Page 109 - EarthHeroes

Renee was frightened, cold and exhausted as she pushed the last of the panicky horses into the trailer. Her waterproofs couldn’t keep out the torrential rain. Tommy, her husband, struggled to shut the trailer door as gale-force winds whipped it from his hands. The farm track was becoming submerged under huge puddles. In the distance, green fields were now brown water as the flooded river Brazos crept towards their ranch. Over the last 24 hours, they had evacuated most of their 96 animals to a friend’s ranch three hours away, but there were still three horses, three hogs and 20 cows waiting to be rescued.
It was September 2017. Renee King-Sonnen and her husband were evacuating Rowdy Girl Sanctuary – their farm animal sanctuary in Angleton, Texas, in the USA. Hurricane Harvey, a Category 4 hurricane, had brought a deluge of rain. They drove along flooded roads, anxious to deliver the animals to safety at the local showground before returning with a larger borrowed trailer to rescue the rest. A few hours later, their ranch and buildings were engulfed by the flood.
Hurricane Harvey was the wettest tropical cyclone on record in the United States. Renee and Tommy were allowed to return home a week later, but they had to travel by canoe since the floodwaters were still high. They paddled through their barns, around islands of trees and peered into their home, full of filthy water. This was the second time in two years that they had been affected by flooding, although storms this big and destructive used to be rare. To Renee, it was a sign that climate change is affecting her country now. It made her
even more convinced that an urgent shift towards vegetarianism or veganism
is needed to help stop global warming. Vegans choose not to eat or use animal products, including meat, fish, milk, eggs, honey and wool. Cattle farming is a significant cause of greenhouse gas emissions in two ways: because of methane produced by cows and their dung, and also because land used for grazing and growing their feed is often cleared forest, which releases carbon that had been stored in the trees.
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