New Brief by Kip Hansen — 24 February 2024 — 1600 words/7 minutes
Seldom does the NY Times cover any story that I can physically fact-check. In this case today, the object of the story is “close enough” for me to visit and take photos.
The sad tale is recounted in this piece in the NY Times:
“Sanctuaries Can Protect Animals From Abuse, but Not From Climate Change — A growing number of animal refuges are being forced to move in the face of extreme rainfall, droughts and hurricanes caused by the planet’s warming.”
It deals with an animal refuge of the type known (officially) as a Farmed Animal Sanctuary [FAS]: “Farmed animal sanctuaries (FAS) provide care, shelter and advocacy of farmed animal species such as chickens, cows, goats, fish, horses, pig, turkeys, and sheep.” The specific FAS is called the Catskill Animal Sanctuary, though it is not in the Catskill Mountains but rather down in the valley closer to the Hudson River.
The claim is: “Climate Change is Driving Animal Sanctuaries to Relocate” – according to the official title of this article which is found in the meta-data for the webpage as “<title data-rh=”true”>Climate Change Is Driving Animal Sanctuaries To Relocate – The New York Times</title>” This claim is false in general and false in the specific instance of the Catskill Animal Sanctuary.Let’s see how the author of this NY Times piece makes this yet another “every story is a climate change story.” First, this article is “narrative journalism”. Narrative journalism:
- It looks at intriguing people, human emotions, and real situations. It provides the private story behind the public story.
- It reaches past the ordinary by blending the reportage of facts with the writing style of fiction.
But, in addition, it is meant to “contain accurate, well-researched information”.
Our NY Times journalist, Hilary Howard, seems to have understood the first two, but fails on the last requirements of “accurate” and “well-researched”.
Why do I say this? Let’s see what Howard had to say about the reason this animal sanctuary has to move:
CLAIM: “Increased rainfall …. has finally forced the sanctuary to search for a new home”
The Times says “Climate change has resulted in warmer and wetter weather across New York, where annual precipitation jumped 10 to 20 percent over the past century, according to a state report. The study projects that the largest precipitation increases in coming years will be in New York City, the Catskill Mountains region and the Lower Hudson Valley.” Similar to the error of applying Global Warming to every locality, the Times author apparently thinks that a state-wide statistic applies everywhere in the state and/or that future predicted weather can cause current-day problems.
This sanctuary property is located in the Glenerie area of Ulster County, NY, and was purchased in August of 2002. “We only had a small number of animals, it was August, the grass was lush, I didn’t ask about soil composition.” The Times quotes Kathy Stevens, the 150-acre sanctuary’s founder and executive director, as saying. Why does she say that last part? Keep reading, I’ll get to it.
Has Ulster County, NY, thus this sanctuary, see “increased rainfall”?
Here’s the graph:
The little box in the lower right points to 2002. The property was inspected and purchased in the drought year of 2002, after which local rainfall returned to a more normal range. There were two very wet years a decade ago, 2011 and 2012. Otherwise, rainfall amount are variable, but generally constrained to the range of 40 to 60 inches per year. Now, that a pretty wide range – 20 inches. At the top end we have a wet year and at the bottom end, a dry year.
So, let’s look at Monthly Rainfall. Has Ulster County seen very wet months?
I don’t really like illustrations of “difference from normal” but this shows “drier” and “wetter” month by month since 2002, the lifetime of this sanctuary.
There are not many “wettest” months (darkest green) and visible but not obvious is that 2021 had a wet summer (four greens stacked up).
And though 2017-2018 appear in the Total Precipitation graph as a wet year, we don’t see many very wet months that year.
There is one more way to look at this data provided by USAFacts, which attempts to make government produced data available and visible to the general public.
The graphs I have used here are available in interactive form on the USAFacts “Climate in Ulster County, New York” page.
I don’t like using a graph of standard deviations, but that is what is available – they use this “We defined all monthly temperature and precipitation values to be average in comparison to the 20th century average if they fell within two standard deviations of the 20th century average. All values that fell below or above two standard deviations are defined as climatic anomalies”.
So, over the lifetime of this sanctuary, in the latest decade we see four or five anomalously wet months – but not as anomalous as those in the first decade of the sanctuary’s life. Further, the latest decade has been less variable than the first decade.
VERDICT: There has not been increased rainfall in Ulster County, NY where this sanctuary is located over the last two decades.
So, you may ask, if there has not been increased rainfall, why are their pastures and fields soggy?
“At the Catskill sanctuary, flooding and constant dampness have resulted in soil erosion and a loss of trees. Animals’ hoofs often sink into saturated ground while members of the sanctuary’s staff undertake flood mitigation efforts, installing culvert pipes and curtain drains, among other tactics, to no avail.” [ NY Times article ]
“Basically that property is in a bowl,” said Jake Wedemeyer, the executive director of the Ulster County Soil and Water Conservation District, a government agency that advises farmers on agricultural practices.
Another problem, Mr. Wedemeyer said, is that the valley’s clay soil retains water and drains poorly.” [ NY Times article ]
We see in this topographical map from USGS that the Catskill Animal Sanctuary is located between two ridges (of solid rock, by the way) with the only outlet for water being the tiny stream at the south end of the bowl, but the creek is not reliably downhill from the fields and pastures, it has negligible slope and is seasonal. (I confirmed by physical inspection).
The whole area between the foothills of the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson River in this part of the Hudson Valley has so much clay that it is famous for the number of historic brick kilns which used the abundant clay to manufacture bricks which were loaded on barges and floated down the Hudson to build NY City.
When purchasing the property “Ms. Stevens remembers when she first bought the Catskill property in 2002. “We only had a small number of animals, it was August, the grass was lush,” she said. “I didn’t ask about soil composition.”” [NY Times article]
In the drought year of 2002, the property looked oh-so-nice with lush grass and dry fields, not boggy-wet fields. It hadn’t been used to pasture many animals.
VERDICT: Agricultural land purchased without any regards for soil type, soil composition, and without seeking any expert opinion on what purposes for which the property was suited and without considering the well-known effects of variable rainfall.
Viewed in the moment, the property looked great – but there was a failure to take into account long-term weather patterns and physical geography. Previous owners or neighbors could have told them the property was boggy in wet years, as is much of the agricultural land in the valley portion of Ulster County.
CLAIM: “A growing number of animal refuges are being forced to move in the face of extreme rainfall, droughts and hurricanes caused by the planet’s warming.”
Despite the use of the words “growing number”, the article only cites two instances of animal refuges moving at all, and BOTH moved to New York State’s Finger Lakes region.
Quoting the Times:
“Sweet Farm, an animal sanctuary that also grows produce and supports climate-related technology, moved 140 animals from Silicon Valley in California to New York’s Finger Lakes region in 2022 after a close call with a wildfire.” [I need not point out that wildfires are not climate change, especially in California, which wishes it was back to drier conditions after two very wet years.]
Note that Sweet Farms’ website makes no mention of being forced to relocate due to climate change, wildfire or anything other than simple personal choice of the owners.
and
“Happy Compromise Farm + Sanctuary, which moved from Oregon in 2021. …. Trading drought concerns in the Northwest for New York’s extreme rainfall presents its own set of challenges, the owners said. But it was a trade they were willing to make.”
“We do have to deal with an overabundance of water here in New York,” said Eryn Leavens, a founder of Happy Compromise. “But climate change affects every corner of the planet, and you really have to pick and choose your battles.”
The owner’s quote of “extreme rainfall” can not be verified – they are in Tioga County, which has been drier than normal since 2021.
Note that Happy Compromises’s website makes no mention of being forced to relocate due to climate change, drought, or anything not simply personal choice of the two co-owners.
“The exact number of relocations is hard to pinpoint. The Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries, an accrediting agency, does not track the reasons for such moves. But the nonprofit group did report an increase in sanctuaries strengthening their disaster preparedness plans from 2022 to 2023, said Valerie Taylor, the executive director.
“Sanctuaries which did not previously have to worry about wildfires, severe flooding or extreme heat and cold are now faced with these new challenges,” Ms. Taylor said. Last year, about a third of all sanctuaries seeking accreditation reinforced their disaster plans, a 4 percent increase from the previous year, according to the federation. (Some 186 animal refuges in the United States are accredited by the group.)”
Let’s be clear, there are two animal sanctuaries that are known to have moved, both moved to New York State, neither mentioning climate change as the reason for their moves, not even the one that labels itself as a “Climate Sanctuary”. According to Ms. Taylor, of The Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries, wildfires, floods, heat and cold are uniquely new weather phenomena.
VERDICT: The claim that “A growing number of animal refuges are being forced to move in the face of extreme rainfall, droughts and hurricanes caused by the planet’s warming.” is not supported by facts presented by the NY Times.
Bottom Lines:
1. The featured Catskill Animal Sanctuary has found that it made a poor choice in its property purchase in 2002 – failing to inquire about how long-term weather conditions might affect the land. If the owners had asked the local experts, advice is provided free by various levels of government, they would have known that land would be boggy in wet years.
2. The reason they have to move is not down to Climate Change – the local climate has not changed. They must move because of Geography and Geology – both of which they should have studied in school.
3. It is false that “increasing numbers of animal sanctuaries” have been forced to move because of climate change. That idea seems to have been entirely invented by the NY Times journalist.
4. This essay illustrates the ongoing trend, pushed by Climate Crisis News Cabals, to “make every story a climate change story” – even if they have to make things up.
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Author’s Comment:
A silly little story, blown out of proportion to sell the specious climate crisis.
I write about it to show something about journalism, the misapplication of, leads readers astray giving them seeming true stories that are not factual.
It is a fact that if the Catskill Animal Sanctuary wants to have many hooved animals, it will have to move. The property is not suited for that use and never was. Why? Geography and Geology. I am sympathetic that these well-meaning people who have worked so hard for 20 years are now realizing that their poor property choice is not “fixable”. I once put just five years into an ambitious project that I finally came to realize was not going to get done, a least by me. Luckily, I realized it before we sunk our life savings into it — and was able to unload at a handy profit.
I admit that I do not understand the whole “animal sanctuary movement” — at all.
Using large area statistical weather trends to explain local phenomena is a bad idea. National, state and county lines don’t apply to the natural processes that produce weather.
Thanks for reading.
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It looks more like ignorance of actual farming, which is exactly what I would expect of animal rights activists.
Yes, more intentions (good or bad) than knowledge or experience. Especially lacking in the self-awareness of being ignorant.
I live in the Sierra Nevadas at 4000 feet. Had some city idiots move up here and be completely flummoxed by snow. A neighbor who has lived around here his whole life twice caught them putting chains on the rear wheels of their front wheel drive car, and when he told them, their attitude was “we’re from The Big City and too smart to fall for your redneck tricks”. These people sound like their cousins.
It seems like they had no idea of what questions to ask about the property.
Right, but even worse, they had no idea they even needed to ask questions.
“Drainage? What’s that?”
they were after land at a cheap price I would guess size and area only Q asked after cost
Welcome to the world of farming and ranching. The owners probably thought they had a real bargain when they bought this amazingly cheap bottomland. The most basic inquiries might have given them some clues.
If a vegan runs a livestock operation, what do they do with the animals? They won’t market them, so do they just operate as an assisted living facility, animal geriatrics? Where do they dispose of the carcasses?
It is like the old line about socialists, if they knew economics, they would not be socialists. If animal rights activists knew farming,. . .
Lower grocery bills support operations?
It’s just a place to keep their pets – non-working, non-productive animals are pets and “the animal sanctuary” is just a way to beg for a living or deplete one’s savings.
they end up with too many animals, a huge feed bill and yes disposal of the aged dead becomes a real issue as they really shouldnt bury on farm if its not huge enough for a designated area for large animals, but they dont like the knackers for pet food option either, and burning large animals is agin their codes as well (and harder to do properly than they know)
you wouldnt(yes you would;-) believe the X “discussions” im having with those people. everything on a farm is cruelty doncha know…. AI is bestiality was this weeks winner!
Story tip – Native Tribes Receive Greater Authority to Block Hydropower Projects › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)
Typical attitude – that everything will work out all right because their hearts are in the right place.
J Boles ==> These people fought against Nature for 20 years, installing drainage devices, but they could not defeat Geography and Geology. It is a shame they didn’t realize earlier that the property wasn’t suitable.
Look closely at the topo map included with the story.
Just south of the location of the animal shelter, you can see the USGS symbols for a “marsh or swamp”.
The animal shelter is literally located adjacent to a swamp, and is only elevated above the swamp by a single contour line.
I have seen this happen many, many times. People are looking for a property and find one that is attractive because it is significantly below the market rate for other properties in the area. They never wonder WHY it is priced much more cheaply!
pillage ==> The swamp is a more-or-less permanent wet area…one see’s this all over the county. Any slight dip in the land produces one of these wet spots, which quickly grow cattails or the invasive phragmites. Sometimes right in the middle of a farmers corn field or hay field. If the farmer is quick, before the State environmental police catch them, they can move some soil around in the Fall or even winter months to fill and slope the wet spot out of existence.
Very hard to have well drained fields in the flatter parts of Ulster County because of the clay. Drainage has to be lateral.
Before the Supreme Court corrected the Waters of the USA ruling,Federal EPA could order the farmer to leave the tiny “wetland”.
I made a fool of myself in Western Ireland a few years ago when I asked a local why the drystone walled fields of the poor farming land were so small. He looked at me pityingly, “so that we don’t have to carry the damned stones so far”.
Sorry Kip – that was meant to be a response to your comment below on stone walls in the Hudson Valley below 🤡
like in aus you NEVER buy anything bordering state parks bloody roos possums and fires follow too often. the odd idiot who thinks roos bashing over the fences is sweet tend to be the buyers, and then bitch when it burns down
My heart bleeds for these do-gooder morons.
Curious==> Give ’em a break — at least they don’t operate on your tax dollars. Expensive mistake though.
I once bought rural real estate– but was a lot more careful.
Who was it that said that climate change is a get out of jail free card for those who screw up due to their own ignorance?
CC seems to be a universal boogey man of blame shifting, – Help us, we are victims, send money! Climate change is creeping up on us and we might not get out alive so send money!
Sounds like bad management by clueless people to me, Sheep and goats are best suited to scrubland, moorland where the vegetation is spares , forcing them to roam around and not strip the land. A sheep’s jaw and teeth are evolved to take any vegetation down to the soil almost.
Hoofed animals churn up ground into mud, so cattle, horses have to be enclosed in sections, then moved around to let land they have grazed recover. Chickens will peck, scratch, in the top soil to find anything they can eat. Pigs are used truffle hunting because they can smell edible – to them – things under ground, and then use their snouts to dig them up – they eat just about anything too.
It is thick grass and vegetation that fixes topsoil and fixes water to prevent it getting water logged. Unless the animals are being properly managed and land rotated, it is little wonder the land is boggy and churned up. Also land drains can help. Leave farm animals to farmers who know what they are doing.
Clay becomes impervious to water when it is trampled by hooves. This was a lesson learned by the builder of the Bridgewater canal in the U.K. in 1770, to take coal into Manchester from a mine in Worsley five miles away.
He lined the canal with clay where it passed over the River Irwell but the water simply ran out. He noticed that in areas of farms where cattle regularly congregate clay soil was permanently puddled, so he drove a herd of cattle backwards and forwards over the aqueduct and lo and behold it didn’t leak when the canal was refilled. Puddling machines were subsequently invented to do the job of the cattle!
Prior to the completion of the canal it took two days for an ox cart load of coal to reach Manchester. On the canal, a barge hauled by a single horse could deliver tons of coal in a day. The price of coal halved in Manchester, business flocked there and the population tripled by 1800.
James ==> Historically, sheep were a big business in the Hudson Valley on the western side, in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains . The sloping woods are criss-crossed with low stonewalls which would keep the sheep in (domestic sheep are skitterish of lose stone walls — though they will leap them if chased by dogs or wolves). The sheep just ran in large multi-acre paddocks and ate everything except full grown trees.
John ==> And that seems to be a large part of the problem. They generally didn’t have that many animals,according to the owners, so they could rotate them around the five or six larger fields. The dozen sheep were confined to the higher ground near the ridge from which the photo is taken,off to the left.
The water height in the pond tells you how high the water table is….only few inches below the soil surface inmost places.
Failure to properly plan for extreme weather events is a very common theme in all of human history.
So, their poor planning and placing it in a known flood prone area, not climate, is to blame. Typical. It is too far for me to actually visit, so I went to the satellite images and maps to get an idea what the problem is. Wow, about the best thing they could have done is expand that pond and put a fish farm in, awfully wet location to bring livestock into.
2hotel9 ==> Probably fine for a small outfit back in the day — a family with a few cows in the barn, a kitchen garden, fields mostly in hay. Probably some of the area was woodlot, cut and used up to make more pasture.
In drought years, their pond dries up in the summer — which s another problem.
Nice post, Kip. So much for ‘journalism’. Cheap ‘farmland’ is always cheap for a reason.
Rud ==> Thanks — If they had asked me, I could have told them they would have problems in the spot.
Beginning in 1935, the Soil Conservation Service – now the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) began mapping soil types. This is now documented as the USDA Soil Taxonomy. The information is easily available with knowledgeable staff at county and federal agencies. Mentioned by Kip is Jake Wedemeyer of Ulster County; located 6.5 miles south of the Sanctuary.
Search terms: soil-profile or soil-horizon
John ==> If they had only asked Jake before purchasing the property, he would have warned them off….
Some years back, a friend who was head o the communications department at a large Virginia university told me that of all schools in the various departments, his School of Journalism contained the least intelligent, least inquisitive, and least capable lazy students. He didn’t say this as idle chatter. His situation caused him great concern especially because he had yet to find a solution. I could offer none except to say that sports journalists near always reported correct scores perhaps because it was easy for their readers to check. Perhaps the lack of easy “checkability” is why there is so much climate science junk “reported” by journalists. There is lots of data out there on all kinds of climate issues but it takes effort to dig it up as you did and that is not done by incurious lazy people.
Denis ==> Journalists are in short supply and usually have little time to get the story,write it up, get a few quotes from “experts” and put it all together. This journalist got the “statewide” stats on rainfall….which is the wrong stat to look for — took me only minutes to find the county level data.
If this had been a Science section journalist, she might have looked for more local information.
At least the journalist went to the country soils guy and put his information in the story…but didn’t draw the right conclusions. With Jake Wedemeyer’s expertise, the journalist should have concluded that there is no climate change connection, just a poor choice of property.
Sounds like some mean-spirited, slick country scalawags took advantage of gullible urban do-gooders by selling them land cheap that wasn’t suitable for purpose.
More Soylent Green ==>Maybe, but at first they didn’t have many animals…so it was probably ok. Not though for sheep….
In UK farming vernacular, the term is ‘Poaching’
It happens when animals are kept (forced) to remain on wet clay.
The damage is two-fold.
Firstly their feet destroy all the vegetation in the top few inches of soil, turning it to a mud bath
(Human feet do just the same, esp why Burning Man became such a mess but notably Glastonbury almost every year and gets worse. I have no idea what the Eavis Family do to repair the damage but ‘just’ human feet can do immense harm to soil structure.)
Secondly and unseen, the animals’ feet create a solid compacted layer at maybe 4, 6 and 6 inches under the surface and it is that which destroys any hope of plants properly growing and they repairing the surface damage.
The compacted layer prevents root growth as the plants seek nutrients and also creates an underground pool of water that suffocates.drowns not only the plants trying to grow but also the soil bacteria trying to feed the plants.
Heavy farm machinery also inflicts the same damage
Poached ground is an incalculable disaster for any farming enterprise, either livestock or arable and it that takes many years to repair and recover.
It can happen to any soil soil type, either clay or sand.
As I commented in the thread about Dung Beetles, sandy soil tends to reform itself into sandstone and Clay Soil becomes ‘rammed earth’ = so beloved of eco-nut hippy warriors for building houses with
Rammed clay, mixed with straw was a very widely used building material in the UK, esp for farm barns, byres, dairies and stores, even houses and it is truly gobsmacking how hard it is, how weatherproof and long lasting.
Look up ‘cob’
Clay, I know this from personal experience, is fantastic and fertile stuff for growing crops on, esp grass for grazing animals.
BUT, you have got to look after it, allow it to get ‘poached’ even just once and you regret it for the next decade at least.
On clay soil farms and at the first rains of autumn, get your animals off the land and into their indoor winter housing
Do not let them back out again until the spring grass growth is at least 5 or 6 inches tall
And that is where it all went pear-shaped here – just one more facet to soil erosion.
Human foot traffic is incredibly damaging, as in the story of Major Oak, near my old home on north Notts
Major Oak is an oak tree, a very old oak tree and actually in what remains of Sherwood Forest
Silly romantic old fools that we all are, a huuuuge story grew up about Major Oak being where the famous anti-villain ‘Robin Hood’ lived and operated
Major Oak was/is = Robin Hood’s tree
But being where it was, it was left to it’s own devices in midst of a large forest until The Victorians invented railways
Suddenly Major Oak became a sensational tourist attraction and almost anybody from anywhere could come visit it – and they did in their 10’s of thousands
After a few years, folks noticed that Major Oak was ‘looking unwell’ – were his leaves going yellow and falling off, twigs & branches breaking off, no acorns etc etc whatever whatever.
Bless them, the Victorian gardeners were really quick off the mark and diagnosed; Poaching.
So many people had come to visit the tree and spent hours paddling around under it, sitting with pic-nics, posing for photos (did they have pictures then or was it silhouettes and pencil sketches) etc etc that they had hammered the soil under the (large) expanse of its canopy into something resembling rock.
The tree was simultaneously starving, and, dying of thirst.
They immediately fenced off the area around the tree covered by its canopy and also put wooden props under its lower branches to support them while it recovered.
Nearly 200 years later, that fence and those props are still there – no-one is yet convinced that the damage done back then then is yet repaired even now.
That is soil erosion and why is a ‘rather serious matter’
Do we all recall hearing stories about Boabab Trees in African villages ‘dying from climate change‘
Like hell they’re dying from climate, they’re being killed by ‘tourists’ in same way Major Oak was nearly destroyed
Tourists is in “””” marks because many of those tourists are haha scientists gone there to try work out why the trees are dying.
<look in a mirror you clowns>
This Is Planet Stupid
Repeat: The clues are all around us – except – inside computers screens – no matter how super they are or how (artificially) intelligent they are cracked up to be.
Peta == Thanks for the extensive data on Poaching….appreciate it.
That fence around the major oak is still there and visitors aren’t allowed to get close to the tree. That is, unless you happen to know one of the Rangers. 😉
deep rip n dolomites good too IF you can afford it
Very little that the New York Times presents to its readers these days is supported by facts but rather is supported by funding from special interest groups of the Left.
ntesdorf ==> The NY Times irself is one of the special interest groups on the Left.
Having lush grass in a drought should be a bit of a giveaway 🙂
old cocky ==> To be fair, they probably had no idea the whole county was in a drought.
Kip, sadly, that may well have been the case.
Yet another example of ambiguous language being used to cover for poor decision making. There is such a thing as carrying capacity. Being an animal lover does not qualify you to run an animal sanctuary. Educate yourself if you are going to take on a task like this.
Bob ==> Yes, having once kept a horse or a family poultry flock does not make one qualified to run a animal rescue and shelter.
Unicorns and rainbows are not enough to get you through hard times.
I homesteaded for five or six years with mt wife and three kids, two of them under five. Was marvelous but we made mistakes as well. Today, vet bills will eat you alive of not pro bono.
well covered, and I admit I did the same lack of diligence on my place because it was covered in grass butt high and the entire area was lovely and wet I assumed…more fool me.. that the land was good. nope 12ins sand zero calcium over clay. its good for trees IF you can keep them alive for the first 2 or 3 yrs and what type ie redgums BOOM but citrus and other useful trees curl up n die
This is brilliant investigative journalism, which is a dying occupation
The lesson learned is not about New York Times dishonesty. That was known many decades ago. That rag prints all the leftist narratives there are. Truth does no t matter. It is the bible of leftists … for whom truth does not matter. Only political power and control matters to leftists.
Here’s the real problem:
Fictional climate stories are easy to write, but refuting them takes a lot of time and effort
(1) Leftist bias affects about 95% of the US mass media
(2) Leftists throw climate change mud (NONSENSE) on the wall much faster than conservatives can refute them
(3) There is no fact checking of leftist narratives by fellow leftists. Fact checking of leftists is only done by conservatives, who care about the truth, Wrong scary climate predictions are ignored by leftists, and then replaced by new scary (and wrong) climate predictions
(4) By the time a conservative has fact checked any leftist article, five, or fifty, more climate scare stories will have been published.