Last Frontier of Animal Rights? The Farm : Activism: With their rescues of cows, donkeys and other livestock, Gene and Lorri Bauston give the term <i> sanctuary</i> a new meaning.

On the dusty road in the vacant parking lot of a cattle auction yard here, a lone cow is crying.

“She’s been dumped,” shouts Lorri Bauston, who with husband Gene has come to inspect conditions at the yard. The animal activist couple jump out of the truck and rush over to the animal to offer water and comfort.

Because of the Downed Animal Protection Act, the California state law that the Baustons championed, they can do something--instead of watching helplessly. The law, one of the first of its kind in the country, prohibits the purchase or sale of non-ambulatory animals by slaughterhouses, stockyards or auctions. When notified, the owner or dealer is required to have the animal euthanized rather than to attempt to sell it, dead or (barely) alive.

With the precision of a fine-tuned drill, a stockyard worker is summoned by Lorri to get his boss, while Gene runs for a phone, calling Sacramento for a faxed copy of the new law (which went into effect in January). Civil and criminal fines can be as stiff as $2,500 per incident; criminal penalties can range as high as one year in prison.

Meanwhile, Lorri cradles the animal’s head, the cow’s eyes rolling backward as she goes into shock. Lorri pours another sip of water into the cow’s mouth.

“The animal was left in the hot sun with no water, no food, unable to walk,” Lorri says wearily, having seen this more times than she would care to count. “If we had not come upon it, she would lie for another 16 hours, suffering, until she was discovered tomorrow morning.

“Living, she’s worth a couple of hundred dollars. Dead, she’s worth, maybe, $20. For that couple of hundred dollars they’ll let her suffer like this, hoping that she’ll still be alive tomorrow morning so they can take her to the slaughterhouse.”

The yard boss agrees to allow the animal to be euthanized, a vet is called, and the animal is finally put to sleep.

“In the old days before the bill was passed, our hands were tied,” says Gene, who remembers crouching under a truck at the same auction yard a year ago, video taping abuse because he was not legally allowed to do anything. “I . . . couldn’t do anything but watch the calf crying. The people who worked there came to get me and boot me out.” The previous law prohibited cruelty to animals, but did not specifically address farm animal abuse.

The California law was successfully lobbied by Farm Sanctuary, the 35,000-member organization the Baustons founded and head. Its celebrity supporters include Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.

Farm animal rights are the last frontier in the animal rights movement. “The farm animal is the lowest link in the chain, low man on the totem pole in terms of animal rights. People just don’t want to give up meat, and they can’t make the link about animals like chickens or cows or pigs being more than a commodity,” Gene says. The American Veterinary Medical Assn. estimates that nationwide, as much as 10% of livestock is abused annually.

Not everyone agrees.

“I think the problem is overstated,” says Glenn Slack, executive director of the Livestock Conservation Institute of Bowling Green, Ky. “We’re producing food animals. . . . Damage to those animals costs dollars.

“According to USDA data, investigations of 1,400 livestock markets around the country revealed only 80 non-ambulatory animals.”

Responds Gene: “We suspect the stockyards have been alerted prior to USDA inspections.”

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On most days, Lorri and Gene are picture-perfect thirtysomethings, far removed from the popular image of crazed militants. They appear to belong in a Spiegel catalogue choosing den draperies, rather than fighting abuse at stockyards and slaughterhouses.

But on this day, Lorri is far from pristine. She is covered with blood from the cow’s wounds, saliva from the animal crying in shock and dehydration, and mud and dust from the road where she is crouching, holding the animal’s head. “You get used to it,” she says. “You steel yourself, but you never accept it.”

Farm Sanctuary was the first, and is the largest permanent sanctuary for victims of the factory farm system in the United States, where 7 billion animals are slaughtered annually. But the hundreds that Farm Sanctuary rescues is a drop in the bucket. “It’s a minute portion, but it’s a start,” says Gene, driving back to the Northern California sanctuary. “We’re barely scratching the surface in rescuing. That’s why we educate, legislate and campaign.”

The Baustons’ first sanctuary was a tiny plot of land in Pennsylvania donated by a farmer in 1987. In 1989, the Baustons bought a 175-acre parcel in Watkins Glen N.Y. That sanctuary is now a permanent home to more than 500 cattle, sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys, pigs, rabbits and ducks in 12 shelter barns. There is a main house with offices, two staff residences, three bed-and-breakfast cabins, and an educational center they call “the people barn.” The shelter has instituted an educational program that runs through the school year for children’s groups. The Baustons live in the loft of the cow barn, even though their annual operating budget is now close to a million dollars. Until 1992, Lorri and Gene were each drawing only $100 a week in salary. Now they receive $15,000 annually, the maximum pay of the 10 staffers. “That’s the only way we can maintain the farm and the programs,” Gene says.

Farm Sanctuary’s California offspring, now just a year old, is situated near the tiny farm community of Orland, two hours north of Sacramento. Built on a smaller scale, it houses 150 animals in its pig barn, ruminant barn, rabbit shelter, rescue refuge and introductory barn, where ill animals are nursed to health.

It is a world away from overcrowded corrals, grassless pens and the routine antibiotic injections of stockyards like those in Chino. The setting is pastoral. Its two flagship buildings are boldly painted, cow-like, in white with large, irregular brown spots. The buildings are on two rolling hills overlooking a valley.

“This is part of the healing process for us as well as for the animals,” Gene says. “It’s an uplifting end to a horror story.”

Lorri points to a donkey in a pen next to one of the barns; it was brought in by a U.S. government agent who had been investigating animal abuse. “Bonnie was abandoned, literally unable to walk . . . and she was covered with lice,” Lorri says, gently patting the donkey’s nose.

Outside the pen is a gaggle of turkeys. “Those turkeys will only live to be about 2 or 3 because of genetic engineering,” she says. The turkeys, with their oversized breasts and torsos, are waddling awkwardly on wobbly legs. “They’re victims of consumers’ desire for more white breast meat, less dark meat. After about 3, they can’t support their weight, can no longer walk, and just keel over and die,” Lorri says.

She points to the corner of the corral, where a black-and-white Holstein steer is curled up, sleeping. “His name’s Henry,” she says. Henry was adopted and named by Kim Basinger, who fell in love with the animal.

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The world of federal and state bills, celebrity sponsors and bicoastal sanctuaries is vastly removed from hawking soy hot dogs from the side of a beat-up VW van at Grateful Dead concerts and peace fairs, which is how the Baustons financed their earlier underground video of stockyard and slaughterhouse abuses, and started their mission to rescue animals.

“We went from spot to spot, selling soy dogs from the back of that old van. We could sell a thousand a day,” Lorri says. “Then, two weeks later, we’d be picking up abused farm animals in the back of the same van. If the health authorities only knew then,” she says, laughing.

It was the harrowing underground footage that propelled the Baustons and their movement to prominence and caught the attention of the media, other animal activists and outraged citizens.

“When you watch the videos of those animals, it’s impossible not to be affected,” says former state Sen. David Roberti, who lobbied hard for passage of the Downed Animal Protection Act. “It makes you ill.”

The soy dogs eventually bought the Baustons their first sanctuary. “We sold our last dog in 1989,” Lorri says, happy to be finished with the vagabond days.

The Baustons have been married for eight years, have no children, and because of the twin sanctuaries must now spend between 10 days and two weeks apart each month. Lorri is on the West Coast, overseeing the construction and operation, and Gene on the East Coast. “They’re a dynamic one-two combination,” Roberti says. “She does much of their hands-on caring for animals, and he does the public relations battle to change laws.”

The Baustons have also made their presence felt in another arena: They got Burger King to test veggie burgers and Wienerschnitzel to consider vegetarian hot dogs.

“We just spoke to Burger King and we were told last month that the results of tests on the development of a veggie burger were successful,” Gene says. The Baustons are optimistic vegetarians. They believe it’s part of the work of the sanctuary to change attitudes at every level of the meat-eating chain.

“When individuals start seeing farm animals as living animals, they are going to think differently about buying a slab of meat at a grocery store,” Gene says. “It starts with a change of perception.”