3,847 hearts
Latest update: January 26, 2026
This feature debuted in Modern Dog's Summer 2022 print issue.
Laurie Zaleski was just a kindergartner when her mother Annie McNulty packed up three kids and fled a violent marriage, landing in a rented one-room shack in the woods where running water and electricity were rare luxuries. Between the strays her mom carted home from her animal-control job and the souls dumped at the farm's edge, more than 35 creatures called the place home. Annie nicknamed it the 'Funny Farm.'
Even as a child, Zaleski promised herself she'd someday buy her mom a farm big enough to save every abused and abandoned animal in reach. Twenty years later she cashed that promise in, snapping up a 15-acre spread in Mays Landing, NJ, and building one of the Northeast's largest rescues—600-plus dogs, cats, goats, pigs, chickens and horses strong.
Her master plan was to share the property with her mom—her best friend—while running Art-Z Graphics, the company she launched in 1996. Then, two weeks before closing, Annie lost her battle with cervical cancer, and every plan she'd made collapsed in an instant.
Zaleski soldiered on, running the Funny Farm solo for 12 years on top of her business. When feed bills spiralled to $4,000 a month in 2011, she filed to go non-profit; the Funny Farm Rescue & Sanctuary officially opened its doors a year later.
Word spread fast once visitors and volunteers began turning up. She never imagined strangers would work for free, yet soon friends, family and then the wider community poured in. Today 10 to 12 regulars pitch in weekly, swelling to about 100 for events. Kids under 15 need an adult, everyone signs a waiver, and there's no age cap—volunteers run from 3 to 83, including one gate greeter who uses a walker. More than 100,000 people wander the farm free every year.
Her memoir, Funny Farm: My Unexpected Life with 600 Rescue Animals, peels back her past, including living on the edge of poverty. 'It's my mother's story as I saw it, and how the Funny Farm was born,' she says. Woven in are the misadventures of a cast of rescued animals and the unlikely friendships they forged.
Before writing for adults, Zaleski teamed with social-media volunteer Matt Reeves on children's books starring three Funny Farm residents. Part of her Kindness Program, they fight bullying and champion those with special needs—by showing classrooms that if wildly different species can coexist, so can kids.
'Three volunteers in a day and I'm thrilled,' she shrugs. 'Five or six? We'll actually finish everything.'
Her typical weekday kicks off around 4 a.m. She runs the graphics firm from home, and while the farm opens to the public only Tuesdays and Sundays, helpers show up daily. Feeding and watering comes first—'three volunteers and I'm ecstatic; five or six and the whole checklist gets done.'
Chicken Adele lives indoors alongside 11 dogs, but most residents roam free, mingling across species into oddball friendships. 'They're loose; I want them living their best, freest lives,' she says. Don't be shocked to glance up and catch a horse or cow peering through her windows.
Zaleski has made a specialty of saving vets and others whose pets faced euthanasia, and she's become something of a megaesophagus expert—the rare disorder that balloons the esophagus so food can't reach the stomach. It's far more common in dogs, and sufferers must eat from a box-shaped highchair. Given grim odds, she christened her megaesophagus pup Chucky the 'Miracle Dog': vets gave him six months; he gave her five years. She nurses two others with the condition today.
People aren't allowed to drop animals at the gate, but during the pandemic someone abandoned 21 feces-caked cats in two crates just beyond the camera's range. A neighbour spotted them and called Zaleski.
'I'm usually pretty unshakeable,' she admits, 'but I went on Facebook Live and asked how anyone could do this.' Every cat was sick, piled atop one another; five were pregnant. She couldn't risk them mingling with—and infecting—her resident felines.
Her plea worked. People flooded in bearing food, blankets, cash, litter and more, unbidden. 'We never asked; they just showed up,' she says. 'People could feel my pain.' A vet cut prices for shots, someone else handled fixing the animals, and once recovered every cat found a home—except four ferals who now live on the farm.
Asked what Annie would make of today's Funny Farm, Zaleski laughs: 'We'd have ten times more visitors and volunteers, because my mom would never stop talking about it. I get sad sometimes, but I know she's here.'
*Funny Farm (St. Martin's Press) launched February 22, 2022.
First seen in the award-winning Modern Dog magazine. Don't miss an issue—subscribe now!
keep the journal open