They Don’t Buy The Farm But They Do Get Sent Up The River . . . Or Somewhere Thereabouts

All of those fanciful flights of freedom for live poultry market fugitives pay off in the “long run”:

Actually, being loose on the mean streets of New York is not really the fun part. That starts once you are scooped up by the police, delivered to animal rescue experts and sent north to the farm.

In this case, “the farm” is not a euphemism parents might use when the family pet has to take that last fatal trip to the vet. For farm animals found running loose in New York City, it often means taking up residence at Farm Sanctuary, 175 acres of vegan nirvana nestled here among the vineyards and vegetable stands in the Finger Lakes region.

The newest New Yorker to arrive is Lucky Lady, a lamb who was found tearing through the Bronx on June 13. Seeing her agricultural tags, the people who saved Lucky Lady concluded that she had escaped from a live animal market where the culinary and cultural value of certain kinds of meat comes from the timeliness and manner of slaughter.

Lucky Lady, indeed.

At Farm Sanctuary, she is attended by a staff of 16 led by Susie Coston, the shelter director. The sanctuary began in 1989, and Ms. Coston has been there almost as long.

The people who run the sanctuary call Ms. Coston the Jane Goodall for farm animals. The analogy becomes clear when, during an interview, she nestles next to a drooling pig twice her size and rubs its belly, ignoring the animal’s tusks.

Lucky Lady is in isolation for a couple of weeks, trying to shake a case of contagious ecthyma, or sore mouth, a condition Ms. Coston described as lamb herpes. But even in isolation, she does not have it so bad. Her hay-lined accommodations are about twice the size of the average Manhattan office worker’s cubicle.