Tracey McShane is a former veterinary technician, author, and animal rights advocate, and the wife of comedian Jon Stewart. Born Tracey Lynn McShane on August 6, 1967, in Philadelphia, she is 58 years old. Most coverage files her under Stewart’s name, but the farm sanctuary the couple is known for, along with a number-one New York Times bestseller, came out of her work, not his.
The deed makes the point on its own. The forty-five-acre farm in Colts Neck, New Jersey, that the public associates with Stewart does not carry his name. It was bought by a company, FSP LLC, also listed as JTS Land Trust, for $4 million in 2016, according to Monmouth County Clerk records reported by the Two River Times. The woman who turned that land into a sanctuary is the one most search results treat as a footnote.
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The career change that started everything
Before any of the animal work, Tracey studied design at Drexel University and spent years as a graphic designer, moving from job to job without settling. On NPR’s Fresh Air in 2015, she told Terry Gross that Jon was the one who spotted the problem. He could not understand how someone that passionate seemed so flat at work, and he told her she needed a job that would make her cry.
She went back to school. In 1999, the same year Stewart began hosting The Daily Show, she qualified as a veterinary technician. The work, she told the New York Times, finally gave her a sense of purpose. “And also,” she said, “I felt macho.”
How Tracey McShane and Jon Stewart met
They met in 1995, on a blind date set up by her roommate, not long after Stewart’s earlier television show had been cancelled. He told the story on Larry King Live in 2002. A crew member he was working with described her in such warm terms that he figured he would be a fool not to call, then wrote her number on a dollar bill and spent it on cigarettes before he could dial it.
He got the number again. The first date went badly. On the Strike Force Five podcast in 2023, Stewart said she would not touch her food at the restaurant, so he ate it himself. Things improved once they reached a bar and started talking.
He proposed in 1999 with a custom crossword puzzle built with Will Shortz, the New York Times crossword editor, the clues leading to the question. Stewart later told the Los Angeles Times that crosswords stayed a private ritual between them. “It is a constant reminder that I am married to a very smart woman,” he said. The couple married in 2000 and had two children, Nathan in 2004 and Maggie Rose in 2006, both through IVF. They later changed their shared surname to Stewart.
How the farm sanctuary came together
The animal work began at home and outgrew it. By the time Stewart was leaving The Daily Show in 2015, the household held the two kids and a rotating group of rescued dogs, pigs, rabbits, and guinea pigs. Tracey put it plainly to NPR: “I’m crazy. It means I have hoarding tendencies.” When the house ran out of room, a former vet tech whose husband suddenly had open time went looking for a barn.
What followed ran over several years, and the dates are worth keeping straight, since a lot of coverage blurs them into one event.
- 2015: The Stewarts announce that Bufflehead Farm, their twelve-acre property in Middletown, New Jersey, will become Farm Sanctuary’s fourth shelter. Tracey reveals it as a surprise speaker at the organization’s gala at the Plaza Hotel.
- October 2016: They buy Hockhockson Farm, a forty-five-acre Colts Neck property dating to 1780, for $4 million, planned as the larger, public-facing site.
- January 2017: The Colts Neck planning board votes unanimously to approve the sanctuary and education center, after an application that ran more than a year against neighbors’ objections over noise and traffic.
The zoning fight is the part that complicates the supporting-spouse label. Getting forty-five acres rezoned for tours, a visitor center, and a rebuilt lecture barn meant testifying in front of a township board and answering residents who did not want it nearby. Tracey carried that work. Stewart turned up for the approval meeting and, by several accounts, asked one question: how much it was going to cost him. The rest of the night belonged to her.
A bestseller with a heavier message inside it
In October 2015, Tracey published Do Unto Animals: A Friendly Guide to How Animals Live, and How We Can Make Their Lives Better, illustrated by Lisel Ashlock. It reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list and topped USA Today’s list as well, according to its publisher, Artisan.
The packaging is gentle. Friendly illustrations, tips for reading your dog or cat, weekend projects like building a bee house. The content is heavier than the cover suggests. Much of the book deals with factory farming and animals taken from slaughterhouses, roadsides, and live markets, written plainly enough to reach readers who would never open an animal rights manifesto.
The rescues that made the news
The sanctuary takes in animals through Farm Sanctuary’s adoption network, and a few arrivals became news stories. In August 2018, two goats wandered onto N train tracks in Brooklyn and were tranquilized by police. Stewart drove to the city’s Animal Care and Control, collected them, and delivered them to Farm Sanctuary’s upstate shelter himself, a scene covered by ABC7, Newsweek, and NBC New York. He had earlier taken in a bull that bolted from a Queens slaughterhouse and an abused horse from Pennsylvania, according to Page Six. A goat named Alondra, found at a Bronx construction site, was placed with help from the Hockhockson Farm Foundation, which Farm Sanctuary credits by name.
Where things stand now
Hockhockson Farm runs as a private operation. It is not open to the public, and it does not take volunteers. The animals that pass through it tend to arrive without much announcement, the way most rescues do.
That quiet is the interesting part. The farm exists because of what fame can buy and reach: the money for the land, the press that turned loose goats into national headlines, the name recognition that likely softened a reluctant planning board. What that fame built then stepped back from view. Stewart caught the contrast himself at the 2015 gala, joking that two decades in Washington politics had left him unsure how to handle people with this much empathy. The joke lands because it is half true. The empathy, and the years of unglamorous work that came with it, were mostly Tracey’s.
