A few weeks before Charlotte’s Web was to be published, author E.B. White’s editor asked him to explain why he wrote the book about a livestock pig, Wilbur, who becomes friends with a heroic spider named Charlotte. In the now beloved novel, Charlotte saves Wilbur from slaughter by weaving messages — “SOME PIG,” “RADIANT,” “TERRIFIC,” and “HUMBLE” — into her web in the doorway of Wilbur’s stall. In doing so, she draws attention to Wilbur as an individual pig full of personality, and ensures that Wilbur is saved and cherished thereafter.
In response to his publisher’s request for explanation, White wrote: “A farm is a peculiar problem for a man who likes animals, because the fate of most livestock is that they are murdered by their benefactors. I have kept several pigs, starting them in spring as weanlings and carrying trays to them all through summer and fall. Day by day I became better acquainted with my pig, and he with me, and the fact that the whole adventure pointed toward an eventual piece of double-dealing on my part lent an eerie quality to the thing. I do not like to betray a person or a creature, and I tend to agree … that in these times the duty of a man, above all else, is to be reliable. Anyway, the theme of “Charlotte’s Web” is that a pig shall be saved, and I have an idea that somewhere deep inside me there was a wish to that effect.”
That wish is also deep inside our guest today. For over 30 years, Gene Baur has been a heroic, real-life, highly strategic, two-legged “Charlotte” for thousands of farm animals, changing millions of hearts and minds about animals and food. Baur is the co-founder and president of Farm Sanctuary, one of the nation’s largest animal rescue organizations that provides refuge for animals who had been abused, confined, and commodified as part of the U.S. factory farm system. Compared to Farm Sanctuary’s rescues, Wilbur lived a great life. White published Charlotte’s Web in 1952, just as factory farming was being invented and a decade before it began to rapidly spread – first with poultry, then pigs and cows. Today, 99% of U.S. farm animals spend their lives in large-scale industrial animal factories. Baur has made it his life’s work to try to change this.
Continue reading Ep. 32 – Gene Baur on changing hearts, minds and laws about farm animals