The Wagner Farm Fiasco
If you don’t know Robert Grillo or his website Free From Harm, you should. I first met Robert at the 2012 Mad City Veg Fest in Madison, Wisconsin and have since followed his work carefully. Robert, not unlike his website, is a fine balance of friendliness and intensity. Today I want to draw your attention to an important story that Robert recently broke about a taxpayer funded “educational” farm outside of Chicago.
The farm is called Wagner Farm and its stated mission is to work closely with the local 4H club to provide an educational experience to children about raising farm animals. According to one of Grillo’s sources, however, “there are ongoing policies and practices at Wagner Farm that contradict the spirit of Wagner Farm.” That source is Debby Rubenstein.When Rubenstein learned that Wagner Farm, in the spirit of “education” and “tradition,” was not only lending animals to 4H, but was selling them for slaughter shortly after their 4H glory days came to an end, she founded the Wagner Farm Rescue Fund (this was in 2002). Over the years, WFRF has rescued 82 animals, allowing them to live out the rest of their natural lives in peace rather than dying prematurely in an abattoir.
Today, Wagner Farm is actively resisting Rubenstein’s rescue efforts. Sound familiar? Although the circumstances are slightly different, the Wagner Farm story vividly evokes the Green Moutnain College saga. Recall that when VINE Sanctuary approached GMC with an offer to rescue Bill and Lou, the oxen who yanked around a plow for the student farm, the school refused, arguing that it was in the interest of environmental sustainability to transform the animals into cafeteria pot roast. Given that completing this perverse “cycle of sustainability” was integral to the farm’s mission, and given that the farm was a major draw for crunchy trust fund kids to attend GMC, the matter really isn’t much different than at Wagner Farm. As one Wagner representative said about the decision to take the farm animals to market, “it falls to my group to try to make a difference in the bottom line.”
Well, at least, unlike the eco-nuts at GMC, Wagner admitted that they were killing animals to buttress the bottom line. And, technically, they aren’t lying about offering 4H students and others “an education” about farming. It’s just a bit too honest. See the full story here.
tomorrow: the Salmon conundrum
Wagner Farm Rescue Fund appreciates your wonderful and much needed exposure about animal welfare issues at Wagner Farm. While a representative of Wagner Farm may have acknowledged a “bottom line”, it does not answer the question why Wagner Farm is refusing to sell animals to Wagner Farm Rescue Fund when we have repeatedly offered at or ABOVE market prices for them to be released for humane placement.
We (partner and I) were just tonight discussing horse meat and the adulterated meat products scandal in Britain and why the big deal since most people seem to prefer not to question the provenance of their meat, but that other than religious taboos, the use of bute and other drugs in horses has been getting publicity seemingly to justify concern beyond simply a labeling issue. I raised the possibility that, aside from the inconvenience of giving a damn, one question, one admittance of concern, may well lead to another. Why, indeed, bute aside, do some cultures find it appalling to eat horses or dogs and others relish them? Why is it better to kill and eat a well cared-for cow than a feedlot animal? Where is the line between animal welfare and animal rights? When does it become clear that there is none?
And so there must come a backlash, a recidivism. All of these questions are raised by 4H programs, and GMC similarly opened themselves up to them in their pursuit of humanely raised or sustainable meat. When they lose control of the systems that keep the momentum of questioning in check, they retreat and lash out. They circle the wagons against outsiders who might not pay due worship to the lines that enable their myth.
Those are the real bottom lines.
The 4H program is one of the many programs run at Wagner Farm. Nothing The WF 4H program does is any different than any other 4H program. If you have a problem with 4H programs, why not go to the source and fight there? It’s my understanding that all 4H animals go to the state fair and then to auction automatically. If you are interested in saving those animals, do you, Debby, go to the state fairs to purchase them? Just wondering.
For all those with misconceptions and questions, this should help clarify some issues.
As far as a perspective that the WF (Wagner Farm) 4H is not doing anything different than any other 4H program, such a perspective is reminiscent of the argument often used by minor age children to try and condone negative behavior by telling their parents that everyone else is doing the same. While such tactics might be understandable by minor age children, it is a baseless and inappropriate one if used by the tax payer salaried adult personnel of WF and their supporters to try and condone the use of public property to implement and perpetuate programming with inhumane outcomes by citing the same kind of argument used by minor age children wishing to have their misbehavior at least excused if not condoned.
There has been nothing on the official 4H web site itself that specifically states that all 4H project animals must be sold for slaughter at the end of a project, and no other outcomes permitted. While this may be the commonly recognized culture and outcome of 4H programming, it does not appear to be an official one based on their web site. Also, a number of statements that have been read in internet articles made by parents of other 4H group participants who do not approve of a slaughter outcome and chose humane outcomes instead lends credibility that humane outcomes are not only permitted by 4H policy, but are often actually implemented. Therefore, both theoretically and in practical application, there are no plausible reasons for WF not to work with Wagner Farm Rescue Fund toward humane outcomes for all animals associated with WF.
If 4H actually were to be prohibiting humane outcomes, then even more so it would emphasize that the program itself is intrinsically flawed and the tax payer purchased and supported Wagner Farm should be disassociating itself from 4H participation.
Also, all the fairs involved are not necessarily state fairs, but local and county ones, such as the Lake County (IL) Fair that WF participates in.
As far as Wagner Farm Rescue Fund “just” going to these fairs and purchasing the animals directly, there are a multitude of issues involved. For the sake of the length of this article reply, here are just some of them noted:
1) There are usually about 2 dozen lambs/pigs involved coming from WF. Unlike making a placement for two pigs like the Fall/Winter display pigs, placement for 2 dozen animals involves (a) multiple placement sites needed (b) sanctuaries holding multiple placement spots open just in case we happen to be the high bidder on auction day. Sanctuary placement isn’t like making advance hotel reservations – spots are very limited, and every day that a spot is held, that’s another day where another immediately available animal would lose a spot. Therefore, sanctuaries can’t hold spots indefinitely, or won’t hold them at all, and with that number of animals, we couldn’t be sure that on auction day if all – or any – sanctuary spots would still be available. Then there would be the issue of where we would bring 2 dozen large animals to at last minute’s notice.
2) Transport has to be arranged in advance too; it’s not like we have a truck, trailer, and driver at our daily disposal (and with tax payer resources) like WF has. To arrange for someone else’s equipment and time (and pay them if this isn’t being donated) to be tied up for a day just in case we’re the high bidders is also an inconvenience to someone else who is then going without their truck and trailer for a day for their own work, and/or an expense to us if we would have to pay, for animals we don’t even know we’ll be able to acquire. And, with 2 dozen animals, we’d most likely need multiple trucks, trailers and drivers, as again, we don’t have the variety of equipment in varying sizes as the publicly funded WF has at their daily disposal.
3) Animal stress is the most crucial issue. Auction day is very chaotic. After having to first spend days in the chaos of the fair and having people poking at them, kids running around screaming, etc., the animals are often physically and emotionally drained. Picking them up at the fair and then transporting them directly to what would likely be long transports would likely result in animal deaths themselves, just from transport. This is one of the reasons that we wanted WF to bring the animals back to Glenview (a ride of only an hour or so from the Lake County Fair) – with financial compensation offered to them – and then give the animals a day to de-stress, and then we’d pick them up for their long-haul transport. Pigs, especially, don’t transport well (they have an innate fear of transport meaning death), and even short hauls that are humane require frequent stopping, giving them water, and calming them down. Transport straight from auction would require us to have an entire transport team available, and experienced animal handlers with medical knowledge included for a humane transport to be conducted.
These explanations are a short answer to a very vast and complex situation that is only exacerbated by Wagner Farm refusing to work with us on humane outcomes.