These guys sent me a catalogue today. You give them money, they’ll send livestock to impoverished people around the world. They say that the animals they give are healthy, they give training to the people receiving the animal on how to use it correctly, and ask that the first offspring a family gets, they give to another needy family by them, creating a village able to depend on goats/water buffalo/sheep/chickens/llamas and cows/etc. I think they breed the animals themselves before giving them over, that or as the catalogue said, they make sure there’s a healthy opposite-sexed animal around to breed with.
So I query: does anybody here know about this organization, or heard of them before in a positive/negative light? I’ve never heard of them before, and before my mother commits herself to giving money to them, I want to make sure it’s not some rip-off evil thing. Their FAQ doesn’t say where they get their animals, but the rest of it seems okay (I still am wary of trusting unfamiliar things tooting their own horns).
It’s legitimate and works on the “teach a man to fish and he’ll spend the rest of his life sitting in a boat drinking beer” system. You don’t have to buy a cow. I think the smallest donation buys a breeding pair of ducks or a half dozen chickens and a rooster. My church has been supporting them for years.
My best friend in Mississippi has worked with this organization, and I’ve met their Southern US representatives. In my experience, they are very committed folks trying to make a contibution via sustainable agricultural means.
We ran a story on these folks in our mag. a while back. Generated a vicious response from the Vegan community. But even if you’re opposed to killing animals for food, there are alternatives–like buying bees (for honey), cows/goats/sheep for milk, chickens for eggs, etc. (Granted, the chickens, cows, etc., likely get eaten eventually… but c’mon. They’d die of natural causes eventually, too.)
The charity also focuses on issues some other more survival-oriented food-supply charities don’t, which I always thought makes them interesting–
the animals give these people a “cash crop”–they can sell eggs, honey, milk, rabbits, etc.–so that they’ll be able to buy necessities other than just foodstuffs (medicine, f’rinstance)
they are heavily into sustainability, and many of the animals make use of land that cannot support crops (i.e, your goat grazes on scrub and weeds and turns that useless plant matter into milk and meat for you)
IIRC, part of their requirement is that the recipients have to give at least one offspring of the animal to another member of the community, thereby ensuring that the gift keeps on giving.
Sorry for the long post. Not affiliated w/ Heifer Project. Just thought it was neat.
I had a teacher who was very committed to helping out HPI, and even got our class to volunteer a weekend working on a farm center. We built a chicken coop, repaired & painted their fence, and plowed their field under for them. It was great fun, they got work out of us and we learned a little about tractor driving and chicken-coop building. Nothing more to say, just that I really like the organization.
