Greetings from Goatlandia

“Sit, that’s a good girl,” Kain, a strong lean middle aged man in scuffed brown cowboy boots, Levis, and a black t-shirt, encourages Henrietta, a strapping young brown pig, who walks with us, as Kain gives me my morning work orders.

 “You can feed the pigs,” he says to me, and “Sit,” he reminds Henrietta.  Henrietta sits back on her haunches and raises her reddish pink snout, on his command. “We’ve got to train her for when she’s 600 pounds,” Kain explains. “We’ll take her out to fairs and schools to educate people about animal rights, changing farm practices, and eating vegan.”

That particular morning at Goatlandia, an animal farm sanctuary in Santa Rosa, California, I detected a bounce to Henrietta’s step, as she followed us back to the fenced in pasture where she hangs out during the day with 16 rescued goats.

When I first met Henrietta she wore a little blue t-shirt.  “How cute,” I thought, not understanding that the cloth protected her back that had been burned when as a runt, she was thrown into a fire by her former owner.

At Goatlandia, Henrietta, along with the other 100 or so residents, don’t only survive, they thrive.  Last year, after the devastating fires in Sonoma County, Goatlandia opened a second site in Sebastapol to take care of an additional 27 rescued goats. 

Henrietta sleeps in a big yellow shed in the pig pasture with four black and white sister hogs, Gigi, Dippy, Portia, and Brianna, and a white hog named Sheldon. Rescued from a farmer who changed his mind about slaughtering the hogs after giving them names, the hog sisters form a 2000-pound wall of protection around Henrietta at night in as they dream pig dreams resting in soft hay.

Deb Hoffman, a restaurant owner from San Francisco, sold two successful business, and moved to the Santa Rosa to create Goatlandia with her partner, Alana Ekhart, a Sonoma County native and yoga instructor, who returned to the area to pursue their shared vision of farming and food.

Goatlandia initially offered Farm Tours, an AirBNB destination, and Vegan meals from the abundant garden, in addition to serving as a sanctuary for rescued farm animals.   Deb and Alana attended educational events at local schools and fairs, bringing along animals for people to cuddle. 

After a complaint from a neighbor about parked cars, Goatlandia had to cease providing farm tours and hosting events onsite. In Sonoma County there are currently no laws that govern animal sanctuaries, and the property unfortunately, doesn’t meet zoning requirements for opening the farm to the public.  

The non-profit organization is currently readjusting to these constraints, adapting to take animals and food out into the community, and creating a membership model that will allow donors and volunteers to work and learn onsite.  They also have an adoption program, that places rescued farm animals in loving homes.

As I set off with Kain to prepare the pig food. Henrietta is not pleased to be left to her own devices, and follows me back to the gate.  “I’ll be back, sweetie,” I assure her, making sure she doesn’t sneak between her freedom and me.

Kain gives me a very large colorful tub filled with veggies from the kitchen shed: potatoes, carrots, and green roughage.  Local markets such as Oliver’s Market in Cotati regularly donate produce to Goatlandia.

I wrap my arms around the tub and proceed to the pig area, where the four hogs play in mud puddles, lounge contentedly on their sides, wander about, and of course, eat.  I dump the colorful orange, purple, and green produce, onto a wooden slab. I watch as the hogs snort, inhaling apples and broccoli, tossing around their breakfast with great enthusiasm.

Next on the chore list, comprised of about 50 different tasks we check off as we accomplish them during our 3-hour shift, is cleaning the goat sheds.  Goat shit forms small, round, hard pellets.  The goats poop everywhere -- in the fields and in their sheds, on the concrete surfaces that lead to the barns, and on their wooden play structures.

The mayor of Goatlandia is a large black and white goat named Stella, who greets humans and animals with gentle curiosity.  Duncan, one of the three large white Saanen goats, is eating the hair off the backs of the other two rescues, Rainy and Noll, a behavior that Alana says doesn’t particularly bother them.  Two brothers, Phineas and Ferb, brown and black Oberhasli goats, adopted from a meat company owner who no longer wanted them, approach me, and Ferb, with his curly cut off horns puts his face up close to mine to say hello. 

Luna and Chanel, Nubians with lovely long white and brown ears, sunbathe, as Coco, a brown Lamancha, who was unwanted because she had an extra teat, rubs up against the side of the green barn.  So many goats, so many stories.

A young woman volunteer, home for the summer from U. of Washington, and I fold up the blankets from the floor of the goat shed, then carefully empty the poop into a large round plastic green tub that sits in a framed wheeled apparatus.  Later, we use the goat poop we’ve collected from sweeping sheds and raking the ground, to fill holes in the pig’s pasture, so they don’t trip and hurt themselves. 

We hang the quilts on the fence and hose them off; they’ll dry out by the end of the day and will be returned to the sheds where the goats sleep at night. 

In the goat pasture, two volunteers, a mother and a twenty or so daughter, half-heartedly rake poop.  Kain finds me and whispers, “Those two are new.  They told me that they have hay allergies. “ We laugh and wonder what they expected to be exposed to on a farm.  “They don’t seem to understand my instructions.  They won’t last an hour,” Kain predicts.

I look up from my racking and sure enough, they put their rakes back behind the blue barn.  They flee Goatlandia; Kain nailed it.

Farm work may not be for everyone, but I find it extremely satisfying.  It’s physical, purposeful, and interacting with the animals makes me giddy with joy.  About 30 people volunteer at Goatlandia, sharing my enthusiasm for caring for the animals in their “forever” home. 

I wheel my full green tub over to the pig pasture and hunt for holes to fill.  When I’m done, I stop by the feeding shed and get a bunch of cut carrots to stuff into Henrietta’s orange Kong toy ball.

When I walk back up to Henrietta’s shed in the goat pasture, Henrietta is more interested in devouring the carrots than playing with the ball; she almost bites my finger as I shove the sticks into the ball.  I make a note to myself to rest all food in my open palm when offering treats. Henrietta vacuums up an errant red potato that I remove for her from my pocket.  I get a cupful of coconut oil to rub on Henrietta’s healing back.  She squeals, not happily, but I explain what I’m doing, and she tolerates my ministrations.

Before I wash farm dishes and bowls and tubs at the large metal outdoor sink, I stop by to say hello to my Special Needs pen friends, Spot, Max, and Poppy.  Spot, a shaven wooly white sheep, looks out for Max, a blind black sheep who tosses his head like Stevie Wonder.  They came from a wool factory operation. Poppy, a three legged Pygmy goat, hobbles peacefully about.  She is the essence of sweetness and lets me hold her and stroke her head.   I instantly fall in love with my father’s namesake; we called him Poppy too, and his fuzzy baldhead was equally soft to the touch.

When the morning’s chores and all the items on the list have been completed and ticked off, Kain heads out.  I say goodbye to him, and he motions to one of my fellow volunteers, and says, “Some people think I’m bossy and I scare em.“ I laugh and say, “Kain, you don’t scare me for a minute,” and he responds, “Didn’t think so.”

Kain gets me, as I stand in my rubber green work boots with little goats printed on them, having fallen fiercely in love with this farm and its inhabitants.  “You know what you are doing,” I affirm.  “You’re awesome. So what’s up with your shoulder?”

Kain goes to the cab of his big dusty black truck and pulls out a set of x-rays to show me his decimated rotator cuff.  Then he showed me an image with the great big screw-like thing implanted in the bone.  Kain, who in addition to leading the farm chore charge each morning, is also head of the Goatlandia non-profit’s board, will be out of commission for about 3 or 4 months

.

At a volunteer training the next day he apologetically tells the group, “I’m really just all about the animals, so if I do something to offend you, just let me know. It’s not about you, it’s for the animals.”

The founder of Farm Sanctuary, one of the first shelters for farm animals established in Watkins Glen, New York in 1986, put it simply, “Animals are friends, not food.”

Ethical eating has caught on; in the past three years there’s been a 600% increase in people identifying as vegans in the U.S. According to a report by research firm GlobalData, only 1% of U.S. consumers claimed to be vegan in 2014. And in 2017, that number rose to 6%.

But there is still a long way to go.  99 out of 100 animals killed annually in the U.S., about 9 billion animals, are slaughtered for human consumption. In stark contrast to the utopian community of Goatlandia, factory farming and industrial slaughterhouses subject animals to horrible suffering: confinement, overcrowding, extreme heat and cold, mutilation, and disease.

Goatlandia is a great example of the grassroots advocacy efforts that have launched in places throughout the country and worldwide.  Spending time on the farm with the rescued animals has stirred my own desire to further clean up my eating habits, and make cruelty-free choices.  As the Goatlandia website (www.goatlandia.org) notes, “A vegetarian can save 25 land animals per year, and a vegan can save 200 animals.”  Pivoting to a plant-based diet interests me; and the food that I’ve had the pleasure to sample at Goatlandia work parties and trainings is absolutely delicious!

Goatlandia infuses me with a feeling of calm and joy in these harsh and troubled times.  The week that Brett Kavanaugh successfully made it onto the Supreme Court despite his history of sexual assault and injudicious, vicious partisan behavior, on my Friday morning at Goatlandia I saw six chicks hatch from their eggs, and worked with Henrietta, teaching her to turn a circle. These animal survivors provide respite to the patriarchal onslaught and give me comfort and hope.

This past week when my chores were done, I sat on the ground in the pig pasture, and asked Portia, Gigi, Dippy, and Brianna if anyone would like to have their bellies rubbed. Down went Portia, followed by Gigi.  Henrietta came over and lay down beside me as I made good on my offer.  “This surely must be hog heaven,” I concluded.

Check out the animals on Instagram at goatlandia_sanctuary.