Don't play with your food! how your kids can benefit from visiting an animal sanctuary

Sanctuary. The word alone brings a feeling of peace. It is a place of refuge and protection. It is also a wonderful, heart-warming, and effective way to introduce your children to vegetarianism and cruelty-free living. Visiting an animal sanctuary is an active learning experience; you point out each of the animals and together learn their stories, rich with history.

Here is an opportunity to enhance your child's compassion and to talk openly about your feelings and the animals. Conversations about food and how people eat can easily be incorporated into this field trip. With guidance and discretion, you have the perfect interactive learning experience. It is very easy to strike up conversations with your older and younger children about cruelty-free living here at animal sanctuaries because your children will naturally have questions of their own.

Younger children will be amazed that their friends, like the ones from their favorite stories and movies, live here safely. Your child's eyes will scope the area, seeing some of the animals roam free. This is the perfect time to introduce life's lessons and how people's behavior affects other creatures. At your discretion, you can tell them about the fear and the obstacles some of these animals faced. The positive is also established by telling how the sanctuary is run, and how there are caring, selfless people in the world.

The intensity of your talks is solely up to you. Don't bombard your child with too much information. This trip is primarily to make a connection with creatures that were abused and mistreated, I asked Eddie Lama, founder of Oasis and subject of the documentary, "The Witness," how a visit to Oasis Sanctuary can help introduce cruelty-free living to visitors. He said that, when introduced to animals with names, people will be less apt to eat them. He hit the nail on the head. Where my family goes to The Oasis Animal Sanctuary in Upstate, NY, each animal has a name and is lovingly cared for by Eddie and the staff.

How could anyone eat Hillary the pig? Jenny, my sister in-law, has a 4-year-old vegan son, Gabriel, who sometimes struggles with the idea of eating meat because many of his family members are carnivores. She once asked him, "Would you want to eat [Hillary]?" He politely said, "No." Gabriel asks many questions, and so learned much about the very special people who used their own money and skills to create Oasis Sanctuary. When we arrive, we usually meet Frank Zappa, the goat, in front of the main house. Lama, or his close friend and dog trainer, name each dog in the kennel. They introduce all of the dogs and describe how most were saved from the Streets of NYC. Then they lovingly show us the rest of the Oasis, including the Cat House, pig area, chicken area, mama and baby goat, sheep, and the geese. This is a wonderful haven!

Lama's love for animals is so wonderfully exhibited. It's extremely inspirational, and you can't help but catch some of his energy. Eddie put it best when he said, "Didn't your mom always say you should never 'play' with your food?" I think we should all listen to him. For more information about The Oasis Sanctuary, please visit oasissanctuary.org

--Lisa Poerio is a vegan mom living in Staten Island, NY.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Vegetarian Baby and Child
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning