When Animals Escape
“Chico, the leader of the cows, was keeping the authorities behind a tree, so that his brothers could run out of that area.”
In 2017, six young bullocks crashed through fences to escape a slaughterhouse. People around the world watched as news teams captured footage of the animals cantering through the streets of St. Louis, trying to find their way to safety. Their fear and confusion were apparent; they were, after all, very young; just a year old and they had seen enough horrors.
“You could see the terror in their eyes. They had nowhere to go and no one to help them, but they were desperate to live,” sanctuary owner Ellie Laks Weiner told The Dodo. “There was one clip where Chico, the leader of the cows, was keeping the authorities behind a tree, so that his brothers could run out of that area. It was very deliberate that they were trying to keep each other alive.” When they were sent back to the slaughterhouse, public outrage galvanised. “I looked at my husband and said ‘they have come with a story to share with the world and we have to help them’,” remembers Weiner.
“Heroes escape death” is the plot of countless blockbusters. And like their screen counterparts, everyone was rooting for the St Louis Six (except perhaps the police and the slaughterhouse owner). When they eventually found shelter, at the Weiners’ Missouri sanctuary, The Gentle Barn, the relief was visceral, as if some tacit natural order had been restored. Similarly, in the UK, in 2021, when a pregnant sow escaped a breeding facility to give birth to ten piglets in nearby woodlands in Ollerton, more than 5,000 people signed a petition to save them. "I just felt that she had earned her freedom,” said Anna Ason, who had come across the pigs during a dog walk. Matilda and her babies now live at Surge Sanctuary.
Physical and conceptual ruptures
Captive animals try to escape all the time but while the St Louis Six and Ollerton 11 found refuge, most do not. For every bullock like Chico, 332,000,000 cows are killed for meat every year; for every sow like Matilda, nearly 1.5 billion pigs are slaughtered. Swiftly subdued, any efforts to get free will go unseen.
More than 5,000 people signed a petition to save Matilda and her piglets. Picture: Brinsley Animal Rescue.
For the industrial animal complex, the escaped animal is an irritation - and not simply because they require money and energy to subdue. If they make it onto the cameras, escaped animals offer a glimpse behind the slaughterhouse wall, challenging standard narratives that animals are compliant, even stupid, participants in the work of feeding and clothing the nation. Tim Reysoo is an industry lobbyist and academic, contributor to the Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals. “Escaped animals cause a physical and conceptual rupture by occupying spaces where they are considered ‘out of place … “ he writes, in his thesis ‘Species Privilege and Human Innocence: Understanding Oppression in a Multi-Species World. “They cross human constructed borders … these borders are as much imaginary and discursive as they are physical and material. Border transgressions enable us to ‘realise that a boundary even existed.’” [1]
Via social media, people can watch those ‘border transgressions’ all the time. From June and Susan, the only survivors of a mass escape from a Los Angeles slaughterhouse to Trece, the spherical black piglet found trotting down on a road in Spain, the posts attract thousands of likes (11,900 for June and Susan; 184,000 for Trece) and messages of encouragement and gratitude. Seeing reactions to a successful escape can be one of the most heart-warming experiences on the net. Whether they lead to long-lasting change to farming and diets or if they encourage suppporters to speak up for other animals is another matter.
Cultivating abstraction
In Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era, Sarat Colling tells the stories of dozens of such escapes. Each “challenges the notion that [animals] are voiceless,” she says. “As witnesses, the public is forced to confront the animals’ individuality and sentience.” Time after time, the animals demonstrate qualities that should be recognisable to all of us: courage and defiance, imagination and intelligence, the list goes on. In Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park, young gorillas worked together to dismantle snares. When Bonnie the cow heard the cries of her family being forced onto a trailer, she fled, surviving by foraging and running with a herd of deer.
Once animals are safe, however, for most the story seems to end; a thought process akin to: “The St Louis Six are fine now. Anyone fancy a burger?” Advocates have spent decades trying to decipher the cognitive gymnastics that make this possible. Reysoo terms it ‘human innocence’, a lens of wilful ignorance that renders onlookers blind to other narratives. That blindness is so strong that, “because of human privilege, humans do not [even] recognise animal resistance as resistance,” he writes. (Reysoo, p31-2)
There is a “vehement denial of the systemic issues at play,” agrees Colling. “Faced with the escaped animal, people struggle to reconcile their compassion for individual animals with their choices that support animal enterprises.” The fallback position, the one that maintains the status quo, is to laud that animal as somehow exceptional. “Celebrating animals who escape as having ‘earned’ their freedom perpetuates selective empathy while failing to acknowledge the horrors that forced these animals to flee,” warns Colling.
The Matrix can be a comforting place to be; you get to eat what you want and wear who you want without the inconvenience of conscience. It’s not accidental, says Colling: “The normalization of animal exploitation is intended to prevent the public from questioning every day animal oppression. It ensures that the countless animals left behind remain anonymous and abstracted, hidden within the industrial process.” And the process is thorough, working technologically and culturally. In New Zealand, sheep farmers are so concerned that lambs who open fences will teach others to do the same that they shoot them. Selective breeding eliminates ‘difficult’ individuals (Reysoo, p25). Slaughterhouses and factory farms are hidden from view, “blending into landscapes and building walls that fragment perception and experience,” says Colling. That long, windowless barn you thought was a grain store? Probably not.
All that breeding, shooting and obfuscation are testaments to extraordinary animal agency, as are the buildings they live and die in. “Animals’ wills to live are evidenced by the complex structures designed to prevent their resistance and escape in the slaughterhouse - such as narrow chutes, corridors, and hoods and the kill floors they lead towards,” writes Colling (p48).
In recognising the necessity of constraint, however, is where we can begin to re-acknowledge animal power. “The whole point is to understand animals not as the ultimate losers of culture and capitalism but as resistant agents within a non-innocent conflict,” wrote Fahim Amir, in the award-winning Being and Swine: The End of Nature (As We Knew It). “[In that way], the whole assemblage of technologies for tagging and manipulating, of architectures of control and confinement, of hormones and calcium supplements, of aviaries and pens, of nets and baits would not be merely monuments to their misery, but proof of monstrous power.” [cited, Reysoo, p25]
For 40 days, Emily evaded capture before being sent to Peace Abbey. Photo: Meg Randa/Middlesex News.
When animals escape
The power is indeed monstrous, a ‘moral atrocity’, as historian Rutger Bregman describes factory farming. That power is challenged when escapes bring about change. In 1995, a cow called Emily leapt a five foot gate from the Hopkinton slaughterhouse. For 40 days, with the help of locals, she evaded capture before being sent to Peace Abbey, a foundation in Sherborn dedicated to interfaith peace and run by her rescuers, the Randa family. She quickly became a local celebrity, helping “change the narrative of what animals mean in human society,” writes Colling. “Emily’s escape invoked a transformation of consciousness that translated into tangible life changes …
“One woman made such a leap. After meeting Emily, she finally resolved to leave an abusive relationship. The woman said: ‘If she can, I can’ … The Randas point out that Emily compelled people to consider the violence of the dairy industry .. and become plant-based or vegan …. Additionally, Emily’s escape brought awareness to the physical location of the area’s ‘meat’ production. Some residents were unaware there was a slaughterhouse nearby … Finally, Emily inspired people to help others. Sharlet Ramsland was inspired to stop eating animals with her son Charlie and to start an animal sanctuary. Ramsland explained of the transformation, ‘She changed us … She’s very powerful.’” (Colling, p15)
When events end in tragedy rather than happiness, consequences can be even more profound. In 1994, after multiple attempts to flee, a 20-year-old female circus elephant named Tyke killed her trainer before a horrified crowd in Honolulu, escaped from the arena, and then ran through the streets, charging after pedestrians and smashing vehicles before police fired 87 bullets into her body. Tyke had been kidnapped from Mozambique while young. Her trainer was described as a “punishment-type” trainer with several complaints of abuse filed against him. He was said to work the elephants hard. An autopsy found cocaine and alcohol in his system. [3]
From capture to death, Tyke’s story is a devastating indictment of humanity’s relationship with nature. The sheer pitiful horror of it all - this majestic animal driven mad by torture and loneliness, gunned down in the street, thousands of miles from her home and her family - shook the world.
“When Tyke’s resistance was broadcast globally, her story inspired protests, boycotts, and lawsuits directed at circuses,” says Colling [4]. “The city of Honolulu never hosted another circus with wild animals or elephants. Within several years, all elephants were removed from the Hawthorn Corporation, a once-notorious supplier of animals (including Tyke) for the entertainment industry.” In 2018, Hawaii became the second US state to ban exotic animal acts, the ghost of Tyke no doubt urging their decision.
Tyke’s story is a devastating indictment of humanity’s relationship with nature. Picture: Hawaii News Now.
Listening to animal voices
How to begin to address this? The animals themselves are their own best advocates, says advocates. At The Gentle Barn, Chico is still the leader and also, now, a ‘cow ambassador’. “He opens people’s hearts to intelligence, magic and affection of cows every day,” says Weiner. “It is an honour to work beside him.”
Colling tells the story of Justice the cow, who escaped from a slaughterhouse truck and arrived at Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary in Colorado, shattered and terrified. “Sherman, another steer, started licking him and calmed him down,” remembers caretaker Michele. “Justice has remembered that and he’s done it for every new arrival since … it doesn’t matter what species they are … Like when Rowdy, one of the sheep, got here, he was so scared … Rowdy was just screaming his head off and here comes Justice, charging up the hill to help him.” (Colling, p41) “I was deeply moved by Justice’s empathy and care for his fellow residents, especially considering the suffering he had endured himself,” writes Colling. “His reciprocity of care demonstrates a level of intelligence and kindness that challenges common perceptions of farmed animals.”
As do the numerous instances of animals fighting for each other. Chico worked relentlessly to protect his brothers; Matilda knew she had to get her babies somewhere safe. Dairy cows have been known to travel miles to find the children taken from them. “In recent years, heart-wrenching videos of various animal species trying to prevent humans from slaughtering their loved ones have gone viral,” says Colling. “One shows a pig running up to a group of humans who are preparing to slaughter another pig. Another shows a duck defending her friend who is about to be killed.” (Colling, p4) If we were not so conditioned to look away by culture and media, we would see wonderful things.
But these stories vanish if they are not shared. “Animals’ resistance has often been overlooked,” says Colling. “It’s essential to listen to them, interpreting their actions and behaviours as forms of communication and protest [and] illuminating moments of escape to critique broader systems of animal agriculture.”
Recognising animal sentience and dignity and their capacity to love, grieve, grow and imagine: we owe it to Tyke, and Emily, Trece, Matilda, the St Louis Six and so many more to tell their histories. That ‘natural order’ we feel when an animal reaches safety? It’s violated - and violated terribly, millions of times a day. "The fact that we yearn for escaped animals to live speaks volumes about how we value their lives once they have been separated from the anonymous group,” wrote founder of Surge, Ed Winters. “We acknowledge that they are individuals with their own personalities and a clear desire to live. We recognize that there is something they are trying to escape from, that they are fearful, and in a situation they do not want to be in. We view these animals as underdogs, heroes overcoming adversity, and yet that adversity they are trying to overcome is us."
Citations
Reysoo, T. (2023). Species Privilege and Human Innocence: Understanding Oppression in a Multi-Species World. Research Master Thesis Philosophy, University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Humanities.
Colling, S. (2021) Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era. Michigan State University.
Caelan Hughes, ‘30 years ago, a circus elephant who went on a rampage in Honolulu was killed’, Hawaii News Now (Aug. 20, 2024) https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2024/08/20/30-years-ago-circus-elephant-who-went-rampage-honolulu-was-killed/
Bekoff, M. Listening to the Voices of Animals Who Resist Exploitation. Psychology Today (December 1, 2020) https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/animal-emotions/202012/listening-to-the-voices-of-animals-who-resist-exploitation
