Will Lowrey

When I was about 7 or 8 years old, I remember walking down the hallway at elementary school on the way to class one morning and coming across a large cluster of students peering through large glass windows that looked out onto the baseball field. About 50 yards away, one of the school staff was using some sort of pole to pull the corpses of two animals from down off the top of the chain link backstop. I remember all of us kids just staring wide-eyed at the scene, not really understanding what was happening. Later that day, word spread through the school that the animals were the bodies of a cat who had been shot and a dog who had been skinned and whose throat had been cut. Someone did this and left them hanging prominently in a place for all the school kids to see in the morning. I remember processing the scene and information and even at that age, it just dawned on me that something horrible had happened and I had watched the aftermath of it. It is hard to say so many years later, but I'm sure that this moment probably embedded in my young brain the concept that animals can suffer horribly and often at the hands of humans.

In about 2002, within a span of a few months, I got two pit bull type dogs from the city animal shelter. Soon after getting these dogs, I learned firsthand about breed discrimination, stigmas, and stereotypes through encounters at dog training and day care facilities. These encounters led me to the world of pit bull rescue which exposed me to more ills such as tethering and dog fighting. After a few years of dabbling in this world, it just naturally dawned on me that these dogs aren't the only animals suffering and there was no good reason my efforts shouldn't extend to animals in factory farms, laboratories, etc. And all of that -- those two poor animals strung over the backstop, and the most wonderful two pit bull type dogs -- led me here today.