Finding sanctuary and safety in the garden of Eden

A Ratoath woman is running 100km this month to raise funds for the Eden Farmed Animal Sanctuary in north Meath.

Lara Lewis can be seen out running around Ratoath every day, as she racks up the kilometres to ensure she meets her gruelling target of 100kms in the month.

She has undertaken the challenge to raise funds for the Eden Sanctuary, which is run by Sandra Higgins and which relies on voluntary fundraising like Lara's.

At Eden they have all kinds of farmed animals - cows, sheep, pigs, goats, chickens, geese, turkeys and dogs.

Every animal who goes through their gates gets a promise that they will stay there and be looked after until the day they die.

“Because they are sentient, feeling beings, they share with us the fundamental rights not to be bred, controlled, owned, used, exploited, harmed or killed,” says Lara.

“When we use them, for any reason, whether it be for food, clothing, research, entertainment, labour or any other reason, we violate those most basic rights.”

Lara has a GoFundMe page and her running is being recorded on Map My Run.

Sandra Higgins, who runs the sanctuary is a psychologist with her own practice and it was one day while looking at lambs, just playing in the fields that it struck her that they value their lives as much as we value ours, and that it's wrong of us to use them.

“After that we rescued a group of 12 chickens and I had the very same experience with chickens. So, kind of unbeknownst to me, Eden was born.

“It was really when I saw the sentence, the fact that other animals can feel and also when I saw the damage that is done to egg laying hens, because they're selectively bred to lay an egg every day, which is the equivalent of a woman ovulating every day. When I saw the terrible damage that that does to them, it moved me to study more about what we do to other animals.

“Through that, and through an encounter that I had on a goat farm, where I realised that in order for us to have milk, the babies are taken away from their mothers the day they're born. In some cases, the males are killed at birth, and then the females are reared apart from their mothers.

“As a psychologist I'm interested in the bond that mothers have with their children and parents have with their children, and how love and care and respect in your early life sets you up for adulthood, and how the reverse can have lifelong consequences. It just struck me as abhorrent that we would do that to other animals, especially when I did some research and realise that we can live perfectly healthy on 100 per cent plant diet that we don't need other animals for clothing, research or entertainment.

“I became very interested in animal rights and veganism so this happened parallel to my work on the sanctuary. The two of them are very much linked. So we have all kinds of farmed animals. They come to us from a wide variety of sources. Very often a farmer will form a bond with an animal, particularly if there's something wrong with them, you know, if they haven't thrived, or been very ill and they were young and through looking after them, they formed a strong bond with them, and they don't want to slaughter them.

“A lot of farmers just look at this as a business, but on the other hand, a lot of farmers tell me that they dread slaughterhouse day, they dread the day the lorry comes to take the animals to what they call the factory.”

Farmers often contact the sanctuary when it comes to the day to slaughter the egg laying hens.

Sandra doesn't like to publicise the location of the north Meath sanctuary, as she needs to keep it safe and tranquil for the animals living there.

“We are reliant on fundraising. It is very expensive and it's even more expensive in the last few years. Supplies have got expensive.

“We have about 230 animals in the sanctuary at the moment. Some of them come to us and there isn't something actually wrong with them but then others come to us obviously in a bad state.

“We have Cormac who was rescued as a calf from the dairy industry. He was the only male born on that farm that year. Because male cattle don't produce milk, the farmer can't profit from them. So we were able to rescue him.

“Some of the animals that come to us don't have anything wrong but others are in really bad shape. “We have animals who've been very badly abused, even tortured.

“We have a goat who arrived in somebody's garden one day with the rope around his neck still attached. “He had ripped that rope off but it was so tightly tied around his neck that it was actually embedded in his skin. He has completely blossomed. He's a completely different goat now.

“And then Amma came to us about a year and a half ago. She is a sheep that had suffered a prolapse because of being bred for the animal flesh and wool industries.

“She was very obviously in distress and by the time we got to her, she was almost dead. We really didn't think she'd make it. We're lucky that we have excellent vets. I couldn't thank our vets enough for the care and attention that they give our animals.

“Amma is wonderful condition today.”

Sandra says the worst thing that we have perpetrated against animals is selective breeding.

“We've progressively altered their bodies to produce more milk, more eggs, carry more flesh, so that we can use them as our resources and most of them are killed very young.

“When they come to a sanctuary we see them in their older age and we see the effects of this selective breeding on them so they take very careful minding to make sure that when they're with us, they have a good quality of life.”

The Sanctuary runs a vegan education campaign called Go Vegan World and they are happy to visit and give talks on veganism.

Donations can be made to Lara's fundraiser at gofundme.com by searching 'help-the-voiceless-animals'