Peace, Love, Rescue 

Paw it forward 

On Feb. 9, 2020, Joaquin Phoenix won an Oscar for his leading role in the movie, “Joker.” In his acceptance speech, Joaquin expressed his love of film as a form of expression powerfully suited to “give a voice to the voiceless” and champion the fight against injustice, which he described as “the belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender, one species has the right to dominate, use and control another with impunity.”  

He followed with an example reflecting his passion for animal rights, and went on from there. I watched Joaquin’s speech in a humane education class I was taking last October, forgetting, at the time, that he’d done the narration for several animal rights documentaries. I was also unaware of his involvement in the organization L.A. Animal Save, whose members meet trucks bringing animals from feed lots to slaughterhouses, offer the animals water through the slots in the trucks and hold vigil for the lives about to be sacrificed to satiate humans’ appetites for “meat.”   

Interestingly, just a few days after watching Joaquin’s passionate Oscar speech, I was checking in on one of my young incarcerated clients. He was in the game room playing a video game called “Wolf Hunt” or something, where the player walks through a woods shooting and blowing up anything that moves, be it human or animal. Ironically, next to him sat a couple of teens watching the movie “Joker.” (You can’t script these things.)  

I asked my young client if he’d ever seen the movie, “Joker.” “Yes,” he said.  I then casually added, “Did you know that Joaquin Phoenix is vegan? He doesn’t eat animals.” He turned to me, smiled, and said, “Really?” “Yeah.”  

Then I told him a story I’d stumbled upon while re-watching the speech: On Feb. 10, the day after he’d accepted the Oscar, Joaquin was contacted by another animal welfare group, Farm Sanctuary, who asked if he’d like to accompany them to a slaughterhouse to rescue a mother cow who had given birth shortly after they’d arrived at the slaughterhouse. The owner didn’t believe in separating mothers and babies and wanted to surrender them to the sanctuary.  

Joaquin went with them, of course, and ended up picking up the tiny, frightened calf and putting her into the rescue truck himself. “Isn’t it weird,” I said, “that that same guy could be playing a serial murderer in a movie?” My client, who is quite insightful, again turned to me, smiled and said, “Yeah.”   

I started thinking about all the contradictions, dichotomies and hypocrisies we humans live with, like my young client who was heavily influenced by gang activity and is in a lot of trouble, yet inside him is a seeking heart yearning to do better. Or the fact that most human beings would cringe at the idea of torturing an animal, yet turn away from acknowledging the inhumane treatment of animals caught up in the factory farming industry, and the painful, terrifying, and tortuous deaths they suffer in order to become “meat.”  

Life is full of contradictions. That’s good, though, because facing them invites, and, at times, demands us to make choices and decisions. Unarguably our best decisions come when we gather facts and information with our minds, and listen, at the same time, to the messages in our hearts. It seems like that’s something our species is forgetting how to do.  

At the slaughterhouse, Joaquin and the Farm Sanctuary staff sat down with the owner, a man who had made his decision using all of those capacities.  

“I don’t separate them,” he said. “That’s not who I am.”  

During the encounter no harsh words were spoken, judgement gave way to acceptance of differences, and the rescuers’ appreciation for the decision the owner had made was unmistakable.  

At one point, he and Joaquin had a lively banter back and forth over the words “harvest” and “murder,” a round that ended with Joaquin smiling and saying “You say tomato, I say tom…ah…to.”  

They embraced, and Joaquin promised to send him photos of the mom and baby thriving at the sanctuary. At the end of his Oscar speech just the night before, Joaquin recited a lyric written by his late brother, River Phoenix, who, at 17 was already vegan and an animal advocate.  

The lyric reads: “Run to the rescue with love, and peace will follow.” I believe it’s true. Whenever we show up with love, the peace that follows starts inside us, and then flows like a river to places we may never know.