If super-model mini-pigs were a thing, Chandra would grace the cover of GQ. Thick black and white hair covers his body, leaving only his perfectly round pink pot belly exposed. His almond-shaped eyes gaze impishly from under long white eyelashes. While not endowed with legs-for-days, his petite hooves do add a dash of daintiness to his sashay. And the velvety ears, always alert, are waiting to hear a favorite word or two—apples, kisses, belly rubs. Chandra is gorgeous and it’s obvious he knows it; he exudes sangfroid.
On an overcast, chilly autumn day, I introduce my dear friend Sue to Chandra, who has lived among the rolling hills and verdant fields at Indraloka Animal Sanctuary in Northeast Pennsylvania since his rescue eight months earlier. Found abandoned on a rural road with a rope-like substance and a piece of metal embedded in his severely infected torso, Chandra has not only healed from his ordeal and the surgery that followed without a scar, he has become a healing presence for others. I’m hoping he can work his magic on Sue, whose recent loss of her forty-eight-year-old husband, Steven, to a brutal battle with cancer has left her devastated. I feel powerless to help her, so I’m turning to the one place I know that mends even the most broken souls.
I began volunteering at Indraloka during the spring of 2020, after being in lockdown for nearly two months. The sanctuary needed volunteers to lead virtual tours—Goat to Meetings—for corporate and school groups that signed up to have farm animals make guest appearances during video meetings. From the start, the animals provided adorable moments coupled with comic relief. Goats, in particular, put on a performance. They chewed my hair, snatched the sunhat off my head, stood on their hind legs and pressed their noses to the tiny screen to get a better look at the guests squealing with delight. The goats knew when I arrived holding an iPhone horizontally, speaking in my cheerleader voice, out of breath from talking while jog-walking, it meant one thing: It’s showtime!
Employees of tech and Fortune 500 companies, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and essential healthcare workers visibly changed when the animals came on camera. Smiles lit up their faces as their heads moved closer to their screens, voices rising in excitement. They un-slouched their shoulders and unclenched their jaws. As I witnessed the animals’ effect on people, I saw the symbioses of the relationships. Money from the tours helped build additional barns to enable more animal rescues, while worker malaise turned to joy, for a short time, at least. For me, fear about my finances and future lifted, replaced by a sense of purpose and connection to both humans and animals. I grew close, in particular, to the pigs, especially the charismatic Chandra.
Now, Chandra greets Sue by flopping over for her to rub his belly. She dutifully complies, her dimples deepening as she chuckles.
“This little guy is ridiculous,” she says, “a natural comedian.”
In our circle of friends, Sue is known for her barbed one-liners, but she’d fired off few zingers during the last year, and the rich alto laughter—Sue is a singer—had disappeared. Chandra is succeeding where everyone else has been failing.
Burrowed under a pile of straw is Chandra’s roommate Mazzie, a minipig who possesses a more subtle beauty and timid personality than Chandra. When he was rescued from an animal hoarding situation by Indra Lahiri, founder of Indraloka, his spine had been crushed because he and a dozen or so goats and sheep had been packed into one small shed. Indra doesn’t get into the specifics of what kind of human being would subject gentle, defenseless animals to such unsafe and inhumane conditions. She chooses to focus on rescue and rehabilitation and that means forging friendly, if uneasy, relationships with the type of people from whom animals—and sometimes people—need rescuing.
“Indraloka provides compassion for everyone, even those who may seem not to deserve it,” Indra explains. “This is a sanctuary for everyone.”
In Mazzie’s case, Indra thanked the person who turned over Mazzie to her care, then rushed the little pig to a vet. Mazzie couldn’t walk; he propelled himself forward with his front legs, dragging his rear legs behind him. The sanctuary commissioned a special wheelchair attachment to help him ambulate. He refused to use it. A year and countless physical therapy sessions later, Mazzie has full use of three legs and significant improvement to the fourth leg. Today, he can root and run as well as anyone.
Running a farm animal sanctuary is not a job. It’s a calling. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Indraloka cares for between two hundred and three hundred pigs, cows, horses, goats, sheep, turkeys, chickens, peafowl, mules, alpacas, bunnies, and others at any given time. Plus all the feral cats and housecats people simply drop off to roam its one hundred acres, beyond which copses of evergreens sprawl. Most of the “beloveds,” as Indra, her staff and volunteers call them, have endured agony to reach the point of rescue. Indra has dedicated her life, and most of her resources, to providing a paradisiacal experience from the moment they arrive at Indraloka until the end of their lives.
“I wish there were a place for rescued humans,” Sue says. “I guess we have versions of that in society, but wouldn’t it be great to be adopted by a benevolent force and brought to live on a farm, even for a little while?”
From beneath his blanket of straw, Mazzie squeaks his agreement.
Pigs are the Ph.D.’s of the barnyard. They excel at video games and learn how to play them quicker than chimpanzees and three-year-old humans, researchers at Penn State claim. For context, dogs could not figure the games out at all. Pigs have excellent long-term memories and are highly empathetic. Indra says pigs’ intelligence is comparable to that of a seven-year-old child; other animal advocates claim their cognitive ability is closer to that of a fifth-grader. Pigs are good at math, particularly when foraging, and they comprehend symbolism, which I imagine means Mazzie and Chandra have as much a chance of understanding James Joyce’s Ulysses as I do.
Duncan, an eight-hundred-pound-farm pig, is one of the rare rescues that was prompted by neither neglect nor abuse. He and his brother Nugget were born on a pig farm, destined to a life crammed in cages until their inevitable slaughter. When their mother died shortly after their birth, the farmer reached out to a neighbor to help with caring for them through their infancy. A second-grade teacher, the neighbor began bringing the piglets to class and including them as part of the curriculum. Duncan and Nugget starred in stories and essays; their weight was used to illustrate math problems. The children took turns bottle feeding the baby pigs. Once the pigs were weaned, the farmer came calling to take them back.
“What are you going to do with them?” The teacher had her suspicions but hoped she was wrong.
“I’m going to do what we do with pigs.”
The teacher refused to relinquish Duncan and Nugget and, instead, brought them to Indraloka, where they became goodwill ambassadors for newly rescued animals and symbols of the sanctuary to the community. Architecture students from a local university designed and constructed a Leeds-certified chalet for the pair. Perhaps harkening back to their elementary school days, they showed a particular fondness for children. In recent years, as elderly pigs—no one knows the actual life expectancy of most farm animals, since few are afforded a natural lifespan and farm sanctuaries are a relatively recent concept—both spent far more time snoozing in their pens than running and rooting. There were some exceptions, though. With children, both pigs wrestled themselves upright and doted on the kids.
Nugget passed away last summer while Duncan, now eleven, has become part of a new drove that includes two lambs, Rosie and Sunita, and Sandy, the alpaca. Sandy, who is also around eleven years old, was left for dead by a backyard breeder. When Indra and her team rescued Sandy, they prepared themselves for a possible euthanasia situation. Sandy could not walk. She couldn’t even stand upright. Her left eye was infected with covered in puss and abscesses. Seven months later, sweet Sandy is sometimes wobbly on her legs as she ambles around her pasture, grazing, but she is healthy, happy, well-adjusted, and takes her job of fussing over Duncan very seriously.
Lambs Rosie and Sunita are also new to the sanctuary. Rosie was orphaned when the farmer who bred her, in a fit of rage, ran her mother over with his tractor. The lamb was not yet weaned and needed bottle-feeding. Sunita was discovered hiding in rural woods; it took weeks for her to allow rescuers close enough to catch her and bring her to safety. Both lambs required a protective environment that did not isolate them from being part of a herd, so Indra placed them with Duncan and Sandy, both of whom understand abandonment and are nurturing of others, regardless of species. This section of the barn is where the most vulnerable go to heal, and this is where I notice something shift in Sue.
When Sue enters Duncan’s pen, he opens his eyes, his ears fluttering. “You have company,” I tell him, and warn Sue it’s unlikely he’ll show much enthusiasm and she should not take that personally. I visit with Duncan at least weekly and I can’t remember the last time he stood up to greet me, despite my proffering apples, his favorite treat. A day earlier, I had sat with him, feeding him pineapple and telling him about Sue, her loss of Steven during the pandemic that often kept her isolated from him while he bravely underwent a complete shutting down of his immune system in the hopes that a stem cell transplant would take hold and help beat back the invasive spread of cancer. “With Steven’s death, a light has gone out in Sue and she needs to know that it’s possible for her to shine again,” I’d told Duncan.
Now, to my amazement, Duncan struggles to his feet and sidles over to Sue. He rubs his enormous snout on her thigh. Sue strokes his neck as I explain that Duncan understands the despair of losing a soul mate. Tears brim behind Sue’s glasses, which are fogged from the mask she’s wearing, but her voice is stronger, more resonant, as she speaks. “I know this is going to sound obvious, but it’s startling to me how different all the animals feel. Before today, I never thought of farm animals as individuals.”
Duncan waddles out to his pasture, looking back, seemingly beckoning us to follow. “Okay, then,” Sue says, and I fall in behind her.
Outside, near his wallow—mud baths are essential for regulating pigs’ body temperature and protecting them against the elements—the three of us huddle together against the wind, our bodies touching. I gush over what an honor it is for Duncan to show so much interest in Sue. Sue and Duncan maintain steady eye contact. Both are smiling as a thin ray of sunlight cuts through the gloom. “I can actually see the intelligence in his eyes,” Sue says.
If pigs are the smartest of domestic animals, sheep are the stealthiest. Most of the sheep at Indraloka are senior citizens whose achy joints are apparent in their stiff-legged parades in and out of the barn. Despite their age, the sheep are gifted ninjas. One moment, they are nowhere to be found, grazing so far out in the pasture, they’ve become black and white dots on the horizon. Turn your back and a second later, there they are, surrounding you, and you never even hear them arrive until one lets out a gentle baa. They simply materialize without so much as disturbing the air. Now, they encircle Sue, begging for her to pet them and scratch their ears.
“They’re like a bunch of gigantic cats,” Sue laughs.
All farm animals are more similar to cats and dogs than they are different from them. Like dogs, sheep and goats learn their names quickly and can be trained to do tricks, including shaking hands, walking on their hind legs, and jumping through hoops. They can also be house trained. That’s not to say that either goats or sheep should be kept as pets. Unless you live on a farm, you’d be hard-pressed to provide them with the right environment in which they could thrive. Herd animals succumb to depression when isolated from their community. And don’t even think of using them as props in your yoga practice. Those baby goats that were all the rage before the pandemic, were ripped away from their mothers while only a few days old. Goats grow swiftly. By three months of age, a baby goat weighs about eighty pounds. And what happens to the goats when their yoga days are done? Because there’s little demand for goat meat, most are simply discarded like a worn-out yoga mat.
It’s easy to avoid thinking about how chicken, beef, bacon, lamb, and other animal products end up in the grocery store, bearing no resemblance to their majesty as living creatures. The truth behind that neat, sterile packaging is too awful to face. While commercials for milk and other dairy products proclaim cows are living la dolce vita on beautiful expanses of meadows, factory farming methods for producing relatively cheap animal products could not be further from that image.
Chicken parts began being mass produced in factories in the early twentieth century. Farmers crowded vast numbers of poultry indoors, depriving them of sunlight, fresh air, space, and their natural diets, for the purpose of egg production and eventual slaughter. Since that time, excess chicks are tossed into grinders alive, and “shredded,” as a means of disposing of them efficiently.
Factory farming was limited to chickens until the 1960s when pig farmers began cramming livestock indoors. Cow farmers followed. Today, ninety-four percent of animals bred for human consumption are inhumanely raised on factory farms.
One of the biggest fallacies that allows otherwise compassionate people to continue supporting factory farming is the belief that these animals are, somehow, non-sentient, that they do not feel pain, that they do not understand their own suffering and the suffering of their kind. This is categorically untrue.
According to a 2017 study on chicken intelligence published in the journal Animal Cognition, even newly-hatched chicks are able to perform basic arithmetic and anticipate future events based on experience. Further, they create complex social systems and exhibit extraordinary self-awareness.
All farm animals possess remarkable brain function. Psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, authors of A General Theory of Love, determined the mammalian brain is far more similar across all species than dissimilar. In other words, all animals—including those exploited for food—think and feel, more or less, the same as us.
Like humans, cows weep. I tell Sue about Mookie, who was bred on a “humane” organic farm. As a newborn, he was orphaned when the farmer didn’t realize his mother had given birth and she was carted off for slaughter. Later, the farmer found the calf in the pasture, and by that time Mookie was nothing but bones and fleas. When he arrived at Indraloka unlikely to survive, the herd edged into the barn and surrounded him. Tears streamed out of their huge doleful eyes. Penny, who had been at the sanctuary for over seven years and had not given birth during that time (the sanctuary neuters all males upon arrival), began spontaneously lactating when she saw the starved baby and nursed him into the strapping adolescent he’s become. Today, Mookie and his best friend Jimmy enjoy romping, snuggling, and greeting visitors.
“If you’re ever here during sunset, you might see them running across the pasture as if they’re celebrating,” I say, hoping Sue will want to return.
Rescued farm animals remind me of my rescued dogs—they seem to get how fortunate they are to be in a loving home. Like dogs, farm animals crave attention from their humans and find ways to encourage us to heap loads of love on them. Cows are the most dignified in their approach, using their expressive eyes and impressive voices to draw people in. Goats are the most mischievous. In fact, I’m certain the word “goat” means naughty in some other language. Indra would take exception with my saying this, but I do so out of admiration. If I was told I had to spend the rest of my days with only one other species, I’d probably choose goats. Goats have an excellent sense of humor, a flair for the dramatic, and impeccable timing. Today, for Sue, they are on.
Two young goats, Star and Soul, dance together on their hind legs. Mira, a female goat with a long red beard, poses on top of a bale of hay. Gideon’s dark face is covered in orange pumpkin pulp as he prances around. Sukumar tries to head butt Jose, who deftly dodges him.
Bapu the herd leader and father of many of the other goats, struts over to Sue. He offers her his snout, ostensibly so she can kiss him. He lowers his head to show her his magnificent horns. He stands up on his hind legs and drapes his front hooves over the fence, as if to say, “See how tall, dark, and handsome I am?” A La Mancha goat, Bapu is truly one of the most beautiful creatures I’ve ever seen: shiny black coat accented with snow white and mocha patches, delicate ears, large golden eyes with rectangular pupils. Bapu is the largest goat in the sanctuary and self-appointed king. It’s Bapu’s world and we are his lieges. As Sue and I walk away, though, we are treated to Bapu’s child-like qualities. He whimpers plaintively.
“We need to run to the office. We’ll be back in two minutes,” I tell him.
He falls silent but waits at the fence for our return. When we do, Sue and I remain on the opposite side of the fence from Bapu, just in case. Before his rescue, he and dozens of other goats, along with Mazzie, had been kept by a hoarder in a small, windowless shed that was covered in feces. The animals had no access to the outdoors, no grass to graze on, no natural light. Although I know Bapu would never intentionally hurt anyone, he does suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. At the sanctuary, physical wounds often heal quickly; the emotional wounds can take more time, just like with humans. I tell Bapu it’s time for us to leave and I will see him in a week. He rears up on his hind legs and throws his head to one side, a dance, but also a plea for me to keep my word.
Sue and I mosey back into the barn to say our goodbyes to the Duncan, Sandy, Rosie, Sunita, Mazzie, and Chandra. Chandra tries to leave with us.
I bend down to look him in the eye. “Do you really think you can find a better place to be than here?”
He turns around and scampers back into his and Mazzie’s large, cushy pen.
“Whoa. He really does understand English.” Sue sounds awed.
“They understand us way better than we understand them,” I say.
As Sue and I walk along the goat pasture fence, heading back to our car, Bapu and the rest of the herd follow alongside us, bleating their goodbyes.
“They’re like the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, seeing us off on the Yellow Brick Road,” Sue says. There’s joy in Sue’s voice, light in her eyes, her singer’s posture—shoulders back, head lifted—has returned.
To me, the animals more closely resemble the Scarecrow, the Tinman, and the Cowardly Lion, testaments to the fact that we, all of us, need a lot of love and support to face life’s difficulties.
The next day, Sue texts me a selfie of her and Duncan. I tell her I believe she inspired him, that he thought if Sue could go through the loss of her beloved Steven and somehow still manage to stand up and face every day, he could shoulder his own burden of life without his beloved Nugget too.
“If I gave any positive energy to Duncan and the rest of the animals at the sanctuary, they gave it back to me in spades,” she texts.
Later we talk. “I can’t stop thinking about Duncan and the rest of the animals,” she says. “I’m really not an animal person. I like animals; I just don’t love them the way some do. But, after yesterday, I think I get it. Who knew animals were so much fun?” Sue’s laugh is hearty, deep, long, and it’s the first time I’ve heard her sound like herself in over a year.
The following week at the sanctuary, I thank everyone for being so kind, generous, and attentive with Sue. I tell them they helped her forget her pain for at least a few hours and that it is the most important act any of us can perform—to help ease another’s suffering. Mazzie stops his rooting and chatters at me. I tell him that when I’m at the sanctuary I sometimes feel like I’m traveling abroad, in a place where everyone understands English, but I can understand only a few words of their language.
From the far corner of the pen, Chandra bounces to his feet and pads over to me. I bend down and he plants a muddy wet kiss on my nose, then rolls over for his belly rubs. Still babbling, Mazzie joins us and I sit, rubbing Chandra’s tummy, listening to Mazzie’s stories, thinking of my dear friend Sue’s wish that there was a place for rescued humans. For me, Indraloka is that place.
Indraloka Animal Sanctuary, a 501(c) nonprofit, is one of the largest farm animal sanctuaries in the world. Indraloka provides “heaven on earth” for farm animals that have nowhere else to turn. The Sanctuary informs, inspires and empowers the community, especially children, on ways in which to better care for themselves and the environment while helping animals in need.
For more information, visit Indraloka.org.
