My Gentle Barn (37 page)

We hardly ever left the Gentle Barn, other than for rescues. And here we were, riding down our lane in the back of a town car headed for Hollywood, the smell of hay and manure wafting in through the open windows.

When we got to the Warner Bros. studio, they took us back to the green room, where they had nice snacks and drinks out for us. We took some bottled water and sat on one of the couches.

“Do you think Brad Pitt sat on this couch?” I said to Jay. “Or maybe Obama!”

Jay got up and sat on another one of the couches. “I think the guy from the Allstate commercial sat on this one.”

We settled in and enjoyed our
Ellen
water and stared at each other in disbelief. This was really happening, wasn’t it? I was thrilled to be on this adventure, and even happier to be on it with Jay.

After a while, someone came and got us and led us to our seats in the audience. Before he walked away, he said, “By the way, Ellie, after they show the segment, Ellen might want to pull you up onstage and ask you some questions.”

I felt all the blood instantly drain out of my head, and I had to focus very hard to not throw up. I didn’t hear anything that was being said onstage, and I don’t remember who was up there with Ellen before our segment, or whether there was anyone up there with Ellen. My focus was entirely on the words in my mind:
Please don’t barf, please don’t barf
.

Sure enough, when they broke for a commercial, the producer came and got me. I was grateful my knees didn’t buckle as I followed him down the steps from the audience and up onto the stage. I sat
carefully on a sofa next to Portia, with my knees together in ladylike fashion. I was incredibly relieved that they started rolling the segment right away, so I could try to take a few deep breaths before I had to say anything. When the segment was over—which I would have to watch again later, because I could hardly focus on it—everyone in the audience clapped. Ellen and Portia talked for a bit, and I prayed to God to get through this without sounding like a total idiot.

Then Ellen said, “Ellie, why don’t you tell people about who comes to the Gentle Barn.”

Thank God I had talked about the work we did with animals and at-risk kids thousands of times over the years—to Sunday visitors, newspeople, anyone who would listen. I opened my mouth to answer the question, and autopilot took over. Ellen did a good job of helping me along by asking several more perfect questions (i.e., ones I knew the answers to). And my autopilot flew me through the whole thing because I was still out of my body with nervousness.

At one point, Ellen introduced Jay in the audience, saying that we ran the Gentle Barn together, and I was grateful to her for doing that.

Then she said, “We want to help you out,” and to the audience: “because they need money and they’re helping so many animals that need to be taken out of horrible situations, so …” And Ellen reached over the side of her chair and pulled something up off the floor, a big, flat rectangle covered in red cloth. Not having watched the show before, I was unfamiliar with Ellen’s shenanigans and had no clue as to what was coming.

“We have some friends at Tonic.com,” she continued, “that have been so extraordinarily generous with us for any occasion when they know somebody needs money.” She turned to me. “I know you’re trying to raise $100,000 for some dairy cows.” And she pulled the cloth off of the rectangle as she said: “They’re giving you $50,000 right now toward that.” And she set this huge cardboard check for that amount on her knees. It was made out to the Gentle Barn.

“Oh my God,” I said, and my hand flew to my heart. Now my
nervousness miraculously vanished as I was flooded with shock and gratitude.

Ellen asked the viewers to help us reach the rest of our goal.

After the show Jay and I kind of floated off the set, headed to get our stuff from the green room, and then down the hallway toward the parking lot, when one of the producers called to us. “Wait. Wait up. Ellen wants to say hi to you.” We were ushered to Ellen’s private green room, where her chef had made a vegan meal. Ellen hugged us, and she and Portia invited us to sit down and eat with them. We had made a book of photographs and stories for them about the cows we had rescued, and this was the perfect opportunity to present it to them.

At one point Portia asked me what I had done before the Gentle Barn.

“I was rescuing dogs and cats,” I said.

“Yeah, but before that.”

“Well, way before that, when I was really young, I was an actress.”

“I knew it!” Portia said. “I just knew it. You do so well in front of the camera.”

Apparently my autopilot was pretty good.

Ellen’s show with our segment aired the next day, a Tuesday, at four p.m., and that night we saw our Facebook fan base explode before our eyes. People were posting like crazy and donating through our website. By the next morning the number of fans on our Facebook page had more than doubled. Giddy with disbelief I made my first post of the day:

Throughout the day I kept running back to the computer to read the new comments coming in, and to make more posts. I was suddenly aware that nearly twenty thousand people were reading my words, and I felt self-conscious and exhilarated all at the same time. I posted about a cow we had rescued a couple of weeks before. Then I posted to publicly thank
The Ellen DeGeneres Show
, then another post to thank Tonic for their incredible generosity. I wrote a post about the young woman visiting us from England to volunteer for a week (she had found out about us through Facebook). Before I went to bed, I reposted the welcome to all our new fans. I felt like I’d thrown a party and thousands of people had come.

In the days following the
Ellen
show, I spent more time at the computer than I ever had in my life. I was just so excited by how big my family had suddenly grown and I wanted to spend as much time with them as possible. I ended up writing several posts a day for that entire week, and I spent hours reading all the comments from people all over the world. Phone calls were flooding in, keeping everyone on their toes, and the office staff kept an eye on the incoming donations; we were getting closer every day to our $100,000 goal that would buy the cows their new barn.

We put out a call for extra volunteers for the Sunday following the show. We usually got fifty to sixty visitors a week and had ten or fifteen volunteers helping out. We kept e-mailing our community until we’d collected a team of nearly forty, just in case. And it was a good thing we did because 350 people showed up at our gate on Sunday morning. We didn’t even have the space to fit all their cars in our parking area; people had to park on the road and walk in.

I walked through this huge crowd on my own property, thinking,
Thank you, Ellen. Thank you, Ellen
. It wasn’t just that we had so many
visitors, which was amazing in and of itself. But the whole energy was different. People kept coming up to Jay and me and hugging us and crying and thanking us for doing this work. They understood our mission; they got it because they were just like me. We traded stories about what animals meant to us and the grieving we’d gone through and the celebrating we had done. Their eyes glistened with tears just like mine and they laughed from their whole heart just like I did. After so many years of being mocked and misunderstood and judged as crazy for how passionately I cared about animals, I had finally found my tribe. I was humbled to meet each and every person who came up to me and so very grateful to Ellen for spreading the word.

We had never intended Sundays to be profitable; it was more community outreach than fund-raising. But because of the numbers of people, our sales in the snack bar and gift shop quadrupled, and by the end of the day, our shelves were bare. And that on top of the $5 entrance donation from 350 people. If this kind of turnout kept up, Sundays would bring in a quarter of the donations we needed to run our place and take care of our animals.

Donations kept coming in online as well, and a month later we had raised the $100,000 for the new barn. It took a while for the barn to be built, and when we called the dairy to let them know we were ready to receive the cows, they informed us that they had found a way to stay open. The sixty dairy cows would not be coming to us after all. So we pledged to all our donors to keep rescuing cows from slaughter until we reached the number sixty. This was the first time since we had moved to Santa Clarita where we found ourselves with more space than animals. We had come to dread the daily calls from people who had a pig or a horse that we didn’t have space for. It felt awful to say no and pass them on to another agency; it was equally difficult to scramble in panic mode to try to make the space and come up with a budget. But now that we had this land and this barn specifically for cows, it was a joy to receive calls about cows needing to be rescued; we had ample space and shelter to welcome any cows who needed us.

One such call was from our connection at the auction house. Only this time it was not a request to come pick up downed animals. He was calling to fill us in on a new trend he was seeing. With dairy farms going out of business in the difficult economy, the auction house was getting a lot of dairy cows headed for slaughter. Because dairy cows are almost constantly pregnant, many of them went into labor and dropped their calves right there in the auction house. The buyers had no interest in the calves; they only wanted the meat from the mother, so the calves were left to die on the concrete.

“Would you be willing to come take these newborn calves off our hands?” he asked.

Jay told the guy yes, but we had something else in mind. Not only did we want the newborns, we wanted to take the mothers as well to keep that relationship intact. But after Jay drove the two hours to the auction house to intercept some of these mother-newborn pairs, no births occurred that day, and he called me with the update.

“I’m about to go into the bidding room,” he said. “I’m going to see if there’s anyone else we should bring home.” In the background I heard the horrifying din I always heard when he called me from the auction house. This was not mooing, this was mother cows
screaming
for their babies, babies screaming for their mothers, friends and relatives screaming for one another. And the screams were filled with terror and a depth of angst that I would never be able to erase from my mind.

While Jay was there, there were four animals who went down—too sick to stand any longer. Two of them were teenage cows and two were eight-week-old calves.

He called me again from the road to let me know who he was bringing home. “Start contacting volunteers,” he said. “Two of them are veal calves.”

I started calling and sending e-mails immediately, rounding up a
support team for the orphan calves. It also occurred to me to let Portia and Ellen know that two babies were on their way home. When Ellen got the news, she decided she was well overdue for the visit she’d been meaning to make to the Gentle Barn and she scheduled to come three days later.

Like all calves raised in veal crates, the two calves arrived very sick and very weak. They were malnourished and anemic, both had pneumonia and high fevers, their coats were dull, their stomachs distended, and one could not walk because she had been stomped at birth to keep her from walking. In the next few days we discovered that the other calf had an infected puncture wound in her side, likely from a pitchfork used to prod her to stand up and get moving.

When Ellen and Portia arrived, they were so moved to meet these baby girls. They sat in the straw with them and stroked their heads, then helped me remove the auction stickers from their backs.

“You’re not a number anymore,” I told each calf. “You’ll get to have your own name now.” Then I turned to Ellen and said, “It would be a real honor if you named them.”