The goat in Chris Fuller-Wigg’s arms doesn’t look like the start of anything big. Cookie is a LaMancha, the breed with tiny, tucked-in ears, and in a 2024 photograph taken at Austin Farm Sanctuary in Paige, Texas, she leans into him the way a family dog might. Chris holds her gently, his face close to hers.
Cookie is where it all began.
Back in 2016, she was a dairy goat whose working life had come to an abrupt end. She had been injured while giving birth, and her daughter, Bertha, was born undersized. On a dairy farm, both of those things matter. An injured mother and a small kid aren’t profitable, and animals that aren’t profitable rarely stay.
“They were no longer of use to the goat dairy,” Chris told Tribeza. On most farms, he explained, that usually means only one thing. This time it didn’t. Chris and his wife, Angela, had just bought their first home in South Austin. It came with a backyard of about half an acre, and when they heard about Cookie and Bertha, they opened the gate. They had no plan to start a sanctuary and no blueprint to follow. They simply said yes to two goats who needed somewhere to go.
That yes turned out to be the first of many.
From a backyard to 95 acres
According to the information on Austin Farm Sanctuary website and Facebook account, the farm gradully expanded as word spread, and more animals arrived. By 2022, the couple’s project, now called Austin Farm Sanctuary, had moved to about 40 acres and was caring for roughly 130 residents. Today it covers 95 acres in Paige, east of Austin, and is home to nearly 240 rescued animals.
The list of residents reads like an entire farm that has quietly stopped working. There are goats, pigs, cows and turkeys. There are donkeys, Texas longhorns and even water buffalo. Hundreds of chickens and roosters live there too, many of them rescued from cockfighting operations and from mass religious sacrifices.
What unites them is the reason they came. Many are elderly, blind or disabled. Many were surrendered because, like Cookie and Bertha, they no longer earned their keep.
Take Buddy. As per Vegan FTA, he was born blind on a goat meat farm, where his blindness made him a liability. He arrived at the sanctuary at just four weeks old, too fragile to fend for himself, and needed to be bottle-fed. He spent much of those early weeks curled in the founder’s lap. Today he is usually the first animal to greet visitors, sniffing out old friends and new faces alike, and he has appointed himself leader of a little group of goats the staff call “Buddy’s Buds.”
Image credit: Austin Farm Sanctuary Facebook
Care that changes outcomesLooking after animals that farms have written off takes more than kindness. It takes medical transport, specialized diets and mobility support for aging bodies, all funded by donations.
The sanctuary works with veterinarians at Texas A&M, and the lessons learned there travel. When a sick calf named Wendell came through, the vets learned enough from his case that it shaped the treatment of another calf, Zoe, who arrived months later. Zoe survived.
The sanctuary has since added a chicken hospital and a learning center. That second building points to the part of the mission that reaches beyond the fences.
A different kind of farm educationFor generations, many American students have learned about farm animals through programs like 4-H and Future Farmers of America, where raising livestock usually ends at auction or slaughter.
Austin Farm Sanctuary offers another path. It is an affiliate of Leaders for Ethics, Animals and the Planet, known as LEAP, a national program described as the first of its kind. LEAP gives middle and high school students a compassionate alternative to conventional agricultural programs.
The program works with 18 farmed-animal sanctuaries across the US. Each month, students combine classroom lessons about animals and the environment with hands-on time at a sanctuary, plus lessons in plant-based cooking. The aim is to turn young people into what LEAP calls “compassionate catalysts for change.”
At Austin Farm Sanctuary, that means a teenager can meet Buddy, learn how a blind goat navigates a pasture, and leave thinking differently about the animals on their plate.
Image credit: Austin Farm Sanctuary Official Website
Ten years laterThe sanctuary’s stated mission is simple: to rescue farmed animals and to change how society sees and treats them. Its founders talk about the residents not as categories or commodities, but as individuals, each with a name, a temperament and a story.
None of it was planned. A decade ago, there was a half-acre yard, a newly bought house and two goats nobody else wanted. One had been hurt bringing a daughter into the world. The other was simply too small.
Today, their names are the first chapter of a story that now spans 95 acres and nearly 240 lives. And in that 2024 photograph, Cookie, the goat who started it all, is still being held.