Mercy For Animals: One Man's Quest to Inspire Compassion and Improve the Lives of Farm Animals - Hardcover

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Nathan Runkle is the founder and president of Mercy For Animals. For two decades Nathan has overseen the organization’s growth into a leading international force in the prevention of cruelty to farmed animals and promotion of compassionate food choices and policies. A nationally recognized speaker on animal advocacy, Nathan has presented at colleges, conferences, and many other forums from coast to coast. He has been featured in hundreds of television, radio, and newspaper interviews, and has worked alongside elected officials, corporate executives, heads of international organizations, academics, farmers, celebrities, and film producers to pass landmark legislation and implement animal-welfare policy changes.

Gene Stone is the author of many bestselling books, including the number-one New York Times bestseller Forks over Knives. He also cowrote the bestsellers How Not to Die, My Beef with Meat, The Engine 2 Diet, and Living the Farm Sanctuary Life.

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1.

Down on the Farm

time: 7:52 a.m.

date: April 13, 1984

location: A couch in a farmhouse just outside  the village of Saint Paris, Ohio

population: 2,051

I suppose it only makes sense that I would someday found an international animal-rights organization, given that I was delivered by a veterinarian.

My mother, Joyce, had been planning a home birth, but on the early spring morning she woke up with excruciating contractions, the midwife wasn’t around. As Mom panted and pushed her way through labor, it became clear that, ready or not, I was about to make my ­appearance. My dad, Mark, determined problem solver that he is, ­immediately took the shoelaces out of Mom’s new tennis shoes and sterilized a pair of scissors, ready to ligate and cut my umbilical cord. He later found out that Mom already had a sterile kit at the ready.

When the midwife finally arrived, my father decided to step aside and let her finish the work. Instead, he began filming the birth. A far better veterinarian than he was a director, Dad stood in front of the camera during most of the action. The greenish-hued recording contains many excellent shots of his back.

The small, hundred-year-old farmhouse where I was born was like many others in west-central Ohio: two stories tall, with a wraparound porch and wooden clapboards covered in chipping, eggshell-colored paint surrounded by massive oak trees. The farm and its white barns still stand today. So do my relatives—within a twenty-mile radius, you can find more than thirty Runkles.

My family had already been living in the area for many generations, farming corn, soybeans, wheat, and hay. Our history as farmers dates back to sometime in the 1820s, shortly after Ohio became a state. The descendants of German and Irish immigrants, we arrived in covered wagons. Joseph Parke, my paternal great-great-great-great-grandfather, kept a handwritten diary chronicling his journey from New Jersey to Ohio with his wife, Hannah, and their children. The journal details the often-treacherous travel (anywhere from fifteen to thirty miles a day), typical expenses (33 cents to $1.70 a day), and the wildlife they encountered. Dangers abounded. One evening, Joseph wrote: “Here our little boy got a corn grain up his nose but received no injury.” It’s because of Joseph that I know the exact date my father’s ancestors arrived after crossing the Ohio River from Pennsylvania: Monday, May 22, 1820.

Joseph and his family ultimately settled in Troy, Ohio, and raised farm animals. He eventually sold the farm and retired soon after, but the story of farming in our family continued across the next two centuries. The Runkle farm in Sidney, Ohio, where my dad grew up, has been in his family for at least five generations. My dad’s mother’s ­family, the Cochlins, were also farmers, who worked land in nearby Wapakoneta that they had owned for more than a century.

Grandma Donna is the family historian. Her ability to recall childhood memories in eerily clear detail is remarkable. She tells tales of feeding the chickens and milking the cows, and then playing with the pigs and watching them eat “slop.”

While my grandma grew up eating meat, she had a connection with the animals her family raised. The animals on the Cochlin farm had names. They were allowed to roam, run, play, and just be animals. When the end came, it came quickly. They were killed right there on the farm in the fastest way anyone knew: with a shot to the head by a good marksman. Few people could do the job right, so it was a very marketable skill. Similarly, chickens were killed by placing them on a solid chopping block and quickly decapitating them with a razor-sharp corn cutter.

When my grandma was growing up in the early 1900s, she and her family took care of sick animals by cradling them in their arms and bottle-feeding them. Sometimes a mother sheep would birth more lambs than she could nurse, or one lamb would be too small to reach her mother’s milk. My grandma’s family would take these lambs into the house and stay up all night to care for them. Unlike today’s ­factory-farmed cows who are milked relentlessly and live for only a few short years, my grandma’s cows were milked gently by hand and lived well for many years. They were given names like Molly and Nell. The pigs were never confined indoors in tiny cages. They were allowed to roam along with the cattle, and piglets followed their mothers wherever they went. The pigs were given names, too. As my grandma recalls, “They loved to be rubbed and petted.”

When my grandmother was a sophomore in high school, she met the love of her life, my grandfather Don. Introduced by friends at a high school basketball game, they were soon engaged. After they married, Grandma moved to the Sidney hog farm, where my paternal grandfather’s family had been living for many decades.

My grandparents, too, showed respect for the animals they raised. Although the pigs were all bred for slaughter, the family took good care of them until that very last day. For example, soon after Grandma Donna arrived, my great-grandfather Emmett decided to remodel the farm. Emmett, who’d worked full-time on the farm since leaving sixth grade, said that no matter what other farmers might be doing, he would never use farrowing crates—tiny metal stalls in which the pigs couldn’t even turn around. “They’re too hard on the sows,” my grandma recalls him saying. Emmett took great pride in his sows. He wanted them to live good lives before they died. Eighty years ago, the concept of industrialized animal agriculture was just beginning to emerge, and my great-grandfather didn’t like it.

Nowadays, factory farms account for almost all farm animals raised and slaughtered in the United States. These industrial facilities in which animals are treated as mere cogs in a machine are nothing like my grandma’s farm. The roots of this industrial, factory-farm system can be traced to World War I, when the federal government was guaranteeing generous prices for crops and animal products to support the war effort. Whatever farmers could produce, the government would buy. In response, farmers borrowed heavily by mortgaging their farms, bought more land and animals, and produced as much food as possible. These farms prospered for a short while, but when the war ended, so did the government’s price guarantees. The price of corn dropped by nearly 80 percent, and beef prices dropped by 50 percent. Then, just as farmers were clawing their way back, the stock market crashed. The price of food dropped so low that many farms were abandoned and snatched up by the banks. The old model of food production was quickly insufficient. Producers had to make food plentiful and affordable, and they had to do it with a smaller workforce. This led to fewer but much larger mechanized farms. Much, much larger. Despite producing more food today, the agriculture industry’s share of the workforce has shrunk 80 percent over the past sixty years.

It’s a change my dad saw unfold. He was born and grew up on the same farm and attended the same grade school as his mother. Whereas she had traveled to class via horse and buggy, he got to ride a bus. The Runkle farm had milk cows, pigs, and chickens, as well as numerous cats and dogs. All summer throughout his school years, Dad worked on the farm with his father and grandfather. Back then, family farms like ours were small—about 80 to 160 acres—with two or three tractors, each generating less than 50 horsepower. Today most such farms comprise closer to 2,000 to 5,000 acres and are tended by a phalanx of 200- to 300-horsepower tractors. Land back...