The LambShank Redemption

Slaughterhouses may have mostly disappeared from New York City's municipal landscape, but they still exist. They tend to only be noticed when one of their stock escapes imminent death via a bolt for freedom. Unfortunately, the city's streets are barely more hospitable to a farm animal on the loose, once it has escaped the inevitable doom of the urban abattoir. Last month we posted a story about a little lamb (whose fleece was about as white as dirty city snow) that was wandering around the Bronx. After a chase-and-be-chased incident, a man named Julio Rivera managed to corral the lamb into a parking lot, where responding police officers took turns capturing camera phone pics with the animal.

These types of stories crop up on occassion, and the The New York Times addresses what happens to livestock that are captured on the streets of New York. Animal Care & Control cannot take a lamb or a goose to the pound. Instead, the city agency transports the animals to an upstate farm in Watkins Glen called Farm Sanctuary, in New York's Finger Lakes region. The lamb-on-the-lam from the Bronx: she's been named Lucky Lady and is pictured in the Times apparently enjoying her new home, (our pic is from her time of "arrest.")

Farm Sanctuary is directed by Susie Coston, who leads a staff of 16 and has been described as the Jane Goodall of rescued livestock. The facility has operated since 1989 and includes a menagerie of hard luck cases––abandoned pigs and chickens, and a gang of goats from Brooklyn.

If Lucky Lady follows the other sheep and ambles up a hill to the wide pasture where the cows graze, she may meet Queenie, considered one of the heroes of the farm, said Gene Baur, president and founder of Farm Sanctuary.

In 2000, Queenie broke out of a slaughterhouse in Queens and ran free for 20 blocks until the police found her in a playground and shot her with a tranquilizer gun.

If you'd like to visit Lucky Lady, Queenie, or any of the other animals that escaped from non-viable urban situations, Farm Sanctuary loves visitors. Details available here.

Photograph of Lucky Lady by Kathy Willens/AP