What Kids Ask at Sanctuaries That Adults Often Don't

Conditioning, Compassion, and the Questions We Stop Asking

By: Kelly Nix, Ed.D.(c), Executive Director, Luvin Arms Animal Sanctuary

A few summers ago, I was leading a tour at our sanctuary. It was a group of kids, eight or nine years old, and we stopped at Tito's area.

Tito is a Jersey steer. He came to us when he was ten days old, when he was supposed to be veal. He is nine now. That day, he did what Tito does. He walked over to the fence, slow, curious, and calm. He is a gentle guy. One of the boys stood there watching him. Then he looked at me and asked, "Did he have a mom?"

I told him yes. Tito had a mom. The boy thought about it. He didn't say anything else. He just kept watching.

That question stayed with me, and it still does. Because it wasn't really a question about Tito. It was a question about who had loved him before he got to us. Whether anyone had ever held him. Whether anyone had been waiting. It is the kind of question I have come to expect from children at sanctuaries, and the kind of question I have noticed most adults learned, somewhere along the way, to stop asking.

That contrast is what I want to write about.

Tito, resident at Luvin Arms Animal Sanctuary. Photo by Paul Adams.

An Educator's Lens

Before sanctuary work, I spent years in public schools. I started as a special education teacher and later became a principal, so I came into this work with an educator's lens, and that lens has stayed with me. I notice how people learn. I notice how they interact, what they say, and what they ask. I love this work for many reasons, but one is easy to name. As a former teacher, I can say there are few things more thrilling than watching learning happen in real time. And learning happens at our sanctuary in ways I never saw happen in a classroom.

Over the years, what I have found myself noticing most is this. When children come to the sanctuary, they ask very different questions than when adults do. Not in tone. In where they begin.

I want to be clear about what this is and what it isn't. It is informed by time spent reading across humane education, developmental psychology, critical pedagogy, and socialization theory. But it is not a study. It is what I have heard standing at the fences and in the barns, watching people meet someone they didn't expect to meet.

"Why Would Someone Hurt Them?"

Here is another question I have heard more times than I can count. A child stands at a fence. They have just learned where one of our residents came from. And they ask, "Why would someone hurt them?"

What gets me every time is that they don't ask it with outrage. They ask it with confusion. With genuine bewilderment, because for them it has not yet become normal that some animals get protected and others don't. I have learned not to brush past that question or soften it, because the confusion in it is honest. It is the same confusion many of us pushed down a long time ago, because the alternative was harder to live with.

Children pick up on emotional realities before they understand any of the systems behind them. They see fear in an animal they have just met. They see loneliness. They notice when two of our residents are bonded, and when one is missing the other. They notice unfairness almost immediately. They don't need a framework to recognize any of this. They recognize it the way they would recognize it in a person.

A child who walks into a sanctuary doesn't understand industrial agriculture. They don't understand dairy production or commodity markets. But they understand separation. They understand fear. They understand what it looks like when someone is sad. And what strikes me, especially as a former teacher, is how quickly they trust those observations. They don't second-guess what they see. They haven't been taught yet which feelings to override.

Watching this is one of the most remarkable parts of my work. Children walk in not knowing what dairy is, not knowing what veal is, not knowing the systems behind any of it. And in twenty minutes, standing at a fence, they start asking questions I have watched seasoned advocates take years to arrive at. That tells us something. The recognition part of this work isn't slow because it is complicated. It is slow because conditioning is in the way.

KJ with a goat at a local farmed animal sanctuary. Photo by Kelly Nix.

The Questions We Were Taught to Ask Instead

Adults often ask very different questions. Some of the most common ones I hear are these: How much milk does she produce? Weren't animals put here for us? Don't humans need meat to survive? What are they for?

These are not bad questions. Most of them are sincere. People are working something out in real time when they ask them. They are trying to make sense of what they are seeing. But they begin somewhere other than the animal in front of them. They begin with categorization. With rationalization. With systems-based thinking. They begin with what we were taught: assumptions about purpose, about hierarchy, about what is natural and what is necessary.

I want to be careful here, because I am not standing apart from any of this. I asked questions like these once, too. I think most of us did. They are the questions conditioning makes available to us, and they often feel like the only questions there are. The point isn't to judge them. The point is to notice that there were other questions we used to ask first, and somewhere along the way, we learned not to.

None of this happens by accident. We are taught early which animals to love, which to eat, and which questions to stop asking. We are taught to recognize certain forms of violence as unacceptable, while others are disguised under different names. We are taught which beings are worthy of empathy and which are not. And this teaching starts long before we have words for what is happening. It comes through children's books with smiling cows on green hills. Through cartoons where farmed animals are friends. Through grocery store packaging that hides what is inside it. Through Happy Meals, through Charlotte's Web, through the cartoon pig on the barbecue sign holding a fork.

It comes through what we are shown, and just as much through what we are not. And it comes through the small daily contradictions that children pick up on faster than the adults around them realize. Love this animal, eat that one. Be kind to all living things, don't ask too many questions about what's on your plate. Over time, most of us learn to hold those contradictions without noticing them anymore. That is what conditioning does. It teaches us not to feel the seams. One of the things sanctuary has taught me is that the seams are still there. We have just stopped looking at them.

The Categories We Inherit

There is something I didn't fully understand until I started doing this work. The categories we use for animals aren't natural. They look natural, and they feel natural, but they aren't. Companion, livestock, wildlife, pest, commodity. These aren't biological categories. They are social ones, and we inherit them. They shape almost everything about how an animal gets treated. The same species can be a beloved companion in one home, livestock in another, and a pest in a third. Nothing about the animal changes. What changes is the category we have put them in.

Here is what I see again and again at our sanctuary. A child meets a pig for the first time. They don't see livestock. They see someone who is curious, or shy, or playful, or scared. They see someone. And then, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly, they start to ask. Why is this pig here, and other pigs aren't? Why does this one get a name, and others get a number? Why does this one get to grow old? That is the moment the category starts to crack. And once it cracks, it is very hard to put back together. Watching that moment is one of the things that keeps me in this work.

Language is one of the most important tools conditioning uses. The words we use don't just describe what happens to animals. They determine whether we can see it at all. We say meat. It was a body. We say milk. It was a separation, a calf taken from their mother within hours of birth. We say processing. It was a death. These words are not neutral. They create distance between the consumer and the consumed. They make it possible to participate in something without naming it. The words turn someone into a something.

But children who haven't fully absorbed this language yet will say things that catch adults off guard. They will say, "But that was a cow." Or they will say, "Who was she?" They use who where adults have learned to use what. That small grammatical instinct, which instead of what, is one of the most important things I have learned from listening to children at the sanctuary.

Aspen, a chicken resident of Luvin Arms Animal Sanctuary. Photo by Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media.

Miraa and Krishna

I want to introduce you to two of our residents.

In the fall of 2025, we received a call from a rancher's wife. She was calling about a calf on their property, a young black Angus born with dwarfism. In the beef industry, a calf like this is considered unproductive. Not useful. Calves with conditions like this are routinely killed young or sent to auction, which amounts to the same thing. But she wanted to help him.

When our team arrived, the calf had already been separated from his mother. Both of them were calling out to each other. If you have ever heard a cow crying for her calf, and the calf crying back, you won't forget it. After more than several emotional conversations between this rancher's wife and me, we were able to convince her and her family to let us bring them both home. We named them Krishna and Miraa.

Krishna passed away about three months ago. He was not quite a year old. One night, he fell asleep and never woke up. I am still inside that loss, and I want to be honest about that, because I think it matters. I am writing this while I am still learning what it means.

What I can tell you is that Krishna died at the sanctuary with his mother beside him. He wasn't alone. He wasn't afraid. He was at home. In the beef industry, he would not have made it to a year. The rancher's wife knew that, which is why she called us. And Miraa would not have been with him in the end. The bond we got to witness, the bond she got to keep until the last day of his life, is not a bond animal agriculture allows mothers to keep. Not in dairy, not in beef, not in pork, not in eggs, not anywhere. Mothers and their babies are separated. Every time.

This is one of the places where sanctuary most powerfully disrupts conditioning. Not because we save every life. We don't. But because we bear witness to lives that, in the systems we have inherited, would not have been witnessed at all.

I want to say something about sanctuary work that I don't always get to say out loud. Sanctuary is sometimes treated, even inside our own movement, as a softer, adjacent thing, as if the real work is happening elsewhere, as if those of us in sanctuary are stepping back from the harder fights. I want to push back on that. Every advocate, scholar, and activist I know who has stayed in this work for the long haul has done so because, at some point, they stood in a place like ours and met someone. The movement doesn't run on statistics. It runs on those encounters. We just don't always trace them back to where they started. Sanctuary is where the abstract becomes specific. Where the statistic becomes Krishna. Where the policy argument becomes someone standing in front of you. Sanctuary isn't enough on its own, but the movement isn't enough without it.

Miraa and her calf, Krishna, on the day of their rescue. Photo by a Luvin Arms Animal Sanctuary staff member.

Humane Education, Reframed

This is why I have come to view humane education as I do today.

Humane education does not only teach compassion. It protects the connections we were taught to forget. The connection between an animal and her body. Between a mother and her child. Between the food on our plate and the life it came from. Between the violence we do to animals and the violence we do to one another. Between human rights, animal protection, and the living world we all depend on. These connections aren't made by humane education. They are restored by it. They were always there. Conditioning taught us where to look, and where to look away.

Most traditional educational environments aren't built to do this work, and I say that as a former teacher and former principal. This is not a criticism of teachers. It is a structural reality. Schools were built to deliver specific information. Sanctuary is something different. Sanctuary is a site of experiential and transformative learning, where ethical inquiry and emotional reconnection happen through encounter rather than curriculum.

And I want to be specific. Farmed animal sanctuaries do something that companion animal rescues cannot always do. They invite people to meet, by name, the animals our society has built an entire economy around not seeing. They put a face on a category that was meant to remain faceless. That is not a small disruption. It is one of the only disruptions in our culture that can survive contact with everything else we are taught.

When I work with children at our sanctuary, I am not introducing them to something new. I am protecting something they already have. The capacity to see, to feel, to ask. The longer that capacity is protected, the harder it becomes for conditioning to take it apart later. That is when I think humane education is at its best. Not the giving of compassion, but the keeping of it.

Tito and a guest during a Cow Cuddles experience at Luvin Arms Animal Sanctuary. Photo by Monika Bunting, Tour Guide and Volunteer, Luvin Arms Animal Sanctuary.

Maya

Two months ago, Miraa gave birth to a daughter.

When we rescued Miraa, we later found out she was pregnant. So here is Maya.

I want to be careful, because it would be easy to turn this into a story about hope after loss, and that is not exactly what it is. Miraa did lose a son. And now she has a daughter. Both things are true. Both things are her life right now.

But watching Miraa with Maya has reminded me of something. Sanctuary isn't only a place where lives end with dignity. It is also a place where new lives begin with their mothers. Where babies get to stay with their mothers. Where the things conditioning teaches us to take apart are allowed instead to remain whole. That, too, is part of what sanctuary is.

Maya on her first day of life. Photo by Lanette Cook, Education and Engagement Manager, Luvin Arms Animal Sanctuary.

The Harder Question

Children often come to the sanctuary asking whether animals feel fear, joy, grief, and love. The harder question, the one I have come to sit with, is why so many of us were taught to stop asking. Because if we are honest, most of us already know the answer to the first question. We have known it for a long time. What conditioning teaches us is not the answer. It teaches us the silence.

So this work asks something of all of us. To keep breaking the silence. To keep asking. To protect the asking in others. And to remember, every time we stand beside an animal who was never supposed to be remembered, that they were always someone.