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The calf that escaped a slaughterhouse in Brooklyn on Tuesday will live out her days at a New Jersey animal sanctuary among other famous four-legged runaways.
The Black Angus calf, believed to be about four months old, bolted from the Saba Live Poultry slaughterhouse on Tuesday afternoon, dodging a team of wranglers and pizza shop employees as it galloped through the streets of downtown Canarsie.
She was eventually apprehended by a lasso-wielding employee of the slaughterhouse and sent back to the farm she came from in Pennsylvania.
Footage of the daring escape drew widespread sympathy from New Yorkers, who called for the Canarsie calf’s life to be spared.
After hours of tense bargaining, Mike Stura, the founder of the Skylands Animal Sanctuary & Rescue, was able to secure the calf’s release during a three-way negotiation with the slaughterhouse boss and farm owner.
“I was able to get two of the men on a three-way call,” said Stura, a former truck driver turned animal rights activist. “As soon as I got the owners on the phone, it went really well. Before that it looked bad.”
You don’t imagine them as individuals until you see someone fighting for their lives.
He told Gothamist he was driving to pick her up on Wednesday morning.
The calf will soon live a “life of leisure” on the rolling 240 acre sanctuary in Wantage, New Jersey, alongside roughly 400 other rescued animals, including “some of the most famous slaughterhouse escapees on the planet,” Stura said.
Among them: Freddie Mercury, a bull who fled the butcher’s knife in Jamaica, Queens; Brianna, a slaughter-bound pregnant cow who leapt from the second story of a truck; and Stacy, a 9-month-old heifer cow discovered walking the fairgrounds in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.
The hope, Stura added, was that the one-off viral runaways would force people to think more about the realities of meat consumption.
“People get mad at slaughterhouses and slaughterhouse workers, but we’re the ones paying them for this,” he said. “Cows are absolutely fantastic, I love them, and what we do to them is insanity. You don’t imagine them as individuals until you see someone fighting for their lives.”
Correction: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Mike Stura’s name.
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