At Capra Libera Tutti
Care is the gesture that changes the rules.
Here, the value of a life is not measured in terms of productivity, but is recognized in its unrepeatable existence.
Care becomes responsibility, connection, respect – the foundation of a new world.
Taking care of animals rescued from the animal agriculture industry means overturning a logic that reduces them to tools for profit.
This is the paradigm we want to break.
Care is a political act: it makes visible what would otherwise remain unseen. Because we can die, we need care in order to truly live.
The privilege of growing old
Outside of sanctuaries, animals are never allowed to grow old: they are killed while still young, long before age can arrive.
This means that most of them never experience what it means to slow down, to carry the marks of time, to need special attention.
Here, things are very different. Every animal can live through all stages of life.
Old age, illness, and fragility are not a sentence. They are part of a journey that we are committed to making dignified.
Caring for aging animals also means facing death.
But not death as a programmed and imposed event of the industry, death as a natural passage, accompanied by presence, connection, and love.
This is the privilege of growing old: to live fully, to die not as “waste” to be disposed of, but as an individual leaving a trace, a memory, a shared story.
To care until the end means recognizing the emotions and dignity of every individual. For those who truly live alongside other animals, death too becomes part of the relationship, just as it is among humans.
Changing the rules
In farms, illness and disability are not tolerated: bodies that don’t meet standards are treated as production errors, destined to be eliminated.
Here, the opposite happens.
Veterinary medicine, shaped by the interests of the animal farming industry, does not consider that a cow, a horse, or a goat could grow old or live with a disability.
In sanctuaries, instead, these bodies exist and resist.
They age, they change, they ask for attention.
And they raise uncomfortable questions: how do we care for someone who was bred with traits considered incompatible with life?
Here, a new kind of veterinary care is born, one that disobeys the rules of production and restores the individual to the center.
Capra Libera Tutti becomes a living laboratory: a place where students, professionals, and trainees can imagine and practice a different form of care, finally serving the individual, not profit.
To care not because it’s convenient, but because it’s right.
Genetic cruelty and bodies designed to suffer
The animals who arrive here carry disabilities, wounds, and illnesses. Not exceptions, but direct consequences of a system that made their bodies exploitable and disposable.
These weaknesses are not random.
Farmed animals are the result of genetic selection designed to maximize profit from their bodies and the products of their bodies.
Bodies that grow too fast, get sick easily, and develop conditions incompatible with life itself.
Added to this are the conditions of the places where they live – cages, pens, unnatural environments – which disable them even further.
When they arrive at Capra Libera Tutti, we cannot erase their past, but we can work to improve their future.
In a place like this, where animals no longer have to serve any purpose, even the concept of disability changes.
It is no longer a measure of lost productivity, but part of an existence that finds meaning within a network of relationships.
An animal with a disability here is worth no less than any other because their value is not defined by what they can produce, but by the simple fact of being alive and recognized.
Every difference becomes an invitation to rethink relationships.
Recognizing fragility in animals means recognizing our own: vulnerability as a shared condition that makes us interdependent.
No life is self-sufficient; we are alive because we are connected, and every bond has a time that care itself makes precious.
How do animals arrive here?
Most of the animals come through seizures carried out by authorities in farms where irregularities or mistreatment were found.
In these cases, the law would normally require killing and disposing of their bodies as special waste.
But more and more often, thanks to ongoing dialogue and relationships built over time, local health authorities choose another path: to entrust them to us.
A shared responsibility
Unlike farms, which receive public subsidies, sanctuaries like ours receive no government funding.
Daily care is possible only thanks to the support of people who choose to walk alongside us.
Every treatment, every hospitalization, every meal, every surgery is born from an act of concrete solidarity.
For us, care is not just an action, it’s a way of seeing the world.
It transforms programmed death into a possibility for life, fragility into connection, waste into future.