What it's really like to volunteer at a farm animal sanctuary
Picking up poop for the cause
Vegan influencers love to visit farm animal sanctuaries and take gorgeous, melodramatic pictures of themselves posing with the aniamls.1
They always make me chuckle. Because I know that sanctuary work is less about tenderly looking into an animal’s eyes and more about shoveling away their ungodly amounts of poop.
I do a volunteer shift every other week at a 33 acre sanctuary near Milwaukee called Tiny Hooves. They care for over 130 goats, pigs, cows, sheep, chickens, ducks, and other animals. Each one was cast aside by the industrial animal agriculture machine.
Tiny Hooves is the best. The staff and volunteers are happy, supportive, and working hard to help the residents. (Everyone at Tiny Hooves call the animals residents.)
And I mean working hard. It takes a lot of physical farm labor behind the scenes to set the stage for the influencers to come in and get their perfect shot.
Poop and Water, Water and Poop
As a low level grunt, I usually spend my 4 hour shift doing two things — picking up poop and refilling waters.
It is not glamorous, but it’s therapeutic. At my real job, I spend a lot of time in front of a computer. There’s something nice about switching it up, using my body, and doing simple tasks that have immediate rewards. Instead of sending an email that will hopefully lead to a sale 3 months from now, I get to work in a stall for 25 minutes and then go, “Poop gone. Nice.”
If you’re picking up horse and donkey poop, you might get lucky and be followed around the whole time by Peedy, so at least you have a friend with you.
Besides the water and poop, other tasks I’ve done include:
Prepping food
Feeding pigs
Feeding and watering the chickens and waterfowl
Filling up kiddie pools and mud pits for the pigs
Giving goats water
Helping bribe sheep besties Dani and Violet back to where they should be after a fence was left open and they went a wanderin’
While the work can be difficult and sometimes tedious, the overall atmosphere at the farm is calming. It’s like a throwback to a simpler time. People don’t work with Airpods in. Phones get checked, but no one is glued to them. There’s sometimes a tinny old speaker playing classic rock in the barn, sometimes not. It’s just you and the breeze and some brays, neighs, and oinks. A free little meditation getaway, if you look at it with an open mind.
A day in the life
A typical 4 hour shift looks like this:
Arrive, check in with shift leader to see where I’m most needed
I’m usually told to either start mucking stalls or filling up the indoor waters
If I’m doing stalls, I get a shovel, a big plastic tined rake thing for scooping, and a wheelbarrow. The goal is usually to scoop out the turds and pee-pee while leaving the majority of the shavings still in the stall. There are also full on cleanings, where you clear out dump all the old material and then put down fresh shavings.
When doing the indoor waters, you unwind a giant hose and go from stall to stall emptying out the old water buckets, wiping them out, and filling them up again. You dump the old water in a wheelbarrow and wheel that out to the manure pile. This is all a pretty good workout, because most of the water buckets are still pretty full when you have to change them.
That’s basically it. I’ll assist in other miscellaneous tasks, such as taking out the garbage, dong the dishes, or assisting with a construction project. The farm seems to be a magnet for retired locals who volunteer to do stuff like build a fence from scratch and install it, all in a few hours. I can’t fathom that level of handyman competence.
The adorable parts of the job
Even though I mostly just muck stalls and fill up water buckets, I find time to hang with the animals. There are generally other workers and volunteers who encourage me to take breaks and do fun things like feeding the cows or petting the pigs. Apparently a big reason people stop volunteering is they get sick of just doing chores and never getting to spend time with the residents, so the team has made a concerted effort avoid that.
I mostly hang out near the barn, so I’ve grown especially fond of the house pigs, as they are called. These are all potbellies (I think? Still learning so much). I’ll stop by and see if anyone wants some pets, which they usually do. They like being scratched with a dishwasher scrubber. When you hit the right spot they flop over, the picture of contentment.
There is currently a moratorium on feeding snacks to the residents. Many of them are gaining too much weight. It’s incredibly fun to feed them, so I get why things got out of hand.
Shoutout to the sanctuaries
The people who keep these places going are incredible. The job is relentless, and the animals need their needs taken care of day and night, in the blazing heat and the raging snowstorms. I am always tired after doing just 4 hours. It really has to be a calling to make it your life.
I used to have lots of daydreams about starting my own sanctuary. It seemed so fun! And at times, it totally is. But it’s also a lot of poop patrol and water refills and vet appointments and mending broken gates and cleaning out algae filled pools and keeping track of medications and stocking a kitchen and sweeping the floors and posting on social media and soliciting donations and hosting events. I’m not totally ruling out going down that road one day, but I think my skillset can be best used elsewhere in the movement.
I am glad I started volunteering so that I could learn first hand that it’s not all cute pics and goat nuzzling. It’s given me a greater appreciation for the people who do this kind of work. Because of them, I get to spend time amongst all these happy beings, almost all of whom would be dead by now without this kind of intervention. After almost any interaction with a resident, no matter the species, I find myself exclaiming, “They’re just like my dogs!” Which really just means they like getting pet, playing around, and expressing their personalities. That seems to be a universal trait, and it’s through spending time at sanctuaries I was able to really internalize that.
I say this with love. This dude John seems great and does a lot for animals. I bet we’d be friends in real life.
I would love to do this as well. Unfortunately, all the animal sanctuaries near me (central NJ) are either non-vegan for-profit places where they do things like give horse riding lessons and have a gift shop selling animal products (wtf!), or they're two hours away from me, which is difficult for me.