From Bethesda Magazine: Meet a Potomac animal rescuer

Michele Waldman turned her passion for animal welfare into Rosie’s Farm Sanctuary

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August 14, 2026 10:00 a.m.

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On a breezy afternoon in May, Bruce snatches an envelope out of Michele Waldman’s hand and eats it, leaving her with no idea who it was from or what was in it. To be fair, he’s a goat. Then there’s Mickey, who playfully clamps his mouth onto Waldman’s arm, leaving slobber on her jacket. The 3-year-old Holstein thinks of Waldman, 58, as his mom, since she bottle-fed him when he arrived at Rosie’s Farm Sanctuary, Waldman’s refuge for animals in a residential neighborhood of Potomac.

Waldman, who became a vegetarian at 19, was in her early 50s and living outside of San Francisco when she first visited an animal sanctuary, a safe place for animals, including those typically used for their meat, milk or eggs. “I started learning some real horrors of some factory farming, especially in the dairy and the egg industry,” she says. “I decided to become vegan.” Waldman, who sees human patients as a psychotherapist, says learning how animals are treated put her in a “despair state” and she needed to take action, so she started volunteering at sanctuaries. The joy she felt from helping the animals sparked an idea to open a sanctuary of her own.

Waldman relocated with her husband and two sons, who are now teens, to Potomac in late 2020 for her husband’s job. A neighbor later agreed to subdivide his property and sell her 5 acres with three barns and a house, and Waldman dove into learning about farm animals, opening Rosie’s as a nonprofit in 2022. Roughly 50 animals now call Rosie’s home.

Tours of the sanctuary are offered for visitors of all ages for a small fee. “The goal is to inspire people and to educate people about these beautiful animals and how relational they are, how they have best friends, and they have their favorite activities, and they have personalities, and just to teach compassion,” Waldman says. She hopes that after meeting the residents at Rosie’s, visitors “will change their eating, their diets, and leave here
just feeling more connected to themselves, to the planet, to animals.”

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Waldman is intentional about having a mix of animals. She has rescued sheep, goats and cattle from the dairy industry. Some of the sheep at Rosie’s came from a lamb farm, and some of the chickens from the poultry industry. There are also pigs and turkeys that have been found on the street, and a sheep from a research facility, plus two horses that were on the property when Waldman bought it.

The tale of rescuing the two largest residents at Rosie’s, Mickey and Moose, a young male Ayrshire, is told in a documentary released in May. Cow Trip starts when they were calves in Vermont in 2022. Joanna Zelman, a D.C. based filmmaker, and her father made a trip to bring them to Potomac in the back of an SUV lined with hay. By early June, the 27-minute film had more than 200,000 views on YouTube.

The property at Rosie’s is divided into sections to keep harmony among the nimals. Still, there is mingling. Gloria, a white-feathered turkey who came to Rosie’s after being found walking along the side of the road outside of turkey farms in eastern Maryland, has made a best friend, Marty. “When we got [Gloria], we didn’t have other turkeys, and so she spent all her time with the potbelly. She is pretty sure she’s a pig,” Waldman says.

Along with dozens of volunteers and five part-time contractors, Rosie’s has one employee, Sanctuary Manager Victoria Prasad, who lives in the house on the farm with her fiancé, three cats and a dog.

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Sonali Motha, who works for Montgomery County Public Schools and lives in Northwest D.C., visited Rosie’s when her son wanted to go to an animal sanctuary for his birthday in December 2023. What she learned on the tour led her to switch from being vegetarian to vegan. After volunteering and giving tours, she was hired by Waldman to manage an internship program called LEAP (Leaders for Ethics, Animals and the Planet), which is part of a program for high school students at sanctuaries nationwide. The interns learn “about the animal agriculture industry and then [do] hands-on health checks and other activities with the animals,” Motha says.

Waldman named the sanctuary after Rosie, the golden retriever she adopted from PetConnect Rescue, an animal welfare nonprofit in Potomac. Rosie, who had been used for breeding at a puppy mill, was traumatized at first, Waldman says, but transformed after a month into a happy dog. “This is named after the spirit of Rosie, that with enough love and care all beings can thrive,” says Waldman, who helps support Rosie’s financially with her husband and also seeks donations and grants.

Waldman says the patients she works with in her psychotherapy practice have experienced serious trauma and PTSD. “It’s pretty heavy work,” she says. At the end of a long day, she always comes over to the farm. “When I’m here, I’m in my sanctuary for me,” she says. “A goat ate my card. And so … I completely forgot what I did today. How can you be upset when a goat steals your envelope?”

This appears in the July/August 2026 issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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Originally published at Bethesdamagazine