In the end, they knocked him out with a tranquilizer dart. I remembered vaguely that there had been protests from people who thought he deserved to live. One day I asked my friend Jennifer Sullivan, an animal rights person, if she knew whatever happened to him.
“Yes. We took him out to Sasha Farm.” That was the first I ever heard of the place. It was, she told me, the Midwest’s largest farm sanctuary, in the country near Manchester, west of Ann Arbor.
The next weekend we went out there. It looked like a well-managed Garden of Eden. Jefferson, well, what else were they going to name him was there, supremely uninterested in the media. There were other cattle, and hogs and chickens and a whole host of dogs that had been saved from Hurricane Katrina. There was Boris, a wild boar who had been found newborn by a hunter, as well as a legion of potbellied pigs bought as cute “fad” pets and later discarded. There was a magnificent racehorse who barely escaped becoming dog food. And then there were a few animals who still showed signs of a life of torture. Chickens without beaks, for example. They cut them off in factory farms so they won’t peck each other. They do it without anesthesia.
And then there was Samson, a magnificent red chow.
Officially Dorothy Davies and her husband, Monte Jackson, run Sasha Farm, but it was clear that Samson really watched over the whole place. That’s when they told me that he had been rescued from what they called a vivisection lab.
Dorothy and Monte are vegans now. Not everyone who supports Sasha is a vegan or even a vegetarian. But spending time there gives you a different perspective. Whatever else you say about primitive man, they had to meet the meat they ate.
We mostly never do. You may still want to eat turkey, but after you meet the birds at Sasha Farm, you are unlikely to think of them in quite the same way. The turkeys looked happy when I went back to see them this fall. Happy, healthy, and well-adjusted.
Dorothy and Monte have been saving animals since soon after they moved here in 1981. Monte was terribly injured in a trucking accident last year, but he’s recovering gradually.
Samson was still hanging on when I was there in September, but a few days later, he started showing signs of nerve damage.
He died in his sleep, and they buried him on a hillside the day before Halloween. Sasha Farm hasn’t elected a new straw boss yet, but my money is on a very stubborn baby pygmy goat named Stephen Colbert. He intends to have a nice thanksgiving tomorrow.
Regardless of what’s on your plate, here’s hoping you do too.
Thank you for the wonderful story!Remembering Sampson brought a smile to my face.
Posted by: Smaki | November 21, 2007 at 08:43 PM