When you think of someone who is likely to go vegan and start a farm sanctuary, I’m
pretty sure the first person to pop into your head is not a multi-generational cattle rancher
whose entire livelihood is dependent upon the slaughter of cows. Such a conversion would
be nothing short of miraculous, right? Well my guest today is here to share with you a miracle.
Hi it’s Emily from Bite Size Vegan and welcome to another vegan nugget. There is seldom anything
quite as powerful of a vessel for veganism reaching unlikely populations than the conversion
of the most unlikely of the unlikely. I say this all the time to people who email me and
are upset they didn’t go vegan until their 50s or 60s, or more, but they will now have the ability
to reach other people in that stage of life who may not want to listen to a ridiculously
tattooed girl on YouTube.
In the same vein, my guest Renee King-Sonnen, who married a multi-generational cattle farmer
in Texas has the unique ability to reach other people who work in the heart of animal agriculture
and show them there is another way, that they don’t have to make their income from the
suffering and death of other beings. One of the objections to a vegan world is that farmers
will be out of work. Well Renee is blazing the path to an alternative. I’m so excited
for you to meet this one-woman revolution.
Alright well, Renee I want to thank you so much for taking time out of your busy
schedule caring for the animals to be on the channel and talk a little bit about your story.
Awesome! So good to be here.
Alright, so you could tell us a little bit about how it is that you became a cattle rancher?
Well, I became a cattle rancher by default. I assure you it wasn’t in my plans
to have anything remotely to do with even living in the country. My husband Tommy, he’s...he’s
been and his whole family generationally has been in cattle ranching and so when I moved
here, the cow’s were here, the chickens… that’s how I became a rancher was by being
a city girl that moved to the country, and married a man that I really loved.
Talk to us a little bit about the turning point.
Well, I moved out here and I always fancied myself an animal lover. I always loved
my dogs and my cats. I had a ferret. My grandma had birds. She used to take us to the zoo
and I loved all the animals, and the rodeo, and being from Texas, that was just a big
deal out here. Never once did I ever have a connection that there was anything remotely
ill conceived or wrong. And when I came to the ranch, I guess in my naivety, I would
go ‘Oh, you know, the cows are so cute! Look at the little babies!’. And I would
want to go out there, and get to know them, I was just naive. And because who...who
in their day to day life pets a cow? Who in their day to day life goes and picks up a chicken,
and hugs it, and loves it? It’s kept from us. There’s a sort of a barrier there. And
so living here, because I love animals, I gravitated to animals that I also ate.
And I also wore on my skin or my feet, or gravitated to animals that I used to watch in rodeos.
But...and so I started getting this connection because I did have an innate love for animals
but it was enforced and indoctrinated upon me as a young child to love the one’s at
home, and eat the one’s out there. And so basically, the turning point for me was the
first time the red trailer took the baby calves that I had grown so used to and loved to the
sale barn which eventually meant to be lot and slaughtered. And I threatened my husband
that I go to the sale barn. If he...if we were going to keep doing this, I told him
at the final analysis. I said ‘if we keep doing this and that red trailer leaves one
more time, I’m gonna follow it to the sale barn’. And what they do there is once they
leave here, their life changes forever. They become just slaves! They go into these horrible
metal chutes! They’re just whipped into line! They’re tagged! They’re branded!
They’re sold! They’re traded! They either go straight to feedlots where they're...where they're just...they step
in their own feces! Their own urine! They’re just clustered all together in these horrible
environments! They do that or they get sold to one of these nice, peaceful, wonderful
farms where everything looks so good on the outside, and you’re driving down these Texas
roads, and you look out, and you go ‘aww, look at those humane cows. Those are grass
fed beautiful cows’. So, the baby cows will go to ranches like ours was where everything
looks so wonderful from the outside. You know, all it is...we are part...we were part of
big agriculture. We were part of the system that is destroying the fiber of everything
we stand for as humans.
Did you try to...I mean, I am just trying to picture this. You see them going.
Was is it just this light that went off and did you talk to your husband about it?
How did it progress to where you are now?
The first time that it happened I remember the red trailer being out in the field. And
just was like, so stark against the green grass, and the cows, and the babies, it was
there. It was there for several days because you had to bait the babies to go in. They
didn’t want to go in except that they were baited, and there was a chain on it so that
the babies could get through, but the big ones couldn’t. And so, I watched that for
a few days and my connection began to get disrupted as my disconnect. I started going
‘What the hell! What is going on, ya know?’. And I just...then I snapped back to the good
rancher’s wife, you know, I gotta be tough. And the first time they had like, I don’t
know, 6 to 8 of the baby calves trapped in there that I had rumble love the first 7 or
8 months I’ve been here. And then when the trailer pulled out, and the mother cows literally
chased the trailer, crying, literally chasing it trying to catch it. The little babies in
the trailer, bugged eyed, trying to get out the little bars, their prison, and I just
stood there in disbelief. I think I went into a literal shock. Ack, it was the most horrendous.
I have been so tough until that point. And then when I saw the trailer go out of the gate,
and down the highway, and the mother cow still chased them along the fence side, and something
broke in me. Just broke and I told my husband after it all happened, you know, ‘How do
you do this?...how do you do this?’. He said ‘Do what?’. ‘How do you raise these
cows, these babies, and watch them go every 6 months to the sale barn?’. He said ‘Well,
Renee that’s what we have to do. That’s what ranchers do. That’s how you get to
keep your property in agriculture. That’s how, you know, pay for the tractors. Pay for
you know, the insurance. Pay for the bills that come in. You know Renee, we gotta do
that. If we didn’t do that we wouldn’t be able to sustain the ranch.’ And I’m
like ‘Well, there’s really something wrong with this picture, ya know.’ I just started
sensing something really wrong. Well so then, Tommy decides I need a calf of my own. That
I need to be ‘a real rancher’s wife’ so that’s when Rowdy Girl came in. I bought
Rowdy Girl for $300. A little bitty calf that had lost her mother. I don’t know how it
happened. Bought Rowdy Girl, you know, I never had any of my own kids so she kind of became
my little baby that I bottled fed twice a day, watched her grow up. And he didn’t
know that was going to be his biggest mistake. So anyway, that’s kind of how it happened, you know the babies would...
...the mama’s would cry every single night when the babies left. I mean for days and
days. They never stopped. They did not stop until they lost their voice. There was no
break, and my husband would just go about his business watching the news, eating, doing
whatever. And I’m over here about to go out of my mind, go outside with them, screaming,
hollering, crying, begging forgiveness. And of course, all the while I was eating hamburgers,
and chicken sandwiches.
So, when is it that you decided not only that you were going to create a farm
sanctuary out of this cattle ranch but also go vegan. I mean, was that kind of a simultaneous
thing? When and how did that all of that happen?
Well, what happened was every 6 or 7 months is when you sell the calves. You
know, the mama cows were here enslaved I later learned after I went vegan. The calves will
be born. They go to sale barn every 6 months. Well, me living here made it very difficult
for my husband to do that so we started getting pushed out 7 months, 8 months, 9 months, until
the last time it had been 10 months. The red trailer has not gone to the sale barn since
February of last year. In this past December, he was...we were like at a breaking point.
Almost ready to divorce. I gone vegan October 31st of last year, Halloween. I started watching
just videos. I started like peeking at stuff that I didn’t really want to watch. I would
bring chicken sandwiches home. I’d be eating them and my chickens would be at my feet,
and I would start getting this breakdown in my awareness that I was eating their cousin
or their mother. I’d be eating, I’d be bringing home hamburger meat or steaks from
Kroger and I would be pulling into my driveway, and not wanting to look at the cows. I find
myself literally not wanting to look, like I didn’t even want to know that they were
there. I had this vision like this- that was right before I went vegan.
And from that day forward I’ve done everything I can to no matter what it is, even from honey
to...I used to eat my own eggs here at the ranch. I don’t do that anymore. We just
don’t do that. I mean, every time I find out something’s vegan I immediately make
a decision to act in integrity with that ethic because we need to be doing that.
And Houdini had been getting out every single day, if you heard anything about this story,
you know Houdini was getting out along the highway, and so my husband was adamant
about Houdini was going to have to get out of here. She was a liability and there was
no way because that was Rowdy Girl’s baby. And so I looked all over Texas for a home.
But there was no one that would take these cows...no one. And so after that, and Houdini,
and the cops, and trying to find homes, one day I told my husband ‘Look, you know, I
can’t find a home. Why don’t we just figure out how to have a sanctuary right here in
Texas’. He thought I lost my mind, ya know. He said ‘You’ve lost your mind literally.
This is not L.A.. This is not New York’. He said ‘Would that even work? We can’t
do that here Renee, no way. I’m a member of the Brazoria County Cattlemen’s Association.
We can’t do that. What would everybody think? And there’s no way that can happen
here in the middle of all these sale barns all around us.’ And I said ‘Well what
if I just buy your cows?’ And that’s when he just about lost it. You know, I was screaming
‘No, let me buy...let me try to buy these cows. Let me figure out how to have a sanctuary’.
And I said ‘Maybe you don’t know how to do it. Maybe I don’t know how to do it but
I’m sure somebody does’. And so, that’s what happened, and I didn’t know. But my...think
my heart space and my soul lined up with the...a real big vacuum and a need for our planet.
It’s a planet. This is for our planet that I’ve been a force. He’s okay with it.
I mean, he went vegan too, ya know.
I heard about that. When did that happen...how long did that take and was it...tell me a
little about that. I just want to hear more about that.
That was crazy, you know. During this whole time I had tons of deer antlers on my
wall which was about to drive me freakin’ nuts. I felt like I was living in a morgue.
You know, because once...I don’t know about the rest of the world, but once I went vegan
my sensitivity went out the roof. So, I’m talking about liberating with this giant elk
on my wall and I would just go [stunned]. I mean, I was feeling the heaviness of them
all over me and my husband was going plant-based at the time, but his heritage was as a hunter.
His Dad, his Grand Dad, his great Grandfather had a slaughterhouse for god’s sakes, in
Houston, one of the biggest ones. They used to drive cows from San Antonio like cowboy
days, ya know. Because his heritage was so deep it was really hard for him to make the
connection, especially about the deer heads being on the wall because they were just momentos.
He would use this terminology with me and I showed him your hunter one, you know that...oh
yeah! Back before he took them off the wall I showed him, I said ‘You gotta watch this.
You gotta see this’. So, I showed him your...yeah, I loved that one, and of course he watched
it. It might have been part of his decision because there were several...several different
things that did. He finally, just one day decided he didn’t want them on the wall
anymore and now I hear my husband talking all the time about how good it is for your
health. I hear him talking about, because we’re having tours, we have tours every
week now, and I hear him telling visitors how good it is for the animals. He’s making
the connection. He’s gone from plant-based to now, I would say that in his ethics, in
his mind, he’s probably 75% vegan in his mind. He’s definitely totally plant-based
but he’s getting there ethically too.
Well thank you so much for everything you’re doing and for your powerful testimony
and just your…your passion. I think that alone- I mean look at everything that you’ve...
...you've accomplished by just having this change in your mind that “I’m not going to stand
for this anymore” and now it’s become this incredible thing, so just thank you for what you do.
Well, thank you. Thank you Emily.
I hope you enjoyed hearing Renee’s incredible story of conversion. I think her husband may
win the most unlikely vegan of all time award.
Renee has the support of such heavy-hitters as Kip Anderson, the creator of Cowspiracy,
and Howard Lyman, a former cattle rancher himself turned vegan animal advocate, and
her mission is growing by the day. You can check out all of her links below to get in touch.
Now I’d love to hear your thoughts on this incredible story. Does this make you rethink
the possibility of who can be vegan? Are you an unlikely vegan or vegan-to be? Let me know
in the comments.
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Why in the world would you eat a chicken and love a dog?
Why would you do that?
Here's my babies and they are so awesome!
They love side by side together and I hope that all of you can one day make a decision.
To go vegan.
Peace out!