Stewie, a black Angus male calf who escaped a truck transporting him from a Pennsylvania farm to a slaughterhouse at Saba Live Poultry in Canarsie, Brooklyn, is now at a New Jersey animal sanctuary. The calf run for a long time through the streets until slaughterhouse employees and workers at a nearby pizza shop tried to catch him. However, Mike Stura, the owner of Skylands Animal Sanctuary and a vegan animal rights advocate, found out about him and manage to persuade those who were keeping the calf to release him.
He did not buy Stewie from them, though. He said to the Guardian, “Paying money would be counterproductive to my goal. We don’t want there to be any slaughterhouses, so how can we be animal advocates and pay them at the same time?… I believe animals know when they will be slaughtered, but more are so petrified they just shut down. There are a few who say, ‘I gotta go man, I just gotta go,’ and if they see an escape they just go for it. I do think they’re different from the others – not smarter, they just have more of a fighter response. And I notice that the ones I rescue are always a pain in the neck. They’re kind of free-thinkers and have something that enables them to run instead of just standing there.”
Skylands is currently the forever home of over 400 animals living together on 232 acres of pasture. Other of the new housemates of Stewie will be Freddie, another slaughterhouse escapee who made headlines after bolting from a cage in Queens, and Brianna, who jumped from a transport truck as it sped down Route 80 near Paterson, New Jersey.
