Mark Wakeling runs his animal sanctuary, Amberwood Animals, near Bicester in Oxfordshire. This follows a career first in the army and then as an actor, later running his own acting school until Covid hit in 2020.
Linda: How did the sanctuary start? Did you decide to start one and go looking for suitable land?
Mark: No, I had no idea that this was going to happen. I ran my acting school and was living in my own cottage near here, but because of Covid I lost the business after desperately trying to make it work. I had no choice but to liquidate the company and was plunged into quite a lot of debt.
Before Covid I’d been running song circles locally – mantra singing, medicine songs. Through that I met a local farmer’s daughter, Jo, who’d recently lost her husband, quite young. She was from a beef farming family so I was intrigued that she was interested in the song circle, not being the typical sort of person who came along. We became friends, and I visited the farm; then Covid came, and after lockdown I learned that her father had died and the farm’s future was uncertain. I offered to come and help out. There were animals here – 10 beef cattle and 20 sheep; I learned how to look after them and did various jobs such as building fences and tractor work.
Jo wasn’t ready to invest in anything new, but before long I had the idea of raising enough money to buy those animals from her, to form a sanctuary here, and to pay her rent for the land. I borrowed £10,000 from a mate to buy the animals, and that’s how it all started.
Once I owned them I took on more responsibility. There are all sorts of legal requirements to owning animals. As far as the outside world is concerned I’m a farmer, in that I’ve gone through all the necessary legal procedures.
Linda: Have you acquired other animals since?
Mark: Yes, next came the pigs. I’ve got five – the first was Olive, who’d been a pet pig. Then there are ten or so sheep that I’ve bought in from various places. I’ve learned that there’s a whole spectrum of animal farmers, ranging from hardcore factory farmers who see animals as just objects on a conveyer belt, to those on smaller farms who sometimes have an animal that’s special to them. One of the lambs came from a farmer who had a soft spot for this particular orphan and asked me to take him. This week I’ve added two lambs from a small rare breed farm – they were orphaned and undersized, so the owner wanted to find a place for them. I don’t go looking for animals but if I hear about one that needs a home, I’ll follow it up.
L: How do you finance the sanctuary? There must be considerable costs for food, veterinary treatment, equipment and maintenance. Do you have regular donors? Is your sanctuary eligible for any government grants?
M: A mixture. I funded it to start with by selling my cottage and I’ve still got some of that left. The costs are about £40,000 a year, without paying anyone or any of the extra costs – this is just feed, rent, utilities, vet bills, the contractors I have to get in sometimes. It works out at about £900 a year per animal – and there’s insurance now that we’re a charity, too. Just about half comes in from donations and one person donates most of that – thank God for her. I’ve had a few grants, from GenV and other sources.
L: What’s your typical day on the sanctuary?
M: I start very early – it’s all about routine, and I stick to rigid timings. 7am is feed time for the pigs, then I feed the elderly sheep who live in the barn (they’re arthritic, and not out on the grass); after that, it’s picking up poo, an important daily task, and giving pain-killing injections to some of the older sheep. At 10.30 the pigs get carrots and apples. Then it’ll be whatever needs to be done. I function best in the morning. At the moment I’m building a sheep shelter, more or less single-handed – an enormous structure. I need to spend time catching up on emails and admin, checking all the other animals out in the fields, going out to buy carrots etc as well as providing for myself.
But of course it depends very much on what time of year it is. So it varies, but it comes down to that routine. Afternoon feed for the pigs is about 4pm. I like to feed them carrots and apples at that time, to keep them interested in these key moments of the day. When you see how pigs behave, you realise that they like space, they’re often quite widely spaced out. Seeing that, I realise how terrible it is to keep pigs crammed together in intensive farms, how it denies them that natural behaviour.
L: You’ve recently had the heartbreak of losing Bambi, one of your quite young cows, to TB when she tested positive. That obviously hit you very hard. If she’d had to be taken away to a slaughterhouse you’d have seen that as a terrible betrayal (luckily she didn’t …) Losing animals, taking the decision to end their lives if they’re suffering, must be part of running a sanctuary.
M: Yes … my first losses were of two elderly ponies I took in. I just walked out to the field one morning and found one of them dead. As the first loss, that hit me very hard, and then a week later I found the second one dead in the field – it must indicate the strength of the link between them. But in retrospect, those deaths were an absolute blessing; I hadn’t had to intervene. (It took me back to the death of my dog Seamus a few years before – I was absolutely grief-stricken, and that tipped me over into becoming vegan.) Since then I’ve had to have cows put to sleep because they were old and ill, and I researched thoroughly to find the least traumatic way of doing it – I spoke to sanctuaries, I spoke to vets, and still had so many sleepless nights about it. The best way was to shoot them, and that’s what I’d been dreading the most, because of my army experience. I found someone who could do that, and although it was upsetting, he used a silencer and it was instant.
That was a big turning-point for me. I can’t shy away from that responsibility, so I’ve come to accept that this has to happen sometimes and if I ensure that the end is as kind and stress-free as possible, I don’t feel as bad about it as I did at first. It’s as important as anything else I do here, and I have to be at peace with that.
L: A bit about your background - what led you to veganism, and when? Your background (a farming and shooting family; a spell in the army) could have led you in a very different direction ...
M: I went to boarding school, and then the army. I think the key thing was trying to get my head around the fact that I was gay, and I became good at hiding that. It was illegal at that time to be gay in the army so I got used to playing a role that hid it very well, along the way developing confidence and quite a powerful ego. Then I became an actor, and part of the London gay scene; I got involved with recreational drugs, and developed a drinking problem too.
So a lot happened between the ages of 21 and 35, but it was ultimately quite self-destructive. I was struggling, and reached a critical point really – I was either going to go under, or find a way out, to heal myself. The teaching of acting was a big part of that, nurturing the ability to connect with others. When I came back to the countryside, aged 40, to get away from the madness of London, I just started to feel at home there, to see things differently and to connect. I started to play music, to grow vegetables, to have this connection with the earth. I got my dog Seamus, my cat Jack, and pretty soon I stopped eating meat, though it took me a bit longer to go vegan. I saw animals in a different way; I saw the cruelty, I saw the suffering, the things I hadn’t noticed before.
I now lead quite a monastic life here. I think my perception, the meaning of my life, is about service, and it’s about nurturing. The one thing that separates us from other sentient animals is this sense of choice. We’ve been gifted with the ability to notice suffering, and beauty, and our choice is what we do about that. If I’m not exercising that choice every single day I’m not being fully human.
L: There's an urgent need to reduce meat consumption overall - to reduce carbon and methane emissions, cut nature loss, to use less land and water, to reduce overuse of antibiotics on farmed animals, and to benefit human health too. And that's besides the animal cruelty on a barely imaginable scale that's well hidden by the meat industry. Do you think this message, about shifting our diets, is getting through to the public? Will behavioural shifts be enough to reduce meat consumption, or will it take government intervention?
M: I believe we’re a lot more vulnerable than we like to think. Everything about the way society has evolved has led to us shunning our vulnerability and becoming self-serving, with a false sense of security. Most people are unable to pull back from that. We can try to influence individuals, but so many people who essentially agree with us won’t do anything about it. It has to be a governmental shift, in our relationships with money, with power. For real change I think there has to be some seismic event that will really shift the way we think and lead to top-level decisions being made.
Meanwhile we can only influence individuals and try not to get too overwhelmed. We can only hope that things will shift in a direction that’s kinder. There’s that Tolstoy quotation “As long as slaughterhouses exist, there will always be battlefields” - I think we’ve just got to nurture kindness and compassion in every way we can.
There’s a power that comes through people meeting these animals here. We need more sanctuaries!
L: How do you see ways to use your sanctuary to engage with people?
M: We’re now a charity, trying to set up possibilities for that to happen more. My first priority is always to make the living conditions as good as they can possibly be for the animals, but alongside that I’m trying to set up the possibility of some kind of interaction with animals. Also, I’d like to bring people here for healing and meditation, that sort of thing. It’d be great to set up a tepee and have sharing circles. By association, if people come here for their own benefit they’ll see animals here that aren’t going to be killed for meat, and realise that it’s part of the peace of the place.
Alongside these things I’m trying to write a book, with the aid of journalist Claire Hamlett, and someone’s thinking of making a documentary about my life. If those things happen they could lead to more opportunities for outreach, talks and suchlike, involving more people. It’s all about getting the message out, having a voice. But first, I’ve got a sheep shelter to build!
L: Thanks so much, Mark, for giving your time to this discussion. It’ll be great to see how things develop, and I’m looking forward to the book!
To find out more about Mark and his animals, or to make a donation, see his regular posts on Facebook and Instagram, or visit www.amberwoodanimals.com.
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