Gene Baur
American author, advocate, and co-founder of Farm Sanctuary — often called "the conscience of the food movement."
Gene Baur (born 1962) is an American animal-welfare advocate, author, and co-founder (with Lorri Houston) of Farm Sanctuary, the largest farm-animal rescue organization in the United States.
Career
Baur began visiting stockyards and slaughterhouses in the mid-1980s to document conditions. A 1986 rescue — a sheep named Hilda, pulled still-alive from a “dead pile” at a Lancaster, Pennsylvania stockyard — became the founding moment of Farm Sanctuary.
He is the author of Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food (2008) and co-author of Living the Farm Sanctuary Life (2015). TIME has called him “the conscience of the food movement.”
Advocacy style
Baur is known for a deliberately non-confrontational, invitational approach: bringing journalists, policymakers, and the general public to meet rescued animals face-to-face, and letting the encounter do the argumentative work. His public persona has helped move veganism into the American mainstream.