A Legacy of Compassion: Remembering Bob Weir and the Spirit of the Grateful Dead

Bob Weir

A Legacy of Compassion: Remembering Bob Weir and the Spirit of the Grateful Dead

We are saddened by the passing of Bob Weir, the last original member of the Grateful Dead, a band that inspired a community and a spirit that was central to Farm Sanctuary’s founding. Bob’s spirit lives on in us and in the ether around us. We express our deepest love and sympathy to his family.

Bob Weir

Farm Sanctuary was initially funded by selling vegan hot dogs from our VW van at Grateful Dead concerts. The slogan on our first bumper sticker, “If you love animals called pets, why do you eat animals called dinner,” was suggested to us by a Deadhead buying a veggie dog.

 

Grateful Dead

Bumper Sticker

Growing up, I was inspired by the peace and love ethos of the 60s, and when I interviewed Bob in 2021 for Farm Sanctuary’s 35th anniversary, I asked him about the spirit of the hippie culture. He said the phrase “if it feels good, do it” could be interpreted to mean “if it feels right, do it,” and he emphasized the importance of kindness and connection. The Grateful Dead made magic by tuning into each other, amplifying creative joy, and inspiring a community of belonging.

In 2015, during the Grateful Dead’s 50th anniversary tour, we worked with Bob Weir, his wife Natascha, and sister-in-law, Leilani Munter, to encourage concert venues to serve veggie dogs. It was a full circle moment to be able to buy a veggie dog inside Soldier Field, and Vogue published an article entitled “What the Grateful Dead Had to Do with the Rise of the Veggie Hot Dog.” Bob had been a vegetarian on and off and eventually went vegan.

Grateful Dead Tabling and Gene

When he was young, Bob worked on a cattle ranch, and he expressed that hurting animals also hurts humans. He saw how actions had impacts and was concerned about the vast harm caused by factory farming. When Dead & Company played at Sphere in Las Vegas in 2024, Farm Sanctuary was invited to have a booth to help raise awareness and advocate for a more compassionate food system.

Bob was humble, empathetic, and open-minded. He knew the realities of earthly existence and helped elevate our humanity with music, magic, and shared joy. He had an expansive view of life and liberation, and is now on the ultimate everlasting journey, still with us all.

Rooted In Kindness: A Conversation with Gene Baur and Bob Weir

Farm Sanctuary Rooted in Kindness: A Conversation with Gene Baur and Bob Weir
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Transcript

Hey, hey.

Hi.

Hey, Natasha. Hey, Bob. How are you guys doing?

Just fine. Yourself?

So wonderful to be here with you, Bob, and I am an enormous fan and enormously grateful for what you and the Grateful Dead did to launch Farm Sanctuary, to help launch us 35 years ago. And I actually have a picture here of our VW van, selling meatless hot dogs in the parking lots of Grateful Dead shows. How does it feel to have been such a catalyst for that movement?

Well, it feels natural. I'll say that. I fell on line. You were maybe a bit before your time with that. I was a proud, practicing omnivore 35 years ago, but I was open, sort of religiously open.

What you created there with the Grateful Dead was this community.

Where all that came from, as far as I can tell, is what makes best sense. The old hippie ideal, if it feels good, do it. If it feels right is what, I think, people were really trying to get at.

If it feels right, do it, and kindness is enormously important. It was real clear to us that the kindness was going to be an important building block. We managed to make that abundantly clear to anyone who wanted to watch or listen to us.

The shows were really about that, right? About kindness, belonging, acceptance.

You can see it in real time on stage. We'd trade ideas, musical ideas, like motifs. We were kind to each other, and things happened. Things worked.

And it spawned all kinds of other beautiful things. In terms of kindness, it's important to be kind to our friends, our family, our co-workers, but also, the planet we live on and in other animals. Have you, I understand, been thinking a little bit more about that?

I reflect on that daily. Back when I was a kid, I worked on a cattle ranch. I did all that stuff to cattle, and I never did it happily. Because it hurt me to hurt them. It was painful to me.

Yeah.

And now, in order to be a top dog factory farm, you have to resort to cruelty. The problem there is that, if that kind of cruelty is OK, then, where does it stop? Is it then OK to be cruel to the planet? And that cruelty does extend to the planet. Where do you stop turning a blind eye?

Yeah, have there been many of these conversations, over the years, within the Grateful Dead community that you can recall?

There was a time back when that Jerry and I both went vegetarian for a couple of years. And after about three weeks of being vegetarian, a peace came over me, and it's subtle. But it's there. Believe me, it's there. I don't miss meat at all. It's possible to change your tastes, what you're looking for in flavors, in nutrition, and it's working for me.

It is a lot easier now. When we started with the veggie hot dogs, you know, those were processed foods, and then, here's a picture from the show in Soldier Field in 2015. And that's a veggie dog. They actually had vegan hot dogs inside Soldier Field.

Progress is being made, and it's a matter of just raising awareness. With minor bit of adjustment, you'll be happier. You feel like you're doing the right thing, and that always feels good.

Well, I'm enormously grateful for your time and everything you've shared here. You know, the Grateful Dead were a huge part of starting Farm Sanctuary. So I'm just enormously grateful for what you've done to help make that happen and for helping Farm Sanctuary be what we are today.

Thanks for taking what we had to offer and doing what you've done with it.
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