Name: Gene Baur
Occupation: Founder of Farm Sanctuary
Number of Veggie Hot Dogs Sold: 10,000+
First Dead Show: NYE 1985, Oakland
Favorite Dead Show: The Spectrum, Philadelphia, 9/23/87
Website: www.farmsanctuary.org

AFTER VENDING OVER 10,000 VEGGIE hot dogs at Grateful Dead shows, Gene Baur turned a small advocacy project into the country’s leading farm animal protection agency.

From 1986 to 1989, Baur followed the Dead around the East Coast and Midwest in his VW van and sold veggie dogs in an effort to promote vegan living and combat factory farming. “We loaded the van up and went on the road with educational literature and did outreach—and we found a really receptive audience,” Baur says of his stint on tour. “The Dead shows were a fertile ground for people open to questioning the status quo and looking at the world with open eyes.”

When Baur and his wife, Lorri, weren’t traveling, they lived in a school bus on a friend’s tofu farm in rural Pennsylvania and visited factory farms around the country to expose the reality of inhumane treatment of farm animals. By 1989, they had raised enough money to purchase a parcel of land in Watkins Glen, New York, which became the first Farm Sanctuary, a haven for rescued animals (they opened a second in California in 1993). The first bumper sticker for the cause actually came from someone in the lot at a Dead show who said, “If you love animals called pets, why do you eat animals called dinner,” Baur recalls.

Through advocacy, education and rescue, Farm Sanctuary aims to promote a compassionate lifestyle and end cruelty toward farm animals. To date, Farm Sanctuary has rescued over 10,000 farm animals. In March, Baur released the book Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food. He hopes it will encourage people to “make conscientious, humane choices and to be aware of what they eat and how it affects their own health and that of animals.”

Baur cites music and the Dead as a gateway for social awareness: “Music’s always been a very important part of my awareness-raising process.”

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