Hello!

Welcome to StartanAnimalSanctuary.com My name is Catherine and since I was 16 I was sure I wanted to start an animal sanctuary.

I always loved animals and me and my best friend Melissa both went vegetarian at age 10, much to the dismay of our meat loving parents (I call them meat pushers)! When we turned 16 we were finally old enough to volunteer at our local animal sanctuary the Crowborough Animal Welfare Society in East Sussex, UK and we had a blast. Once we had learned the ropes we often took charge of all the morning duties, including cleaning out around 70 cat litter trays, mucking out Dennis, the Shetland pony and Annabelle the Jersey Cow, cleaning out the dog kennels and creating homes for new arrivals.

Whether it was creating a chinchilla play room out of an old stable, or scrubbing out water troughs in the field, we loved our voluntary work. In fact if we could we would have forgotten about school and spent all our time there.

The owner of the sanctuary Jo was a remarkable lady. She had started the shelter by working two jobs, including a night supermarket job and was spurred forward by an incredible desire to help animals. Melissa and Me learned so much from Jo and she instilled in me the desire to one day start my own sanctuary.

When I was 24 I moved to NSW, Australia where I married my husband David, who soon also adopted a veggie diet.

I read as much as I could about animals and as I learned more about animal rights, I realized if I really cared about animals I had to turn vegan. It was an easy and essential change. One of the things I hope to achieve through the animal sanctuary and this blog is to help people make the change and go vegan. It is the only thing that can really change the world for animals.

One of my favourite organizations is Farm Sanctuary, based in the USA. They have huge shelters in New York and California and do an amazing job. If you haven’t already I urge you to head over and check out their website. One day I would love to visit (and hopefully volunteer) at Farm Sanctuary. There are also some amazing sanctuaries here in Australia.

So David and Me have set out our 5 year plan by the end of which we plan to open an Australian Farm Animal Sanctuary. Not only do we have a huge amount of research to do, we also have a huge amount of saving to do.

If you would like to follow our journey feel free to check this blog regularly, or add your details in the subscribe widget in the sidebar.

All the Best

Catherine x