My Gentle Barn: Creating a Sanctuary Where Animals Heal and Children Learn to Hope Author: Ellie Laks | Language: English | ISBN:
B00FIN0RRK | Format: PDF
My Gentle Barn: Creating a Sanctuary Where Animals Heal and Children Learn to Hope Description
“My Gentle Barn is a wonderful book. You'll love Ellie Laks and the animals she rescued--and who rescued her back.” –Sy Montgomery, The Good Good PigFounder Ellie Laks started The Gentle Barn after adopting a sick goat from a run-down petting zoo in 1999. Some two hundred animals later (including chickens, horses, pigs, cows, rabbits, emus, and more), The Gentle Barn has become an extraordinary nonprofit that brings together a volunteer staff of community members and at-risk teens to rehabilitate abandoned and/or abused animals. As Ellie teaches the volunteers to care for the animals, they learn a new language of healing that works wonders on the humans as well.
The Gentle Barn weaves together the story of how the Barn came to be what it is today with Ellie's own journey. Filled with heartwarming animal stories and inspiring recoveries, The Gentle Barn is a feel-good account that will delight animal lovers and memoir readers alike.
- Print Length: 288 pages
- Publisher: Harmony (March 25, 2014)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00FIN0RRK
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #98,961 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Nature & Ecology > Animal Rights - #55
in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Animal Rights
- #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Nature & Ecology > Animal Rights - #55
in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Animal Rights
With boosters like Ellen DeGeneres and Portia di Rossi, this book is obviously not going to be lacking magnificently supportive reviews - and it will deserve them all. Although I am very concerned about animal welfare, and am a "daily clicker" at the Animal Rescue Site as well as a supporter of various wildlife concerns, as it happens I was not acquainted with Ellie's work or the Gentle Barn website and Facebook connections prior to reading this book. Which emphasizes, I guess, that even with all the other publicity, there IS a need for print communications even in this increasingly digital era.
Ellie Laks describes the evolution of her amazing animal rescue operation with extreme coherence and - no other word suffices - great gentility. She is honest about her challenges in overcoming extremely negative experiences, including the perceived rejection of her childhood attempts to heal her own trauma by rescuing injured animals. Yet she is never cruel or vindictive in her descriptions. She emphasizes the "positives" both in her interactions with her parents during childhood and subsequently, and with her first husband. Throughout the narrative, it is clear that she perceives the difficulty of maintaining a balance between one's "call" or "mission" and the needs of family and friends. Her story is full of spiritual and psychological truth, without being in any sense preachy or proselytizing.
The descriptions of the harrowing circumstances with the various animal abuse situations, including the petting zoo where Ellie got her first rescue, the goat Mary, and the subsequent "backyard butcher" are harrowing.
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