I feel like they should have and could have gone way more in-depth in this section about individual fishes and their emotional needs and their individual desires. I felt like it really fell short. But overall, a fantastic film. I highly recommend it.
I hope you enjoyed my review of Seaspiracy and if you have any thoughts on the film, something that I missed, something that you want to talk about, please email me. You can email me at Hope@UPC-online.org. Okay, let’s get into our interview for today.
Hope:
So on the podcast today, we have Tracey Glover. Between college and law school Tracey worked as a rescue and cruelty officer with the Humane Society of Ann Arbor in Michigan, and during law school, Tracey focused on international refugee law. She practiced law for eight years before traveling to India to study yoga and meditation. Then in 2010, Tracey moved to Mobile, Alabama, where she created the vegan meal delivery business, The Pure Vegan, which she ran for eight years. And then in 2014, she co-founded the intersectional animal rights group, Awakening Respect and Compassion for all Sentient Beings and their acronym is ARC, and she’s still the Executive Director of ARC and Tracey is the author of the book Lotus of the Heart: Living Yoga for Personal Wellness and Global Survival. And then in January 2019, Tracey adopted eight chickens that were rescued from the meat industry, which led to the creation of the Sweet Peeps Microsanctuary that’s located in Lillian, Alabama, and is currently home to 16 intelligent and unique chickens, all of whom have been rescued from animal agriculture. So we are really excited to have her here today to talk to us about all that she’s doing. Hi, Tracey.
Tracey:
Hi, Hope. Thank you so much for having me.
Hope:
Of course. I’m glad you could take the time. I would love to start with a little about you. Tell us what your origin story is, your superhero origin story. Why did you go vegan? When did you go vegan? What got you into activism? So tell us about your history and your backstory.
Tracey:
Okay. It’s always funny to try to synthesize, you know, a life into a discrete little story, but I guess thinking about sort of where the person I am today came from, I have to just start with, as a kid, I grew up in a house full of animals. My parents were divorced when I was little, they’re both animal lovers, but my dad was really like a crazy cat man. We just always had a menagerie. I was just always surrounded by non-human animals. Growing up we had cats and dogs, bunnies and fish and snakes, and I was just always surrounded by non-human animals and I always really loved them. When I was about 16, somebody gave me a PETA flyer or booklet or something and I think that was the first time I really thought about animal agriculture and possibly going vegan or vegetarian, and my dad and I-
Hope:
And around when was that?
Tracey:
I was about 16, which would have made it, oh my gosh, math on the spot…
Hope:
It was like the 90s probably?
Tracey:
Yeah, it was probably like late 80s, early 90s. And really as a follow up, I guess too that soon after that, I read Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, so my dad and I both went vegetarian at that time. Sadly I did not stay vegetarian, and you know that thing, I think the only thing vegans regret is that we didn’t do it sooner? I definitely am sorry that I didn’t stay vegan at that point but I also think in some ways, it helps me understand where people are at when I meet non-vegans now and all of the obstacles and hurdles that people face. I think that when I first learned about the incredible cruelty of the industry, I was still very naive in my belief that the purpose of the government was to protect the innocent, whether they be humans or nonhumans. I just couldn’t believe that the things that happen in animal agriculture were legal. And so in my naive young mind, I think after a couple of years, I just thought well, if I know about this cruelty, then the government must know about it and they must have fixed it by now because, how couldn’t they? And, you know, it was a little bit of a different time, it was really pre-internet, it wasn’t so easy to find out what was happening. And it was a lot easier to bury our heads.
So I bounced back and forth between vegetarianism and non-vegetarianism for years, but I was always really an animal lover. And so, in between college and law school, I worked as an animal cruelty and rescue officer for this Humane Society in Ann Arbor. It was such meaningful work that we were doing, but it was so minimal, and there were so many hypocrisies that I saw. For example, I would be out doing rescues in the rescue van and my boss, the Executive Director of the Humane Society, would page me on the emergency pager and ask me to pick her up a cheeseburger from McDonald’s. And I would be, “I’m out trying to get an injured animal,” and she’d be, “Yeah, well, he’ll still be there when you’re done.” Yeah, it was really an interesting look at shelters, there’s just a lot of different kinds of people.
Hope:
And they’re able to somehow separate that there are just certain species that are worth our protection and respect and others that are not.
Tracey:
Right. Yeah, you just saw that there so glaringly and of course, that’s our society. And then everything that I had been reading for those 15 years where I had been bouncing back and forth, it just all hit me, kind of at once. I was finally ready to accept the truth of it all because I do think for a long time what stopped me from going vegan was I really could not believe that we kill millions of baby chicks every year in the egg industry and that baby calves are routinely stolen from their mothers in the dairy industry, even the calves coming from farms that are “humane.” I just couldn’t believe that it was possible, that this was all happening.
Hope:
Yeah, it does seem so unreal, unimaginable. Yeah.
Tracey:
Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I still feel that, you know? I still look at the world on a regular basis and just go, how is it possible that that’s the norm? It doesn’t make any sense.
Hope:
Yeah, so you took this wonderful journey and you finally reached a vegan conclusion.
Tracey:
Yes.
Hope:
And I know that you’ve done a great deal of activism up to and including the sanctuary, but I’m curious and want to ask you about Sweet Peeps Microsanctuary. This is a microsanctuary that you founded fairly recently. It’s just been a couple of years, right?
Tracey:
Right. That’s right.
Hope:
Tell us about the sanctuary. How many chickens do you have? Where do they live on the property? And maybe tell us a little about the microsanctuary movement as well.
Tracey:
Yeah, I would love to! My favorite thing in the whole world is to talk about these chickens.
Hope:
Good!
Tracey:
I had known for years that at some point I wanted to rescue chickens in part because I knew that they were the most abused land animal on earth. So much of why I went vegan to begin with was because of the suffering of chickens, but in all honesty, until I took some in to live with me, I didn’t know chickens. Every time I had visited the sanctuary, I was more interested in visiting with the large mammals than the chickens, and I just felt like I would be a better vegan advocate if I knew about chickens. So I always knew in the back of my mind I wanted to take some in at some point. And I’m trying to think now, I guess it was January of 2019?
Hope:
Yeah. That’s what it says in your bio.
Tracey:
Okay, thank you. So in January 2019 there was a big chicken farm in Colorado that went bankrupt, and they were housing something like 40,000 birds. When they went bankrupt, they turned off the heat and stopped feeding them. They put out, I guess, a call to local farmers or something that if other farmers wanted to come and take any of the birds, they could. And there was a local sanctuary that found out and the farm owner let them go in and rescue as many birds as they could. They then started contacting other animal sanctuaries, and the word just spread really on social media, I think, and I saw a Facebook post. At that point, there were rescuers in the sheds and they were going to rescue as many as they had homes for and no more. There were like 40,000 birds there and they, you know, it was like, if people would step up, they would pull out more birds and if people didn’t step up they couldn’t because they didn’t have homes for them. I just had an old shed. Very spontaneously, I just decided I would take, I think originally I said I would take two, and then a bunch of things happened and somehow I ended up with eight. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, honestly. I often will say I’m glad that I had no idea how much time and energy I was going to need to take care of them or else I don’t know that I would have done it. But it was the best thing I think I ever did. But you read online about caring for chickens and everything from the backyard chicken industry will indicate that chickens are easy and cheap. Well, that’s if you don’t value their lives and you don’t provide them veterinary care or worry about keeping them safe or giving them an enriched environment, it probably is cheap and easy to care for them. Their needs are not unlike dogs and cats in terms of veterinary care and enrichment and really, unless we keep them in the house, you need to provide predator-proof housing which is also time consuming and costly.
So I took in these eight birds, I knew nothing about chickens. I joined the Vegans with Chickens Facebook Group and learned, you know, I still learn more from people in that group than from anywhere, including from my vets, even the avian specialist that I go to now because the avian specialists, they’re used to treating more like parrots and parakeets. The regular dog and cat vets, if they see birds at all, it might be backyard chickens, and most people again, with backyard chickens, they don’t provide the same level of veterinary care to them as they would their dogs and cats. Also, I’m sorry I didn’t update my bio, but I actually have 25 chickens at this point. I think the idea of the microsanctuary movement is to show that these species that are not generally considered companion animals or considered to be worthy of our moral consideration, to care for them and show society how wrong our perceptions are about them. And I think part of the beauty of the microsanctuary is that you don’t have to have a huge sanctuary with a lot of animals to have a large impact. There are lots of really great examples of people who are, especially people who are very savvy with social media, and they might care for one or two animals of one of those really exploited species, but through their social media posts, they’re able to reach 1,000s and 1,000s of people and tell their stories.
Hope:
So humans categorize domestic animals, primarily in two categories: friends and food. How do our speciesist views come into play when we’re considering chickens? And of course, speciesism is when we consider one species more dominant or more important than another. What can we do to get people to see chickens more as companion animals and not commodities?
Tracey:
Yeah, chickens are the most abused land animal on Earth because of the way we perceive them, and so I think we have all of these misperceptions about them that allow us to treat them so egregiously. So I think a lot of changing the way they’re treated is about changing the way we perceive them. And, for the most part, people just don’t know chickens at all. And then there are all of these harmful misperceptions out there like the idea that chickens are unbelievably stupid. That’s a super prevalent misconception. And one thing, a bit of a side note, but you don’t have to be intelligent to suffer, and so I feel like I get into trouble sometimes if I make too much out of how smart they are. That’s not the barometer, right? It’s the whole Jeremy Bentham questions, “It’s not, do they think, or do they talk, but can they suffer?” But the fact is that chickens are smarter than we think. Way smarter than we think.
We think about chickens as being stupid and they’re not, so correcting that by educating people about their different forms of intelligence. We as humans, we compare all other species’ intelligence to ours and if it’s a different form of intelligence, then we discount it entirely. So recognizing that maybe they have different forms of intelligence, we just absolutely remove all personality from them. We think that they’re not intelligent and we group them as these beings without personalities. Of the 25 chickens that are here, each one has such a distinct personality. I can tell you about every single individual here, and they are all such different people, just like our dogs and our cats. So it’s a combination of educating people about their actual intelligence and their personalities.
Besides, coming back to just their ability to suffer, regardless of their intelligence and their personalities, they’re capable of suffering. I think by characterizing them as not being intelligent and not having personality, somehow, we think that means they can’t suffer. It’s correcting all of these misperceptions. And this is part of the brilliance of the microsanctuary movement is that there’s this opportunity to highlight individuals and show people a combination of who they really are, and then also show people how they can live, the contrast. A large part of why I went vegan was definitely seeing the cruelty and the deprivation and the abuse and all the horrible things that we do to them in animal agriculture, but I think that the flip side of seeing what their lives can be, like seeing the alternative, seeing the dramatic contrast and you see an animal living a beautiful happy life. I’m actually looking outside right now and I can see the group of the Georgia tornado survivors, and they’re all out in the sun right now, dust bathing and just milling around, with their friends. It’s very basic, it’s very simple, and it’s also just beautiful!
Hope:
I would love to hear a story of one of your chickens or roosters, one that either maybe touched your heart or just had an interesting story or one that you just want to talk about.
Tracey:
Yeah, they all have such interesting stories and we’ve touched a little bit on the main groups. They all come from these horrible situations. But I guess I could just tell you a bit about a couple that I’m closest to. Fannie. Fannie came from that original Colorado group. She’s one of the original eight. And when I got them, I didn’t say, but we send them to slaughter in the meat industry right when they’re between six and eight weeks old, and they were just about that age when they were rescued. Even when they got here at eight weeks old, they were pretty much the size of a regular adult chicken, but they were babies. They were eight weeks old, they peeped, you know, they sounded like babies. And probably in part because they were so young and they were such babies, they would, Fannie, in particular, was just always by my side. So when I first got them, they’re all Cornish Cross so they’re all white. People often too when they come visit the sanctuary, they’re like, “How do you tell them apart?” When I first got them, I couldn’t. Now, I can tell them all apart because they have slightly different faces, they have different voices, they just have all these different little characteristics. I can tell them all apart. But when I first got them, I absolutely could not tell them apart. They all looked identical to me, and I did at some point, put leg bands, different color leg bands on them so I could tell them apart. But even before I put the leg bands on, I always knew who Fannie was because Fannie was just always the one who was right at my side, wanting to either jump, fly up into my lap or follow me around. And so she’s now two and a half years old, and she is the same. Every time I go out into the yard, they all will come over to greet me, but she’s always at the front of the line coming over to greet me. She just likes to be held, she buries her head into my armpit, and I think would stay there for hours. I think the longest I’ve ever probably sat with her was maybe an hour and a half before I had to get up and go do something.
One more story I’ll tell you quickly is about Simmi who was part of the Georgia tornado rescue. When I first took in this group, actually there were seven, and one of them had injuries that were too severe and had to be euthanized, but I took the whole group to the vet when I first got them, and the vet recommended that we euthanize Simmi as well. She had a broken leg, and her overall condition was really bad because they had been in this destroyed shed for a week before they were rescued, so they would have been without food or water and injured when they were rescued. When I got my group, none of them were walking, most of them had deep lacerations and like I said, Aubie had a broken wing, Simmi had this broken leg, but her overall body condition was just bad. The vet recommended euthanizing her. But because I am connected to people who have chickens with disabilities, I knew it was possible that, if nothing else, I could get her a wheelchair and give her a good life. My vet has never dealt with anybody, I don’t think he’s ever dealt with a vegan probably, and he took care of a lot of the backyard chickens in town but for the most part were treating them for worms and not a lot else. So I had to really fight with him. I probably spent two hours fighting with him, and eventually, we concluded that there was no harm in trying. And then he put her in a splint and for about a month, I built a sling for her, and she lived inside with a cast on her leg and in her sling. After a month-
Hope:
When you say a sling, do you mean like a little harness with wheels or what?
Tracey:
It was like a ferret hammock. And then I bought PVC pipe and watched a YouTube video, and basically constructed like a wheelchair, although we never used the wheels. And for that first month, after she came out of the cast, I thought the wheels apparatus would sort of support her and she could relearn to walk. I think what I built was too heavy for her, so the sling mill was just PVC piping basically, with this ferret hammock. And the idea was to keep that leg in the cast straight, and even when the cast came off, still to keep the leg straight as it healed. And once the cast came off, I just lowered it a little bit so that her feet would touch the ground, and then I just had to work with her, kind of like physical therapy to get her to slowly start to use that leg again. Within maybe a month after having the cast off she started to really walk on it. She runs on it and has done so well. To fill in images of any of this, I’m always posting photos and videos on the Sweet Peeps Facebook page and Instagram page too, so if anybody’s listening and they’re like, “I have to see this!”
Hope:
I love it. We’ll put links to those social media pages in the show notes.
Tracey:
Okay, fabulous. Thank you.
Hope:
So I want to switch gears a little bit and ask you about your documentary. You created a documentary called Until All Are Free, and it’s 30 minutes long and it covers a lot. It covers really all aspects of veganism and even some that are more obscure like aquaculture, fish farming, you go into the environmental audits. It’s really very comprehensive and beautifully done. I will give just a bit of a content warning, if anyone wants to watch it, there is some really kind of hard to watch footage, some pretty heartbreaking stuff, so just be aware of that going in. But I’d love to hear about why you made this film. Can you tell us about it?
Tracey:
Yeah, like many animal activists, I am constantly trying to figure out how to help and how to have as much impact as possible. I feel like I am constantly trying new methods, trying to figure that out, trying to figure out what my role in the movement is. There are so many amazing documentaries out there that have had such an impact on me. I’ve always been drawn to film, and I think it’s such an effective medium. So I was at a point in my life where I was like, I want to do more, and I don’t know what that should be. I remember before making the film and reaching out to some activists who I admire including Bruce Friedrich, who’s in the film, asking him what he thought the greatest need in the movement was. I can’t remember exactly what his answer was, but the message I got was to figure out what you’re good at and what you’d like to do. The movement needs everything. We need people from all walks of life, doing all kinds of things.
Hope:
That’s good advice.
Tracey:
Yeah!
Hope:
You say something in the film I wanted to ask you about. You say how before you knew chickens, that you were thinking and hoping that chickens were too stupid to feel or to have emotion. And you kind of touched on this earlier, talking about animal intelligence and I guess my question kind of is, does it even matter? Does a lack of intelligence matter at all whether we exploit an animal? But in the film, of course, you say that once you knew chickens, and I’ll read this quote because I loved this quote, you said, “As a species, chickens are incredibly social, gentle, curious, and smart. I had no idea what amazing little people they were.” And that’s just such a sweet quote, I love that. So tell us what you learned about chickens from living with them.
Tracey:
Yeah, to answer your first question, I think it doesn’t matter. I think there are two parts to that. I did think, and I think many people do think that they are too stupid to suffer. And I think that there’s a lot to unpack in that. For one, I think, no, it doesn’t matter. Right? I mean, you know, you don’t have to be a highly intelligent being of any species to feel pain and to suffer, but the truth is, they are so much more intelligent than we give them credit for. And, not just intelligent but yes gentle and sweet and social, so I just think that before I got to know them as individuals, they were just very neutral somehow in my mind, you know? I had never known one well enough to have any idea what their personalities would be like. And again, you know they’re very much individuals, and it’s like getting to know Fannie as an individual or Becky.
Okay, so quick little Becky’s story. Becky is one of the Colorado rescues. She came to me with a compound fracture and had her wing amputated. She then slept inside for about a year. Oh yeah, she’s featured in the documentary too. She loves being around me. When I go out to clean the coop she wants to be by my side but she does not want to be held. Fannie really likes to be held, likes to have her head scratched. Becky, I don’t know if it’s from the trauma of what happened, whatever caused that compound fracture, or if there’s still some sensitivity, or if it’s just her. It’s clear to me when I try to pick her up, she’ll flex her one wing. She’s a little bit more shy. I think of Becky like she’s one of the shier girls. Whereas Nunu is kind of bossy, but they all have these very unique voices. I can identify who’s talking from the other side of the yard, unique voices that go with unique personalities. I’ve learned so much.
Sorry, your original question was what did you learn about chickens since you had them? It’s like everything. I mean, even as an activist. I went vegan in part because of the suffering of chickens, but I had no idea. And so now to think about how the sheds and slaughterhouses are filled with individual people, just like my Fannie or my Simmi or my Eleanor. I’m sorry to use that possessive, but it’s like our loved ones. They are “ours” on some level. Oh yeah, I’m very, very attached. I’m theirs as much as they’re mine, you know?
Hope:
So you have a series of webinars coming up with your organization that focus on chickens. So I’d love to hear about these upcoming webinars.
Tracey:
My group, ARC, is about to launch a webinar series on the chicken industry looking at the many different ways that the chicken industry is harming the planet from, obviously, the animals, to the environment, to workers. We have Erica Meyer scheduled to do our first webinar on May 13 which will be an overview of the chicken industry. We don’t have any other dates set in stone yet but basically the plan is to do one webinar a month through the fall. And we’ll also be looking at the legal status of chickens, and we have Justin VanKleek who’s going to speak about the backyard chicken industry. So, we’re hoping to do a really comprehensive look at all the main evils of the chicken industry. And you can find all of the dates and all the information and everything up on our website.
Hope:
Great, and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes so people can register. So Tracey, what gives you hope for the future?
Tracey:
There are so many things. One thing, honestly, it is so far from the work that I do, but all of the food technology advances give me a lot of hope. I look at meats but also lab grown, “clean meat.” Looking at the transformation of the dairy industry. The changes that are happening, I think, in food technology are really taking society in a big leap forward, maybe even sort of beyond where we are, ethically. I think that there are so many moral and ethical reasons for us to eliminate animal agriculture. I see the food technology industry really taking us there, in a way that does give me a lot of hope. It’s maybe like connecting the dots, like, you know, people have compassion, even though I think it’s often just very varied and people do want to save the planet. How could humans not want to save our one and only home planet? I think our habits are so ingrained and people may struggle with the practical aspects of giving up animal products, and if you can give people the same food that they’re eating and used to, they don’t have to change their habits. If you can completely eliminate animal suffering and environmental destruction, it seems that people will buy those products. So that’s hopeful. That gives me hope. I think there are a lot of changes happening right now in the world that are hopeful. Just seeing so many more vegan options out there, seeing so many more people mentioning veganism. It seems that veganism has become a real possibility for a large segment of the population in a way that it never has before for a lot of reasons.
Hope:
I’ve really enjoyed spending this time with you and learning about Sweet Peeps Microsanctuary. Thank you so much for talking with us today.
Tracey:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been really great talking to you, and thank you for all that you do.
Hope:
Yes, you too Tracey.
Thank you for listening to the Hope for the Animals Podcast. If you know and love a microsanctuary that we should feature in our microsanctuary series, please let me know. And if you enjoyed today’s podcast I hope you will share it with others, hit subscribe, and put us in your listening library. How about a five star rating while you’re at it? That helps us so much to reach more listeners. We really appreciate it. I hope that you are finding ways to enjoy life for yourself and preserve life for others. Please, live vegan.
