August 13, 2015

On a recent morning, Ellie Laks was hugging a yellow Jersey cow named Buttercup in the lower barn of her 6-acre animal rescue, The Gentle Barn, in Santa Clarita. She explained she had rescued the cow some seven years ago from a man who was illegally slaughtering animals in his backyard, a place strewn with animal feces and where dead and dying animals languished alongside the living ones. Buttercup arrived at The Gentle Barn “terrified of people, filthy, emaciated and malnourished,” said Laks, whose memoir about her experiences, “My Gentle Barn: Creating a Sanctuary Where Animals Heal and Children Learn to Hope,” was published by Harmony last year. 

After Laks nursed Buttercup back to health, however, the cow went on not only to become the matriarch of the Barn’s herd, but also helped to heal the psychic wounds of human beings who were invited to visit the facility: war veterans, people with disabilities, and especially inner-city students and kids from foster homes and probation camps, among others.

“Abused animals can heal abused children because they have the same kinds of stories,” Laks, 47, said. “If you have a child who is too angry and shut down to be able to sit in traditional therapy and talk about their emotions, we can talk more indirectly to them through the story of an animal.” 

Buttercup is one of more than 180 animals who live at the Barn, founded in 1999, which also houses goats, sheep, chickens, turkeys, peacocks, llamas, horses, donkeys, dogs, cats, pigs, parrots and an emu. All of them help nurture the approximately 25,000 children and adults who visit the Barn each year.  

Denizens of the barnyard include Faith, a cow once destined to become veal who arrived at the facility suffering from anemia, skin funguses, pneumonia and raging fevers some years ago; Sir Fancy Pants, a turkey Laks saved from slaughter one Thanksgiving; Biscuit, a 1,000-pound pig who, as a piglet, was rescued from a pumpkin patch the day before he was to be butchered; and Andrew, a stud horse who was left to die in a ravine.

Ellie Laks, founder of The Gentle Barn, holds one of the rescued goats at her 6-acre Santa Clarita facility. Photos courtesy of The Gentle Barn

Amy Evans, a therapist with Optimist Youth Homes & Family Services, said that hearing the animals’ stories of abuse, abandonment or neglect has helped her clients “to open up and to process some of their own traumas.”

Laks recalled a foster child who arrived at the barn about a decade ago, angry and defiant; he had been severely beaten by his alcoholic stepfather before being removed from his abusive family. “I started talking about Bonsai, our miniature horse, whose alcoholic owner used to punch him in the face,” Laks said. The boy, in turn, asked Laks and her husband, Jay Weiner, who runs the Barn alongside Laks, to repeatedly tell Bonsai’s story. “Then he ran over to the horse, threw his arms around his neck and whispered over and over again, ‘You’re going to be OK,’ ” Laks said. 

Laks understands firsthand how animals can be therapeutic for survivors of childhood abuse. Born in Israel and raised in an Orthodox Jewish home in St. Louis and, from age 13, in Los Angeles, where she attended YULA Girls School and Beth Jacob Congregation, Laks as a girl was molested by two babysitters and then by a stranger at a lake near her home. 

“A man I had never seen approached me and gave me candy and money to do things a 7-year-old girl should never be asked to do,” Laks wrote in her memoir.

Laks goes on to describe how her mother dismissed her story with a curt, “Don’t be ridiculous,” while her father became furious and forbade his daughter from visiting the lake where she had loved to commune with the local wildlife.  “That invalidated my whole being,” Laks, whose grandfather was the former chief rabbi of South Africa, said during an interview at her kitchen table.  “That’s when I tried to kill myself for the first time.” Laks attempted to do so by smashing her head in with a shoe, then tried to jump out of an upstairs window but couldn’t manage to break the glass. A close-up encounter with a hummingbird saved her: “One being was seeing me … and was reminding me that I was not alone,” she said.

Thereafter, Laks continued to find refuge in the company of animals, secretly nursing birds that had fallen from their nests or a turtle that had cracked its shell. She also played with a host of pets, including hamsters and even a dove she once received as a gift for finding the Passover afikomen. But when her parents tired of the animals, after a few weeks or a few months, the creatures inevitably disappeared. (Laks’ Australian shepherd, Simon, was one exception).  

“The spirit and essence of Judaism is reverence for life, and yet in the Orthodox practice all around me at the time, it seemed the opposite,” she said.  “People seemed to approach animals as filthy, inferior and didn’t quite acknowledge them as sentient beings. … The moment I left Orthodoxy was when a rabbi told me that people are forbidden from saving a dog from a burning building on the Sabbath.”

As a young adult, Laks bought into her community’s idea that intensely caring for animals, as she did, was ridiculous, and her self-enforced separation from four-legged creatures eventually led to her to spiral downward into a four-year addiction to crack cocaine in her early to mid-20s.

“That culminated in a day where I had literally binged for three weeks straight,” she said. “I weighed 90 pounds, my hair was matted, and I hadn’t showered or eaten. … One morning came and I was crawling on the floor trying to find remnants of the drug in the carpet … and I thought, ‘My God, what are you doing?’ ”

Laks promptly got clean, returned to college and founded a dog-walking business, using her first paycheck to save a black Labrador and her puppies from the pound.  “Animals played every part in rehabilitating me,” she said.  “They’re my lifeline.” Ten months later, Laks founded a dog rescue that saved only the most unwanted, sick animals, “which felt like coming home,” she said.

Fast forward to 1998, when Laks, then married to her first husband and nurturing barnyard animals as well as dogs at their half-acre property in Tarzana, chanced to drive by a decrepit petting zoo while out running errands with her baby son, Jesse.

“The first thing I was hit with when we went inside was the most God-awful smell,” Laks recalled. “It was all filth and disease.  I saw a little roundabout with ponies with kids on their backs, their noses practically touching the ground. Then my eyes gazed over the sea of goats and sheep, and it didn’t take me long to find that all their hooves were overgrown. And then on the outskirts, there were dead animals in cages. None of the animals had any water even though it was 110 degrees … I ran for the door, but there was a little goat, Mary, blocking my way. … Her legs were crisscrossed so that she could barely walk. Her stomach was enormously distended, her coat was black with filth, and she had bloody, pus-filled tumors all over her legs.”

When the petting zoo’s proprietor refused to allow Laks to take Mary home, Laks returned to spend every day, all day petting and standing vigil by the goat — until, on the 12th day, the frustrated owner finally relented.

Laks went on to adopt 14 more animals from the zoo, as well as even more creatures from a homeless woman who was living in her car. “One day I looked out into our backyard, which was now full of animals, and it just hit me like a ton of bricks: I had just started my dream,” she said.

Laks named her facility The Gentle Barn and began phoning groups that catered to at-risk children and adults, inviting them to visit.  

In the early 2000s, The Gentle Barn moved to its current location in Santa Clarita, where it braved fires and financial woes before celebrities such as Ellen DeGeneres helped put the nonprofit on the map. (DeGeneres once sold a lock of Justin Bieber’s hair for $40,000 in order to donate the proceeds to the charity.)

The Barn now hosts up to 25,000 visitors a year, with a budget of $50,000 per month. It’s open to the public on Sundays and has more than 450,000 Facebook subscribers. A new 15-acre property nearby houses sick and healing animals, and in June, Laks helped open a second Gentle Barn in Knoxville, Tenn.

“In my book, I talk about not fitting in with Judaism, but I do feel that I am living the core values of Judaism every single day,” she said. “It’s about kindness, love, gentleness and remembering the holy in all of us.”

For information and to visit The Gentle Barn, visit gentlebarn.org.