The Menu

Friday: Stuffed “Ricotta” Shells with Marinara Sauce, topped with Daiya Mozzarella – Caesar Salad – Garlic Bread

Saturday: Pumpkin Seed Asparagus Summer Rolls with Peppers and Sesame Dipping Sauce – Roasted Pear Salad with Toasted Hazelnuts, Pickled Shallots, and Shaved Radishes – Braised Holiday Seitan Loaf with Mushroom Gravy – Butternut Squash-Corn Hash – Sauteed Swiss Chard – Double Chocolate Brownie a la Mode with Peanut Butter Mousse

Sunday: Spicy Tempeh Nori Rolls – Seitan Skewers with Spicy Peanut-Coconut Sauce – Roasted Red Pepper Crostini – Caraway & Rye Crackers with Lentil Pate – Cucumber Salsa Cups – Spiced Chocolate Almond Bark – Coconut Chocolate Truffles – Mini Red Velvet Cupcakes with “Cream Cheese” Frosting

LOVE—SO MUCH LOVE AND THANKS—to all of you who shared kind and loving words of support, along with your memories of a beloved friend. I will cherish them for the rest of my days. A Huffington Post blog about Babe is in the works; meantime, enjoy some of my favorite memories…and please share your own! Particularly if Babe was your impetus for going veg, we’d love to hear your story.

For a (very) short while, Babe was a free-ranger. Only he never went anywhere. Free to roam the entire farm, Babe instead stood smack in the middle of the barn aisle, motionless as Peepers the duck patrolled the barn by waddling frantically back and forth, under Babe’s belly. “Quack-quack, quack-QUACK!!” he’d say, rushing under the black giant, who stood unfazed, eyeing the feed room.

A bunch of us were cleaning the cow field. I stood atop the tractor bucket to bellow instructions to volunteers who were spread throughout the large pasture. Babe wandered up to say hello, but got so close that when he turned his head to flick a fly away, he sent me sailing through the air. I landed with a thud, gathered my breath, then laughed hysterically. Babe startled, but then walked over and licked my head.

6:30 am. Two Kingston police cars pull down our driveway. I’m on my way out to a conference and roll down my window. “Are you missing somebody?” a young cop asks. I remember the smile on his face, and I remember somehow knowing that this was code for “Your cows are standing in the middle of the road.” In the road they were, all right…Babe had led his herd through the woods, down Potter Hill Road, and onto VERY BUSY Rt. 9W…and then just stood there. The escapade, and our return walk home (I led Babe, and the others followed) was on the evening news.

Omega Institute invites us to provide animals for their animal communication workshop. When I open the trailer door to see if Babe wants to join us, he evidently does, because he steps right in. I’ll discuss the unforgettable experience at Omega in my HuffPo blog, but a related memory is a dream I had after we returned home. In the dream, Babe came to me and said, “We did a good job this weekend. We did a good, good job. Thank you for choosing me.”

Thank you: big boy, wiseman, mischief-maker, teacher, friend, gentlest of beasts, for choosing us.

Babe remembered in pictures on Flickr.

Gelding is another important step in these boys’ recovery – a recovery that has come so far! Watching them now, it is hard to believe how desperate their circumstances were just four months ago. Indeed, nurturing an animal back to physical and emotional health is the greatest joy of the work we do. We look forward to the day when each of these boys finds his forever home.

Neutering intact animals is important to our mission at CAS – we would never adopt out an animal who could reproduce. Just as with dogs and cats in the US, there are far more farm animals in need of homes than there are homes available. Therefore, we do our part in curbing the overpopulation problem. At CAS, intact horses, bulls, pigs, goats, sheep, and rabbits are always neutered (under anesthesia and with post-surgery pain medication, of course!).

Thank you to all our supporters for helping make this important work possible.

Chapter One: The Work Begins, shows you the first stages of clearing out the massive vines that have choked the life out of most of the trees on these 32 acres. The video also gives you a chance to see views of the property that haven’t been shown before now!

Enjoy! And watch for next week’s Chapter Two.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Meantime, though, Hannah and I must get the hay. Well, again, I do that part, technically. Hannah’s job is to accompany me to the hay barn, charge maniacally up the stairs to the loft, and then again to the top of the hay, then down. Up and down she leaps and spins in sheer joy of being a young dog hanging with her mama and the critters on a crisp morning. My joy is much more mundane: heaving bale after bale after bale of sweet-smelling timothy hay into the beds of trucks parked below, and smiling as Tucker, Babe and crew bellow impatiently below us. “Mmmm—OOOOO!” Babe will say. “It’s coming, Babe!” I’ll answer.

When we’re done, Hannah will jump into the pickup and we’ll return to the barn and park the trucks. I’ll hug humans and horses and plant a kiss on Rambo’s forehead. We’ll return at 10:30 with coffee and juice, and heaps of steaming fruit pancakes and fakin’ bacon. We’ll chat and laugh and eat our fill, and when we can eat no more, Hannah and I will head to the pig barn, dividing the pancakes among Nadine and Peggy Sue, Amelia and Roscoe, Ozzi and Chopper, and all the rest…

“How do you spend Christmas?” folks ask me every year.

“Exactly the way I want to…” is my response.

Merry Christmas, World.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And rescue we did! In the ensuing years, with your spirit and generosity, we built seven barns and many smaller shelters, fenced twenty pastures, erected paddocks, and enclosures for smaller animals, installed a mile and a half of roads, and put in a solar array to power the entire farm operation…and, well, so much more. Together we created this beautiful haven.

Guess what, friends: it’s time to do it again!

Due to urgent need, and thanks to your incredible generosity, we’ve bought a new farm! Just 2.5 miles from CAS, it needs as much TLC as this place did nine years ago. Yup, the abandoned farm did what abandoned farms do: the buildings decayed, the fencing weakened, fell down, or rotted; and Mother Nature went wild. About six acres is usable as soon as we can install fencing and build shelters; the rest is a dense tangle of vines and briars that have killed hundreds of trees and are choking the life out of the land.

Can we count on you? We need, in short order, money and muscle to prepare this land to accept more animals. With over 200 on our urgent waiting list – a list that grows each day – we’re in overdrive, and hope you’ll come along for the ride! Make your most generous gift today and share our good new with your friends on your Facebook page!

Help us do the impossible…once again.

Happy Holiday from your Friends at CAS

Click here to view the embedded video.

(Guest blog by former CAS Animal Care Director Abbie Rogers)

Two days before Thanksgiving, I drove down the highway with two turkeys in the back seat of my Honda.  But unlike most other turkeys this time of year, these two were curiously looking out the window.  Blue, a resident of Catskill Animal Sanctuary for three years, was used to car rides; she had been to the vet numerous times because of chronic “bumblefoot” (an infection stemming from the pressure of her unnatural twenty-five pound body on her feet).  Through months of daily foot wraps, Blue maintained near-eternal patience, taking her big bandaged foot in stride, and even dozing off during treatments.

Blue molted late this fall and, instead of shedding a few feathers at a time as usual, she pretty much exploded, leaving a flurry of feathers everywhere she went.  Now almost entirely bald, she spent her days basking in front of the heater in the feed room, her eyes half-closed, waiting patiently for her feathers to grow back.

Blue’s friend Henrietta was a little more anxious in the car, shifting her weight and panting as she took in her surroundings.  Henrietta was supposed to be someone’s ninety dollar organic, free-range centerpiece last Thanksgiving, but a friend traded her for one of her frozen Butterball cousins, and Henrietta joined the flock at Catskill Animal Sanctuary.   From day one, it was clear that her left leg, which splayed noticeably outward, was already very arthritic, her six-month-old body having grown well beyond capacity.

Even more noticeable, however, was her exuberance.  Compared with our dignified and sedate older turkeys, Henrietta was a wild child.  No potential snack was safe; even buttons and fingers were fair targets (how do you know it’s not edible unless you try?).  She could hobble across the barn aisle surprisingly quickly and stealthily to grab a sandwich from an unsuspecting hand.

We referred to Henrietta as the sanctuary’s token feminist.  She and the other turkeys bunked in a stall with several broiler hens – chickens raised for meat – and whenever a free-ranging rooster harassed one of her hens, Henrietta went after him.  Puffing up her feathers and sounding a shrill war cry, she would drive the offending rooster down the barn aisle and out the door.  Only when she was satisfied that he had gotten the message would she shake herself off and return to her post, cuddled in a bed of straw with Atlas the goat.

Henrietta’s limp never slowed her down, but in the past month, she had developed bumblefoot that made her one weight-bearing toe on her bad foot swell to many times its normal size.  Despite ice baths, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, and padded bandages, the huge, hot toe, with skin stretched almost to the point of splitting, refused to heal.  Amazingly, while the toe was clearly very painful, Henrietta diligently continued her duties as rooster patrol and generally remained as curious and energetic as ever.  That is, until this weekend, when she rapidly declined.  While we had hoped for a miraculous recovery, it was clear that the tissues in Henrietta’s toe were dying.  She couldn’t support her full thirty-pound body on one foot, so amputation wasn’t an option.  We had no choice.  We had to let her go.

While we waited in the vet’s office, I caressed the soft, warm, sweet-smelling skin on Henrietta’s head and neck while she made purring noises and blinked slowly.  The sparse, hair-like feathers on her head rose in satisfaction.  Blue chirped and preened the little feathers that were starting to come in on her back and chest.  She padded around, exploring all the shiny things in the exam room, but never going too far from Henrietta, whose foot had become too painful to walk on.

When the vet arrived with the euthanasia injection, I held Henrietta and kissed her as she quietly slipped away.

On the drive back to the sanctuary, Blue and I stopped at Karma Road Café in New Paltz, NY to share a piece of vegan pumpkin pie after our emotional morning.   Blue ate politely from a fork, but still managed to get pumpkin all over her face.  When I informed the café staff that their pie was “turkey-approved,” they eagerly took a break from preparing vegan Thanksgiving orders to come say hello and get their pictures taken with this living, breathing Thanksgiving spirit.  As Blue cleaned up the last crumbs of crust, I gave thanks to be celebrating the holiday with such a gentle and beautiful friend.  And I gave thanks for Henrietta, who had gained an unexpected year of life, love, and happiness, while we had gained her humor, her tenacity, her spunk, her curiosity, her vibrancy, and her heart.

In a crate in the back of her hatchback, a large white turkey is close to hyperventilating; her legs are splayed out — a debilitating condition brought on by an industry that forces animals to grow so quickly that many actually die of violent heart attacks within the first few weeks of life.

As we’re settling the bird we name “Henrietta” into her quarantine area, where she’ll live for a few weeks until we know it’s safe to introduce her to our other turkeys, I ask Anna what compelled her to save this turkey’s life.

CLICK HERE to read more of this blog on Huffington Post.

From the moment I met him, I knew that I would never be the same. Many animals rescued from severe neglect and abuse arrive skittish, withdrawn, distrustful. Some are terrified. Some are angry.  Not Atlas: he was hungry for affection. If you sat down in front of him, he would inch over on his shaky legs, and nuzzle your face before laying his head in your lap. I often wondered how this animal who had endured such suffering could be so open and loving. Soon I realized that he must have known that he was safe and loved by compassionate people, and that he had been given another chance at happiness. In his heart, I believe, he had left his sad past behind him and embraced his new life at CAS.

 
“Live each day as if it were your last!” is something that we hear a lot, and while it’s much easier said than done, Atlas did just that.  As part of the free-ranging “Underfoot Family” in the main special-needs barn, Atlas was a quiet yet powerful presence.  He charmed all who were fortunate enough to meet him, enjoyed his ginger cookies and strawberries with gusto, zipped around in his custom-made wheelcart, and up until the last few weeks of his life, refused to let his disability get in the way of greeting friends in the main barn, and occasionally strolling to the nearby willows. The chickens and turkeys flocked to him each day — he and Henrietta shared a special bond — and the birds spent many peaceful days nesting in the hay beside him. Atlas reminded us that every day is a precious gift, and that forgiveness is essential if we are to make the most of second chances.  For all these reasons and more, Atlas had many friends.

Earlier this month, his crippled body had become so painful and immobilized that we knew we had to set him free. So, on November 11th, a year and a half after he joined the CAS family, we offered him our final act of love by letting him go in peace. Nestled in his favorite hay bed, munching alfalfa until the last moment, and surrounded by many of the people who cherished him most, Atlas passed on in peace. We will forever miss the sparkle in his eyes, that crooked smile, and his gentle spirit. At the same time, we know that he would want us to fill the space he left behind with more souls needing a second chance at happiness — so we move on and honor his life by doing just that.

 
Check out snapshots and videos of Atlas’ life at CAS, and please share your memories with us!

Ciara will act as the main liaison with local veterinarians, implement health care regimens, monitor the well-being of the animals, and manage diets.

Ciara grew up in the Capay Valley of Northern California, where she developed an appreciation of the outdoors and sustainable farming. She credits her mother (who does German Shepherd rescue) for instilling in her a love of animals.

Ciara received her degree in Animal Science from Colorado State University, studying at the school’s highly esteemed large animal veterinary teaching hospital. After college she completed her graduate thesis work in Hawaii where she concentrated on marine biology and frequently visited Alaska to study harbor seals. Most recently, Ciara worked at the University of California at Davis’ veterinary teaching hospital where she concentrated on large animals.

When she’s not working, Ciara’s loves to dote on her three cats and two dogs, play tennis, go camping and hang out by the ocean. She is currently working towards her PhD in Animal Science.

"I have dedicated my whole life and scholastic career to animals; it has always been my goal to be the voice they do not have to keep them safe."