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Featured Activist!

On a farm in the foothills of Vermont, Glenn Gaetz’s family raised cows and pigs for meat and goats for dairy. Observing from a young age that animals, like people, don’t want to die, Glenn felt great compassion for the farm animals on his parent’s homestead and came to know all of them by name. Under the same sky, continents away in Taiwan, a young Joanne Chang helplessly watched as live animals were slaughtered at the public markets where she and her family shopped. Raised in two very different cultures, yet witnesses to the same kind of exploitation, Glenn and Joanne both came to believe that “food animals” deserved better and became vegans.

Joanne and Glenn’s fates intertwined when they met at college and fell in love. Their shared values and vegan lifestyles not only led them down the aisle, but also into a new life devoted to animal rights activism. Over the last three years, Glenn and Joanne have co-coordinated the 2005 Vancouver Walk for Farm Animals, helped facilitate the Animal Voices Film Festival and organized a Mother’s Day veal demonstration for which Joanne constructed a veal crate! Using a “body TV,” a wearable television used to show undercover footage, the activist duo leaflets and raises awareness about factory farming and other issues two to four nights a week. Joanne and Glenn also regularly table for Farm Sanctuary and other organizations and each serves on the board of an animal protection group.

Glenn and Joanne believe that “for every person [they] reach successfully, hundreds of animals will be spared.” When they aren’t participating in other outreach activities and working to keep up with their “non-activist” careers, Joanne and Glenn can be found volunteering at local animal shelters or caring for their own adopted critters—fourteen rabbits, three cats and a chinchilla. Partly due to their past experiences as Farm Sanctuary shelter interns, the pair is constantly reminded that every animal who is rescued signifies countless more who need help and so they remain committed to easing animal suffering with every free moment their lives afford. Thank you, Glenn and Joanne for your unerring dedication to helping animals in need. You are truly an inspiration to us all!

Together, we ARE making a difference. If you would like to find out more about volunteering your time to educate others about factory farming and vegetarianism, please contact us at activist@farmsanctuary.org, or call 607-583-2225 ext. 229. Click here to find out what YOU can do to help!