My pre-Thanksgiving challenge: hugging a turkey
Ellie Laks, the former Orthodox Jewish founder of the Gentle Barn, said we need to embrace animals, literally
Rob Eshman hugging Justice the turkey at Gentle Barn in Santa Clarita, Calif. Courtesy of @foodaism
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman November 26, 2024
SANTA CLARITA, California — I’ve cooked turkeys. I’ve eaten turkeys. But not until this year did I drop to my knees and hug a turkey.
Justice — the turkey — lives at Gentle Barn, an animal sanctuary in this city 40 miles northeast of where I live in Los Angeles. I drove out to meet the sanctuary’s founder, Ellie Laks, a formerly Orthodox Jew, after reading her book Cow Hug Therapy.
Laks walked me to a spacious outdoor corral where Justice was milling about with rescued goats, sheep and a massive, mud-covered pig named Menorah.
I knelt down and stretched my arms across Justice’s warm white feathers, heard the calm thump of her golf ball-sized heart and thought, I can’t believe I’m about to eat one of you.
“She’s a lover,” said Laks, who found Justice in a slaughterhouse just before Thanksgiving last year.
I didn’t tell Laks I was planning to cook turkey this Thanksgiving — actually two turkeys, one roasted, one bathed in mole negro. I had even taken off the leather belt I was wearing and stowed it in the car.
What I did tell her is that Cow Hug Therapy, published in early 2024, had intrigued me. Some people play with their food; I wrestle with it. For 15 years — from age 18 to age 33 I didn’t eat meat. Then I did. Then I kind of didn’t. When I eat it now, I feel bad about it. I pre-felt bad hugging Justice, who responded the way my dogs do, by snuggling back.
I never thought of turkeys as huggable, I told Laks, I just thought: Thanksgiving.
“As we’re more connected to these animals,” she said, “and as we realize that we’re more alike than different, those things can be unlearned. We can choose to have our traditions differently.”
Gentle Barn sits on six acres in dry, mostly undeveloped scrubland which Laks and her husband, Jay Weiner, a former kosher caterer, bought in 2003. They built the fencing and out buildings, and planted 250 oak, sycamore and willow trees themselves.
In spacious, spotless quarters, the horses stand and shake their withers. The cows chew cud and sleep. Goats scramble on tree stumps. Menorah the pig lounges in a mud pit.
The turkeys, bred with oversized breasts, don’t move much at all. Sitting beside Justice, I understood why animal rescue centers and holy places share the same word: sanctuary.
Each year, U.S. agribusiness slaughters 11 billion animals, 387 per second, including 216 million turkeys — 46 million of them for Thanksgiving.
If the modern factory farm is for animals, as Isaac Bashevis Singer once wrote, “an eternal Treblinka,” Gentle Barn is Eden.
Laks, 56, was born in Israel and eventually moved to Beverly Hills. She attended a girls yeshiva, but told me that she found holiness in nature, not in shul.
“I would much rather be in the field, crawling around, watching monarch butterflies land on me,” she said.
The part of Judaism she most connected to was the laws around kashrut, whose strictures center on the treatment and use of animals.
“They create an understanding that meat and dairy come from an animal,” she said. “Instead of just eating everything we feel like, we need to remember that they were living beings.”
After a stint as an actress in L.A. and Israel, Laks opened the sanctuary the San Fernando Valley in 1999, fulfilling a childhood dream of owning “a big property, full of animals.” She and Weiner, who have been married since 2003, opened a second Gentle Barn near Nashville in 2019.
Laks said she spent much of her life seeking out “therapists and healers,” but found nothing was more effective than — you guessed it — hugging cows.
“When we’re holding a cat or walking a dog or riding a horse, we are in a leadership position,” she said. “When we’re with a cow, we are absolutely not the leader. They outweigh us by thousands of pounds, but they’re very nurturing and motherly.”
I had never cow-hugged, but I had wrestled myself into what some people call ethical carnivorism, which holds that if you’re going to eat meat, you should choose animals raised humanely or — best of all — only those you kill yourself. After Michael Pollan’s seminal The Omnivore’s Dilemma made that case in 2006, every Jewish food conference seemed to feature some poor goat, the hipster’s sin-offering, getting its throat slashed so we attendees could feel absolved of our meat-eating guilt, even enlightened.
Quickly killing an animal you raise yourself — “with respect and gratitude” in the words of the writer and farmer Larissa Phillips — may be the ethical carnivore’s gold standard. But Laks was offering me a different challenge: Try hugging that beast you would otherwise eat.
Gentle Barn, a nonprofit supported by donations, has daily tours, and it books about two cow hug therapy sessions each day, at $200 per session.
“Do you want to try it?” Laks asked.
She walked me to a small barn where Rosalie, a chestnut brown cow the size of a Mini Cooper, rested on a bed of straw. I sat beside her, leaned my head against her warm coat, and rested my hand on her neck. “Hugging” was aspirational. The most even a tall person like me could do was snuggle up against such a giant beast. I closed my eyes, and felt, as a grown-ass man, like I was being cradled.
Several minutes passed before I opened my now-wet eyes.
“Wow,” I said. I’ve done therapy. I’ve done mushrooms. I’ve done meditation. I’ve never felt so held.
Laks nodded. “Now imagine doing that for an hour.”
On the way to the turkey pen, I stopped and “hugged” two more cows. Laks wasn’t charging me so, I thought, absolutely. They didn’t move as I pressed my head into their flanks, flopped my arms across their ribs, and synced my breathing to their deep, anchoring breaths.
“Cows are an example of how to be still, quiet, centered, grounded, and connected to our higher selves,” Laks told me.
It sounds crazy — until you actually do it.
We ended our visit with Justice the turkey, who was every bit as welcoming as the cows.
Underneath her feathers I felt her legs, or, as we say on Thanksgiving, drumsticks. Most of us overcome our inherent disgust at eating animals by buying our Thanksgiving turkey wrapped neatly in white plastic, its skin picked clean of feathers. But sanitizing cruelty doesn’t completely disengage our feeling, as Melanie Joy explains in Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism, because “beneath our disgust lies an emotion much more integral to our sense of self: our empathy.”
One visit to the Gentle Barn and the empathy roars back. And that, Laks told me, is what gives her hope.
“The animals are sitting here looking at us,” she said, “and seeing us as decent and loving, no matter what we have done to them. The animals are holding space for us to be a better version of ourselves.”
I’ll keep trying.
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