There are a number of animal sanctuaries throughout the state, but not too many that specialize in helping farm animals like SoL Criations Farm Sanctuary located about 25 minutes Northeast of Wisconsin Dells in Endeavor, Wisconsin.
The sanctuary’s owned by Jon and Brenda Vetter who initially bought the property about a decade ago for hunting purposes and raising some chickens, basically trying to be more self-sufficient. The couple also ended up with an interest in raising alpacas with the plan of breeding the animals, selling the offspring, utilizing the fiber, and making a profit that way, but never got around to selling any of the babies. “As soon as they came into the world, they were a part of our family,” Brenda said.
She explained that after a while, the two became uncomfortable with that lifestyle and chose to make a change. “It didn’t take long before we just kind of slammed on the brakes, decided to become vegan, and shift what we were doing here,” Brenda said. “We thought we could do much better with our space and time by using this space to rescue farm animals.” From there, the SoL Criations Farm Sanctuary was established in 2014 and became a non-profit in 2017.
Brenda said it wasn’t long before they started receiving calls about animals that needed to be rescued in and out of state. Some of the most popular animals that they continue to get calls for are mini pigs, chickens, and roosters, while they also have donkeys, sheep, goats, ducks, geese, and turkeys on-site. She explained that most of the calls are from people who don’t have the means to care for a farm animal. For example, people who buy a pet pig thinking it’s a small pig and it turns out to be a market hog or those who buy baby chicks and end up getting a rooster in the mix, which most towns do not allow. “I’ve had seven calls this week for roosters,” she said.
The sanctuary gets requests from farmers, from police, from neglect situations, abuse…from all different circumstances. The requests aren’t only coming from Wisconsin, but from surrounding states as well. “We have done some out of the state and we do work with sanctuaries in Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, so we do work with sanctuaries outside of Wisconsin. It’s just a little bit trickier when they have to cross state lines. It’s a bigger process,” Brenda said.
One of the lucky animals that found its way to the sanctuary is Sam the pig. “He was found wandering in a residential area. This was a couple of years ago on one of those really, really cold nights.” She went on the say, “by the time we got there, Sam couldn’t get up. He was laying and he wouldn’t move and the wonderful gentleman who found him was laying on a mattress with him, holding him, and with a blanket to keep him warm.” Brenda said when they got him home he was having seizures, so they took him to the vet where they found out he had a broken femur. After some time, Sam made a full recovery and is now living his best life at the sanctuary.
Another sanctuary lifer Brenda introduced was Benny the three-month-old goat who was born on a goat dairy but was mistaken by the farmer as a blind female kid. She explained that the farm wanted her to take the young goat, but she had no room. At that time Brenda was in close contact with the dairy to see how Benny was doing, but his health kept declining until she finally decided that they would make it work. Benny is now doing significantly better and it turns out, he isn’t blind after all and he’s not a female, so the farm was wrong on both counts.
The hope is that in the future they can expand the grounds and welcome more animals to the property, but for now, they’ve got their hands full with the 89 farm animals currently housed there. “It’s been tough with COVID, we’re not able to have the fundraising events and tours that we normally do, so that’s been tough,” Brenda said. “We have space to expand, it’s just a matter of having the time and the funds to be able to.”
SoL Criations Farm Sanctuary does host scheduled farm tours, as well as accepts volunteer time and donations all on their website. You can hear the full interview with Brenda on our agriculture podcast page.
