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HOST: Compassionate viewers, welcome to Animal World: Our Co-Inhabitants. This episode features the first in a two-part series about a very heartening global trend. Farmers are switching away from raising livestock and are finding peaceable livelihoods. Today we’ll visit former livestock farmers from the United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, Formosa (Taiwan), Âu Lạc (Vietnam) and Iran and learn some of the reasons they made the courageous, noble decision to change careers.

Why did these farmers previously raise livestock？

In some cases, they began simply because that was what their fathers had done before them, and they learned this form of livelihood as they grew up. Also many times the father expects his children to take over the family farm.

Carlo Huertas (m): I came from a dairy-farming family. Since I was a little boy, I have been milking the cows. Later on, my dad gave us our own plots to cultivate when we got married, so I started to make the dairy bigger, making a kind of feedlot.

(m): Yes, my father raised livestock. He had a ranch. Then my father passed away when I was young. So I started to be in charge of the ranch, while my mother was the owner. She did the commercial side. She sold the animals to the people to raise them or to be butchered.

Randall Ball (m): My family historically have been pig farmers right here in Ohio.

Armando(m): As a child, I usually spent my vacations with my grandfather; he had a cattle ranch and farmed. So, from very small, I was acquainted with the environment, with nature. Subsequently, my father bought a ranch.

Harold Brown (m): I spent most of my life in agriculture; I grew up on a cattle farm in Michigan (USA).

HOST: Many of these former farmers had financially successful operations, but after a while, they became deeply troubled by several aspects of their work, including the enormous cruelty involved in animal farming.