Animal Sanctuary: Lean on me
2024, Acrylic on canvas 36” x 23” $1100
The rescued pig Edgar gave his name to the sanctuary where, among other creatures who needed asylum, and after having learned the law of the land from his best friend, the house dog, attracted the affections of both a cheeky kid goat named Ryan, and Arnie the little sheep. They took naps, hung out together and played. They gave each other many endearing signs of love, and tightly stuck by each other. The feeling which binds them is equal to the ideal landscape, rarely known, and as far removed from the dire conditions of Edgar’s beginnings - the factory farm from which he was rescued - as his survival there, when compared with the joy of living next to his diminutive friends. Why is it that the thought of concentration camps is so pervasive, when we look at factory farms, and what moves people to submit human and non-human alike, to this cruellest of treatments, between life and imminent death?
About the Animal Sanctuary theme:
It is not hard to notice that most cases of friendship among different, often inimical species, occur when animals sheltered in sanctuaries find themselves, on the one hand, freed from the commandment of looking for food; yet sad and lonely because of being separated from their congeners, on the other. Such conditions of isolation bring about a need for vital contact with a friendly body, breathing close to one’s own, that supersedes the drive to acquire nourishment. If we were to consider these friendships with Darwin or Marx, we could say that they are a form of culture, an art of being together that most animals possess. Such frienships have become better known since the progress of the bewildering feats of nature photography, and for us are made real when these fortunate beings’ individual survival is due to the kindness of animal lovers.
How moving to see people dedicate their homes, often modest, to the saving and sheltering of animals in distress. We are tempted to compare their mode of living with compassion with the all powerful, profit-driven conglomerates. Think agribusiness or scientific research, for whose success technology makes available means ever better adapted to produce numbers hard to imagine: animals whose destiny is to be enslaved, exhausted, tortured and killed. Is it even possible to compare such unrestricted explosion of wealth with the scarcity of means available to those who defend the non-human animal well-being?