The Inner Lives Of Cows, Pigs & Chickens

I think I heard about Farm Sanctuary when Max was a puppy and as each year goes by, my respect for them and their work grows. Rescuing farm animals and giving them a new life is one of the best things human beings can do. 

But even they cannot rescue every animal and I always wondered about for lack of better word - economies of scale. Now they are trying to solve that issue by doing volunteer studies on the farm animals - read the whole piece here: 

And a growing body of research suggests that farmed species are brainy beings: Chickens can anticipate the future, goats appear to solicit help from humans, and pigs may pick up on one another’s emotions.

But scientists still know far less about the minds of chickens or cows than they do about those of apes or dogs, said Christian Nawroth, a scientist studying behavior and cognition at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology in Germany. “I’m still baffled how little we know about farm animals, given the amount or the numbers that we keep,” he said.

Farm Sanctuary, which was founded in 1986, has always held that farm animals are sentient beings, even referring to its feathered and four-legged residents as “people.”

“They have their own desires, and their own wants and preferences and needs, and their own inner lives — the same way that human people do,” said Lauri Torgerson-White, the sanctuary’s director of research.

Now, the sanctuary is trying to collect enough data to convince the general public of the humanity of animals.

“Our hope,” Ms. Torgerson-White said, “is that through utilizing really rigorous methodologies, we are able to uncover pieces of information about the inner lives of farmed animals that can be used to really change hearts and minds about how these animals are used by society.”

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Farm Sanctuary began not as a home for rescued animals but with a group of young activists working to expose animal cruelty at farms, stockyards and slaughterhouses.

“We lived in a school bus on a tofu farm for a couple of years,” said Gene Baur, the president and co-founder of the organization. But in the course of its investigations, the group kept stumbling upon “living animals left for dead,” he recalled. “And so we started rescuing them.”

They ultimately opened sanctuaries in New York and California, establishing educational programs and political advocacy campaigns. (They raised money, in part, by selling veggie hot dogs at Grateful Dead concerts.)

And in 2020, the organization, which now houses about 700 animals, began assembling an internal research team. The goal was to assemble more evidence that, as Mr. Baur put it, “these animals are more than just pieces of meat. There’s emotion there. There is individual personality there. There’s somebody, not something.”

The research team worked with Lori Gruen, an animal ethicist at Wesleyan University, to develop a set of ethics guidelines. The goal, Dr. Gruen explained, was to create a framework for conducting animal research “without dominance, without control, without instrumentalization.”

Among other stipulations, the guidelines prohibit invasive procedures — forbidding even blood draws unless they are medically necessary — and state that the studies must benefit the animals. And participation? It’s voluntary.

“Residents must be recognized as persons,” the guidelines state, “and always be provided with choice and control over their participation in an experimental study.”