In the opening minutes of Rowdy Girl, Jason Goldman’s debut documentary, the director captures sunrise on a Texas farm where various animals nap, munch, or amble on verdant, windswept pastures. Inside the farmhouse’s kitchen, a middle-aged woman in a well-worn robe and silvery, tousled hair repeats the mantras of a guided-meditation recording: “If you want to be reborn, let yourself die. If you want to be given everything, give everything up.” As she whispers the words aloud, she feeds a turkey that has wandered into the house while a dog and cat look on curiously. “It’s a beautiful day, Sealey,” she proclaims to the turkey, which she carries outside into the matutinal light and places gingerly into a corral. Then she kneels to feed a reposing heifer before massaging the cow’s haunches. “I’m so glad we’re here for you,” the woman whispers.

If Goldman’s introductory scene feels storybook or Edenic, it is not poetic license. This unassuming place is anything but a traditional farm; in fact, it is a vegan animal sanctuary situated at the center of Texas’s sprawling ranching industry, otherwise known as cattle country. Owners Renee King-Sonnen and Tommy Sonnen are themselves former cattle ranchers turned vegan activists who, a decade ago, founded Rowdy Girl Sanctuary as an oasis for livestock that would have otherwise gone to slaughter.

For Sonnen, ranching was a profession that went back generations in his family. It’s a proud tradition as ever-present in rural Texas as John Deere caps, Ford pickup trucks, and Whataburger restaurants—all brands that have long capitalized on the pervasiveness of the farming business.

“It was like the ultimate betrayal,” King-Sonnen explains via Zoom from the sanctuary, which is located just an hour south of Austin in the tiny town of Waelder (population less than a thousand). “My husband’s business partner didn’t want anything to do with Tommy anymore. They had been best friends, they were partners, they baled hay together, they bought equipment together. All of these local ranchers were shunning Tommy. Even the feed store—we’d go to get feed for the animals, and you could tell they were talking about him behind his back.”

Indeed, with so much capital, culture, and identity invested in ranching, the couple’s transformation from cattle raising to animal-rights advocates seems as unlikely a story as the Houston-born King-Sonnen’s move from the city to the country years before.

“Have you ever seen the TV show Green Acres?” she says with a laugh. “It was just like that. I was not interested in moving to the ranch. I was in the city selling real estate at the time, so my daily attire was business suits and heels. By night and on weekends, I produced music and did country-music showcases. I moved there, and I remember hating it. I wanted Tommy to build a road so I wouldn’t get my heels stuck in the dirt.”

She points to her own struggles with alcoholism and sobriety and a childhood surrounded by domestic abuse and drinking as the source of her compassion for animals. “My mother was severely beaten by my alcoholic father over and over,” she recalls. “I was wired to want to save an underdog, to save somebody being abused. Unfortunately, my first rescue was my mom.” After King-Sonnen became sober in 2013, a new and unexpected door appeared before her—one that, as she describes it, began to open when she took to bottle-feeding an orphaned two-month-old calf while on the ranch. She christened the calf Rowdy Girl. “I don’t think I would have ever gone vegan had I not gotten sober. It was as if I was feeding Rowdy Girl and she was feeding me images and thoughts and feelings that I had never had before. And I began to see that eating animals is an addiction, just like alcohol and drugs.”
Yet her transition to veganism was neither instant nor easy. Initially, King-Sonnen’s husband insisted on keeping the ranch, and as she relates in the documentary, there were intense arguments between them (she remembers calling him a “murderer”), long periods of silence, and even threats of divorce. “[Tommy] didn’t want to talk to me about it,” King-Sonnen adds. “He would say, ‘You gotta stop naming the cows!’”

Eager to educate herself, she went online to seek out information about the history and dirty secrets of factory farming, finding educational documentaries and slaughterhouse footage. The images made her stomach turn, but they steeled her resolve. Not long after she shared them with her husband, he went vegan himself.

Rowdy Girl Sanctuary was founded with a small number of the Sonnens’ rescued herd, and in the intervening 10 years, it has taken in more than 100 animals, some surrendered from other ranchers who could not bear to sell them for slaughter. Following the rush of online and television publicity that the sanctuary received, King-Sonnen also established the Rancher Advocacy Program, which supports cattle ranchers and other livestock producers who want to transition to plant-based farming. She also worked as the board director for the Agriculture Fairness Alliance, a nonprofit animal-rights group that lobbies for plant-based farming and vegan-friendly legislation.
When Jason Goldman first heard about the Sonnens and Rowdy Girl Sanctuary in 2018, the New York–based film producer and recent vegan convert had already been scouting other sanctuaries as prospective settings for a film on animal activism. “I really wanted to do a deeper dive into what makes someone want to open up an animal sanctuary,” Goldman explains. “I wondered how that actually helps the movement.”

Having trained in the observational, verité-style traditions of documentarians like the Maysles brothers and Barbara Kopple, Goldman knew immediately that he wanted to produce something different on the subject of animal welfare—neither the interview-based educational films nor the graphic slaughterhouse films that were typical of the genre. “[Those films] were coming across to me in a very specific style,” he says. “They were heavily didactic, or they were featuring the worst atrocities. [But] I wanted a film that I knew my parents would watch and my niece and nephew could watch…where you can get transported into this world that Tommy and Renee have constructed.”

Goldman’s camera follows the Sonnens’ interactions with the sanctuary’s cows, pigs, donkeys, and chickens, immersing the viewer in the often leisurely temporalities of animal life. Like their human counterparts, these creatures are presented lazing, playing, eating, congregating, and observing the world around them—or, as Goldman characterizes it, “standing on their own legs.” When King-Sonnen warbles a quiet hymn to Rowdy Girl, the cow appears to listen attentively, and when she raises a holler out toward the horizon, the horses come galloping in from the pasture. “Every animal had a different personality,” Goldman notes. “It was so hard to film the donkeys because they would just come up to the camera. Some of the horses would chew on the wind protector on the shotgun mic. The chickens would, at first, be cautious…. [But] then we could get intimate and close-up with them.” This intimacy is itself a document of the Sonnens’ everyday lives, which are entwined in and dedicated to the stewardship of these animals.

Between such bucolic scenes, Goldman also shows the Sonnens at work, hosting visitors and volunteer days, organizing their Rancher Advocacy Program with other transitioning ranchers, and taking crisis calls from those who are desperate to save their own livestock from butchery. In one of the film’s most poignant moments, a rangy, ruddy-faced rancher in a cowboy hat and jeans appears at the sanctuary to surrender a calf named Buster. The rancher explains that he had cradled and kept the calf alive after a difficult birth and could not bear to slaughter him. As he pets Buster and prepares to leave him behind, his chiseled face wells with tears.
“Most people see cattle ranchers as callous, as people who have no feelings,” King-Sonnen says. “[They] have no idea that these cattle ranchers are [also] trapped in the tradition of animal agriculture.” She adds that many ranchers remain in touch and often support the sanctuary.

Instead, she reserves her vitriol for the livestock industry, government policy, and asymmetric fiscal subsidies that normalize the slaughter of land animals at the rate of nearly 90 billion per year globally. “We live in a very, very evil grid,” she laments. “It makes me crazy that we have all this great vegan food, vegan restaurants, and we’re still killing more animals than ever.”

Despite the almost unfathomable numbers and overwhelming work for the movement, she remains sanguine about the future of animal activism. “I’m so grateful Jason took the direction he did with this documentary,” she says, “because it gives us the opportunity to be seen in universities and even elementary schools. And we can have real conversations with people.”

And what advice does the former Texas cattle rancher have for those who are hesitant to make the same change to veganism that she did?

“What I would tell people out there who really want to make a difference, if you really love animals, and you don’t know how to stop eating them, just consider that you’re living in a world where you can have a choice,” she says. “The land, the animals, the water, we are all here to love and support one another. If we don’t start collectively [doing this], we’re going to eat ourselves out of a planet.”

Rowdy Girl opens in New York City on May 31 and in Los Angeles on June 7.

View article at Vogue.com