02/17/2026 05:41:53 PMarticleOur Jain studies project in animal ethics is inspired in part by traditional Jain practices surrounding the management of panjrapoles or animal sanctuaries. We have partnered with the Microsanctuary Resource Network (MRN) to learn about the philosophy behind “microsanctuaries” or small-scale facilities dedicated to farm animals and other animals not typically counted as companion animals. Recipients of MRN microgrants manage their sanctuaries according to strict ethical principles regarding the autonomy and agency of animal residents. In the interview below, we meet Andrea Nassar, Program Specialist at LEAP and founder of One Acre Rescue and Microsanctuary. Andrea is currently based in New York state, about two hours outside of New York City. She has a BA in Spanish Language and Literature and a Masters in Educational Technology. She taught middle and high school for eleven years in both an in-person and virtual school setting before transitioning to her work in humane educational programming. In our conversation with Andrea, we learn more about life at One Acre Rescue and the animals that call this microsanctuary home. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Leah Kalmanson: I'm Leah Kalmanson with the Bhagwan Adinath Animal Humanities Initiative, and I’m here with Andrea Nasser to talk about her microsanctuary One Acre Rescue. Andrea, thanks again for making time to be here. In some of our exchanges before today, you told me a little about your slow journey to veganism. I think a lot of people share this experience—remembering the first time they learned where meat comes from. The society we live in is really geared toward helping children make peace with eating meat. But for some people, like with your case, this is the beginning of a process that ends up in veganism. Can you speak a little more about your formative memories, formative moments, times where you realized that you’re going to end up making lifestyle changes? Andrea Nassar: That's a great question. The first thing that pops to mind is actually animal dissection in school. In seventh grade, we had to dissect a frog, and in high school we were supposed to dissect a baby pig. And I was horrified. At the time, I did not know about some of the amazing alternatives there were., WhenI grew up, that probably didn't even exist, quite frankly. You know, now, we have such great alternatives to dissection that students can request. But at the time, I had no idea, and I was horrified, and I just thought, “I can't. These are the same pigs that we're eating.” That was in tenth grade, and that maybe was the first time I was even presented with it—I never thought for a single second where our food came from. But that really, really upset me, and I didn’t participate [in the dissection], and that's really what kind of started it, [though] I didn't know any vegetarians. I didn’t even know what the word “vegan” meant, or that it existed. I grew up in a really small town in rural America, and everyone just ate your traditional meat, potatoes and a vegetable. And I never thought twice about that until that moment in tenth grade, and then I don’t think I continued to eat pigs for much longer. Then, I started to learn more about pigs. And I think it's easier for people to make that leap, because of [pigs] being so much like our dogs at home, who are our family members, [and pigs] act just like [dogs], and are very affectionate and smart. And, of course, once you start to learn more about veganism, [you might say] we shouldn't be measured by our intelligence, right? But I do think, for a lot of people, an easier entry point is, “pig equals dog equals friend.” You know, it's less of a stretch to our imaginations.  LK: When did you first meet another vegetarian?  AN: When I went for my undergrad degree, I met a girl who was a vegetarian at the time, and it was very limited at my college, also, at that time. And I was never, really, a super meat eater anyway. My preference was always for, the veggie melt at school, and the french fries. But I met a fellow student who was actually in my Spanish undergrad program with me, and we had some conversations surrounding it, but it was never something that I felt like I had to commit to. And I think that's becauseof the social pressure at that time, right? You're figuring out your career and meeting all these new people. I would prefer the vegetable option, usually, but I was okay with going home, or to a holiday dinner, and consuming whatever was available, because I don't want to feel like the difficult person, either.  LK: In our correspondences, you made some really insightful comments about how there is no perfect vegan. Maybe that's the ideal. But part of what this whole Jain studies project is about is the ambiguities that we face. AN: Absolutely. None of us are perfect. I drive a car. I kill insects with my car. I don't like it, but it's the reality of the world we live in. I'm trying to just do the least amount of harm I can do as a vegan. I do think that even if we would just significantly reduce the amount of harm, it would really help us to heal some of these things that are in our food system. I think the goal is, for sure, to make the world plant based, eventually. But I think you have to start somewhere. For me, it was a really long learning curve. I always tell people: “Try an oat milk latte.” Go get your coffee order with oat milk. It's available everywhere, and that even that change will add up to  lives saved, and do less harm to the environment. When you say you’re a vegan, it can feel so overwhelming to people—they think it's giving something up, right? [Giving up] everything that you know, as far as food goes, and giving up your traditions. When, in fact, it's just learning new ways to make the same things if you want them, or learning way more ingredients than you ever knew existed in the world. So, it's actually really a beautiful thing.  But, I just encourage people to start really small, like with the oat milk latte, and then try the next thing. Would the whole world go vegan overnight if I could wave my magic wand? Sure. But is that the reality? No. With my own family and my husband, [we tried new things]. And that's a powerful moment—[when you realize], “Oh, okay, that's good. That's comparable to what I'm used to.” Not every single ingredient, but a lot of them, need to be swapped out for something else. I think it's easier than ever, but you still have to be willing to get out of that routine, and keep learning, give something new a try. LK: I have another pig question for you, because you mentioned that you have two potbellied pigs at your microsanctuary now. I am not so familiar with that breed of pig or why they end up in situations where they need to go to a sanctuary. So I was hoping you could tell me a little bit about them, and also the specific two that you have, how they came into your life. AN: Straight to my heart! Yeah, they started this whole thing. The girls. [Adopting them] was kind of the start of the microsanctuary, though I didn’t even know that word at the time. I didn't realize that's what we were doing. My husband and I started by rescuing dogs, when we were engaged, forever ago. And, then we kind of fell into cats who needed a home. And we love our companion animals, but I had always just [wanted a pig]. I don't know if it was social media at the time, or which pig influencers I stumbled across, but it must have been that, because I had never met a pig in my 20s, but by the time I was in my 30s, I thought, “I really want to share my life with a pig!” I kept learning so much about them, how emotional they are, and dramatic—they’re like having a five-year-old in your home that never goes to kindergarten and that the school bus doesn't ever pick up. And for the longest time, I said, for our next rescue, when we can, I would really like themto be a pig. I went on Pet Finder, poking around. And there’s so many pigs on Pet Finder. It's much more rare for people to go adopt a pig. But pigs can live to be 20 years old.  A “mini pig” is a myth. People sell “tea cup pigs” and “mini pigs,” but a mini pig can still grow up to be 300 pounds—and that's still a small pig, right? A full-sized pig in the farming industry can be up to 1000 pounds or more. So, they're still considered “mini” pigs at 250 or 300 pounds, [and therefore] they get rehomed a lot. People go buy them from a breeder when they're tiny little piglets and think they'll stay small. Both our girls are 250 pounds, and so it's like having other humans in your house.  So, they're really big, they live a long time, and they're tricky, because technically a lot of towns and villages don't let you have them, because they're still considered to be farmed animals. That's the first thing we looked for when we moved, i.e., whether it was zoned agriculturally. A lot of people think [mini pigs] will be great in an apartment, but it's actually not always legal to have them there, so the restrictions are tricky, finding a vet who will treat them is tricky.... It’s estimated that more than 90% of pigs purchased as pets end up being rehomed or brought to shelters. So once I learned that, I was horrified. Why do we keep breeding all these pigs into the world who  then end up burdens on sanctuaries, or dog and cat shelters, who cannot properly care for them and are already stretched thin with, obviously, the overpopulation of dogs and cats in the world? Every single day I see requests for emergency pig rehoming. And once in a while, sadly, people will kill them and eat them. That's a risk if someone can’t find a proper home. Once I realized it was such a high need, I wanted to make sure we were prepared, and could provide a good life for them, and then give these animals who are desperately in need of homes a safe place to go—and leave more of the dogs and cats to the dog- and cat-people. I was trying to be a very prepared pig mom. I read all the books I could find, all these articles online. Some of it's true, some of it's just flat out [wrong], igs are all very different. What's true for our one pig Primrose might not be true for our other pig Purdy.  I always joke that I raised two terrible pigs. They're extremely naughty. And that's the other thing [about living with pigs]—they're so smart. They train you. My husband and I look at each other constantly, like, “What just happened?”  I live in New York, where the winters are a little rough, and some pigs like to be out in the winter. Our pigs should have been born in the South, because they want nothing to do with winter weather. Nothing. Purdy will not even go outside; she's not interested. They have coats to wear. But she puts one toe in the snow and turns around, like, “Wake me up in spring, I'm fine in the house.” So, for enrichment, we taught them a lot of things. They know how to spin and dance. They learn fast. They learn after one or two times. It's wild.  So, they're very, very smart. And if you leave them home alone all day, you have to have enrichment. They sleep a lot, but when they're awake, they need to be rooting, so they will tear up people's floorboards. They've gone through all of our cupboards. They actually even broke the child locks on all our cupboards. opened a child lock and started eating a bag of flour. I was home, so, of course, we didn't let her consume the entire bag of flour. But they can be really naughty, because ideally they're outside rooting for eight to ten hours a day. Ours go outdoors as soon as they will tolerate the weather. They will go back out and spend a lot of their day outside and just come in at bedtime. LK: How did you adopt the pigs you have now?  AN: Primrose was our first one. Her mother was at a a backyard breeding facility. A vet took in her mother, who was pregnant already, and gave birth to Primrose. So we rescued her. I thought at first, let's just get used to having one pig, and then later we'll add the second one. I thought my husband might not be pleased if I say I'm going to adopt one pig and come home with two pigs! But in retrospect, we should have [gotten two], because Primrose got used to being the only pig. She loved our dogs and our cats at the time, because they were there first. But once we tried to introduce another piglet to the mix, she was like, “Oh no. I do not want to share.” Still to this day, she doesn't like to share me. They cuddle with usseparately!  They sleep indoors. They sleep in a giant queen size bed or in their little indoor houses that my dad built for them. It’s a gated area that's pretty big, so when we leave the house, they won't do anything to hurt themselves. Orfor appointmentsso they havea place to go.  About six or seven months later, we decided to rescue Purdy. Her mother was also at a backyard breeder. Her mother was way too young to be having babies, but she did. She had a litter of seven piglets—three were stillborn, and the four girls lived, but definitely they all had some issues from being malnourished and not taken care of properly before they were born. That was at a rescue here in New York. I went to meet the four piglets and adopted Purdy.  It is fascinating to live with them. They are very different from each other. They're just like two different people. They have totally different attitudes, different moods, and different food preferences. It's really, really, really cool, but, again, you have to do your research and do your homework ahead of time. LK: Tell me about some of the other animals at your sanctuary. AN: We had two dogs, two cats, and two pigs for a long time. We were already a microsanctuary with just the two potbellied pigs, but we didn't know then that that qualified us as one.  And I would definitely recommend that's where people start, that is, with one type of animal, one species, and start small.. Most of us, of course, have not taken courses on chicken care, so it's very important that you really make sure you can care for the species that you have.  So, for a long time, we had just the two pigs and dogs and cats. And then I finally had the chance to make best friends with a chicken in a sanctuary setting, a larger sanctuary setting where I worked, when I kind of made my careers merge. My background is as a teacher. But I had been spending all my free time trying to learn more about veganism and promote vegan alternatives. And I realized I was already doing “humane education.” So I made that leap to be the Director of Human Education at a larger sanctuary here in New York. And that's when I really had the chance to bond with chickens for the first time. I had been vegan for ten years prior, but it was the first time I really had that experience of hugging a turkey. That's a special moment.  There was a rooster who was rescuedby the sanctuary, named Lou, who lived there with his brother. Lou was a very sweet man, but then he got a major bone infection, and the only recourse was amputating his leg. As a bigger sanctuary, they were caring for hundreds of animals. So having a rooster who needs a harness, and a run, and a lot of time healing [is difficult]. It was a back-and-forth decision as to the right thing to do. And I was joking, but I said, “Well, worst case scenario, if he needs to come be my lap chicken, I can put him in my living room where the pigs are.” I thought he could have a little apartment, and his own house, and I’d just carry him around with me. Once they decided to do the surgery, while he was healing there, and while I was doing public tours on the weekends, I was carrying him like a baby, so I kind of became his set of legs, and then really bonded with him. And when he was healthy enough to come home with me, we welcomed him home, But I had no idea what I was doing, so in the six or seven months it took for him to be healed enough for me to bring him home, I worked very closely with the healthcare team there, and learned so much about chicken care. I had never even shared my house with chickens before, let alone one who had just lost a leg. So I had a lot to learn, and that allowed me to learn that.  We really miss Lou. We only had him for about a year. He ended up with another infection at the end, but he had a lot of happy times. He had a harness, and my dad set up a couple of runs, one indoors and one outdoors, so that he could still stand and do normal chicken things. He was our only chicken for a while, because we wanted to wait to get him a friend until he was healed, for his own safety.  But last February, we actually fell into having another disabled bird named Bart. He came to us because a local farmer had left the animals in the very cold February weather, and Bart had such severe frostbite that he ended up losing his comb and both his feet. This was a month after Lou passed away, and we thought, “Well, this rooster needs help, and we have a vacant chicken apartment in our house.” So I zipped him up in my winter coat, and came home with Bart in my coat, and I unzipped my coat and showed my husband, and he just went and started mixing up chicken food and snacks and stuff and started feeding him. And I asked him, “Don't you have questions about this?” But at this point, he’s not surprised! Bart was the first rescue and intake that I actually did myself. [In the process of helping to locate two piglets who had escaped a local farm in February] the farmer brought me to meet the chickens and pointed out that she was worried about one. I said that, if she agreed, that I would take him, and that I had a vet to call, but that I would have to keep him. And so they signed him [over to me]. I made a quick adoption contract, and they got it to me, and they let me adopt him. He was so sick that I didn't think he'd make it through the first night. We wanted to make sure he was at least comfortable and warm. He survived though  he didn’t crow for a very long time. He was too sick. The first day he crowed was several months after we brought him into our house, and we both came running! Now, Bart joins every phone call. He loves to talk at every meeting. He's a sweetheart. We got him through losing both of his feet and his comb, and he’s completely healed over now. He’s relearned how to walk, and stand, and eat, and we've wrapped him in little boots so that he can be out in the dirt. So he's very cute, in his little blue shoes. I mean, we were told we should probably euthanize him. But I asked to give him another week or two and give him a chance…. So that was a year ago, and now he also lives in our living room without his feet. I've questioned myself a couple of times. Is this the right thing to do? But, if I could ask him now, if he's been happy to have this past year of his life, you know what would his answer be? Yeah. I mean, he's crowing his face off, my husband cuddles him twice a day, he watches the Olympics with us on TV. LK: It must have been hard returning those two piglets to the farm. AN: The local police actually got involved, because the pigs were out for three days. No one was around. It’s also a traffic hazard, right? They kept running back and forth through the road. So we did end up talking to [the police], and it's kind of a dead end—[farm animals] are not protected well enough under the \ law, and so even [the police’s] hands are tied. It remains a pain point for me, for sure, where we live. I can't just take them all. I try to find that balance between [living near  area farmers]. LK: You mentioned in your notes to me that you have a difficult relationship with predator animals around your sanctuary. That really resonates with the story about King Megharath, which inspired this project. Maybe a lot of people see the kind of work I do, and they think maybe I’m the sort of person who really loves nature, loves being in nature. But, really, any time I walk out into my backyard, I am prepared to see something violent! Even if it's just birds eating bugs, still, at any other time, those would be bugs I'd be trying to avoid harming. But I don’t try to take them away from the birds. Animal sanctuaries seem to have similar ambiguities and tensions. You've got certain animals that are within the sanctuary, with which you have a relationship of care. And then you’ve got a kind of adversarial relationship with predator animals that you're actively trying to keep out. Like you said, they're also there because they're dealing with other human-made crises in their habitats. So I wondered if you could talk about that some more, because I thought that example of how you're trying to navigate the predators in your area really spoke to the heart of this project. AN: Exactly. This project really also resonates with me for the same reason. You had asked about whether or not we were faced with conflicting choices. And it's constant. It is constant, because we bring in a lot of produce for the pigs. What do we do with all these fruit flies? We have mice who come in the house, and, you know, you go down this rabbit hole and try to find the most humane traps that there are. And so we do that, and we bring him out every day, and I'm sure hes the same exact mouse. We trap him every single day and bring him out to the shed, and he comes back every single day.  But, you're constantly trying to learn ways to do the least harm. The predator thing is an issue for all sanctuaries, big and small, because, of course, most farmed animals are also prey animals. In this area, we've had a fox, we've had a large cat that looks like a mountain lion or a bobcat. I rely on what I know from working in the larger sanctuary, and I keep a little air horn by the door, just in case we ever see someone. Depending on the predators in their area, sanctuaries have all kinds of ways to humanely dissuade predators from coming around.  And we also have put up some cameras, so that we can monitor. The girls will go way up in the back [of our one acre], especially in the summer, and I like to just see them. My husband went for a run in the fall, and he saw a bear across the road in front of him. They're definitely around, and we've been fortunate that they have not climbed the fence and come for [the sanctuary animals].  But it is challenging, because the reason they’re coming more and more into these areas is because we are taking more and more of their habitat. Because bears are very attracted to birdseed, we don't put out any bird food. It would be my preference, though, to put some out, especially in the winter…. But it's just kind of a constant How do we balance this? Do I feed the birds and risk the bears? Probably not. I feel bad for the birds, but that's why we bring in the stray cats so the birds are safe, and so I'm constantly questioning. What is doing the least harm in this situation? LK: You said in your notes that no one wrote the manual for this. And I thought that was really insightful, too. And it got me wondering whether this is the kind of thing you can have a manual for, or whether this is the kind of thing where it's constantly going to be a case-by-case basis, you know, constantly going to be agonizing over individual cases. AN: Some great work has been done at the Open Sanctuary Project (opensanctuary.org). They offer free resources. They have done a great job of gathering ideas for enrichment in the winter, gathering ideas by species, what to do about predators, and all based on vegan principles. A lot of what you'll find online, obviously, is geared towards the farming community. But Open Sanctuary has done an amazing job of starting the catalog on all of these things relevant to sanctuaries. For example, if you're going to have tours at your sanctuary, how are you going to make sure that the animals are safe and not super stressed?  And we all, as vegans, have differing philosophies, right? For example, hat do we do with all these cats? It's tricky. Sometimes there's not a perfect answer. But again, I always just try to come back to what is doing the least harm. What do we do about ticks? What do we do about these huge black flies that do a lot of damage to our pigs? I'm constantly looking things up, seeing if anyone else has had a similar problem, ora great idea about it…. So it was so interesting to learn of that story [about King Megharath] from you.his is exactly what we're questioning constantly, actually…. LK: Is there anything else you’d like to share? AN: I love the microsanctuary movement, because I think if everyone can rescue two chickens, that's amazing, you know? We would obviously save thousands, if not millions, of animals that way.  But it is a ton of work. It is 365 days a year. There are no days off—unless you find a magical unicorn of a house sitter, right? So I guess I would just say to other people who are interested, definitely start small. I wouldn't go out and rush to rescue, two goats, two cows, two pigs, you know, because it's a lot to learn for each species. I would also say, go volunteer somewhere first, get some of the experience with animals, and get an idea of what's involved.  LK: I like that message—just save two chickens. That idea of taking in animals that show up in need has been what’s driven the development of animal sanctuaries in Jain practice. AN: And that ends up being exactly what we do. You know, whoever shows up in my yard and needs help, we're going to help them. Anyone who ends up in this little acre of ours will be cared for to the very best of our ability. To meet the animals who call One Acre Microsanctuary their home, please follow oneacremicrosanctuary on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms.