UP-CLOSE AND PERSONAL: Why the anti-factory farming movement needs direct action
The law is supposed to reflect the public’s idea of right and wrong, not that of business interests with no regard for sentient life. By breaking unjust laws, activists want to confront a jury of regular citizens with the question: 'Is it really right to send someone to prison for saving a suffering animal?'
MARINA BOLOTNIKOVA: In January of this year, seven activists were driving through factory farm country in central Iowa. For those who have never been to this part of America, the sight can be surreal: Massive piles and dumpsters filled with dead pigs and piglets, discarded as trash, can be seen from the road. This apocalyptic scene is a common and inevitable part of industrial animal agriculture. Factory farms are breeding grounds for death and disease, and animals are routinely killed because they’re sick, injured, or just too small to be profitable. But in one of those piles in Iowa, the activists spotted movement—a piglet who was still alive… Charlie, as he was later named, was estimated to be three weeks old, weighed seven pounds, and had several health problems and injuries, including severe hypothermia and a broken jaw and rib…
The activists, members of Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), a grassroots animal rights network, were in Iowa to support Matt Johnson, who was about to face trial and up to eight years in prison. In May 2020, Johnson, an organizer and press coordinator for DxE, had uncovered something that was shocking even by factory farming standards. Early in the pandemic, when slaughterhouses were shutting down and the industry didn’t have enough workers to process slaughter-ready animals into meat, companies started looking for ways to exterminate them quickly and cheaply.
A truck driver for the pork producer Iowa Select Farms tipped DxE off about a method the company was using to kill its pigs. Called “ventilation shutdown,” it entailed packing pigs into sealed barns, sealing off the airways, and cooking them to death by pumping in heat and steam. Johnson and other activists planted recording devices to capture this process and its aftermath. The audio defies belief: Pigs can be heard shrieking in pain and distress for two-and-a-half hours. By the two hour mark, most of them have quieted down and presumably died, but some voices can still be heard crying out.
The groundbreaking investigation was reported in The Intercept, and the state of Iowa, instead of charging Iowa Select’s executives with criminal animal cruelty, arrested and criminally prosecuted Johnson. Soon after, Lucas Walker, the truck driver who blew the whistle on Iowa Select at great personal risk, was pursued by the FBI to serve as an informant (he declined)…
The revelations about ventilation shutdown created a crisis for the pork industry, which scrambled to create justifications for cooking pigs to death. McDonald’s, The Intercept reported, had asked pork producers for an explanation. The following month, Iowa Select announced that it had stopped the practice. It’s worth dwelling on the fact that if it weren’t for Johnson’s investigation, the world would never have found out about ventilation shutdown. Without direct action and investigations by groups like DxE, no one would know what had happened to Charlie or about anything else that happens on factory farms. The meat industry is highly secretive, and without undercover footage and direct activist intervention, its abuses would be carried out entirely in the dark.
Direct action, especially in the name of animal liberation, is often maligned by people who don’t know anything about it. They imagine reckless activists wreaking havoc for the sake of it. One reason for this is that the things these activists bring to light, like a baby pig maimed and left to die in the cold, can seem too horrible to be real. And their ultimate goal—to end all mass production of animals for food—can seem extreme if you haven’t thought about what it means for living creatures to be reduced to commodity status, their bodies mutilated and optimized for making meat…
Numerous organizations and individuals, besides DxE, are engaged in this work. Animal Save, for example, holds vigils at slaughterhouses and gives water to animals arriving on trucks (a practice that’s been banned by an “ag-gag” law in Ontario), drawing attention to one of the most stressful parts of a farm animal’s life: their transport to slaughter… Despite immense industry efforts to thwart them, the radical wing of the animal rights movement accomplishes an extraordinary amount…
Some vegans and animal rights adherents believe direct action is foolish because it makes the movement look extreme and criminal, and it threatens to destroy the movement by locking up talented activists. This is understandable. Prison is a terrible, unjust place, and the animal rights movement is not that far removed from the specter of incarceration. In the aughts, activists were imprisoned in a devastating series of convictions that weakened and demoralized the movement. DxE activists have not yet received any prison sentences, but its co-founder Wayne Hsiung was convicted for the first time of two felonies in December (and given probation) for rescuing a sick baby goat. Even a felony conviction without prison time can seriously restrict a person’s rights. More prosecutions are coming, and activists will need to carefully weigh the risks with each action they take.
But the notion that because removing animals from factory farms looks extreme, it is a bad tactic, misreads the philosophy of direct action. The law is supposed to reflect the public’s idea of right and wrong, not that of business interests with no regard for sentient life. By breaking unjust laws, activists want to confront a jury of regular citizens with the question: “Is it really right to send someone to prison for saving a suffering animal?” This is hard to do when regressive judges suppress evidence of animal cruelty, but as animal law scholar Justin Marceau told me, it only takes one judge ruling a different way to start to change that…
And then, of course, there are all the individual animals liberated by activists and given a rare chance to live, like Gilly the piglet, who was removed from Iowa Select Farms by Matt Johnson, or Lily and Lizzie, taken from Smithfield Foods. Activists working across the country have saved hundreds of turkeys, chickens, ducks, pigs, dogs (bred for experimentation), and other animals this way. Life for former farm animals is never going to be ideal—at farm sanctuaries, they still live in an enclosed, human-controlled environment. But it’s the least humans can offer our fellow creatures born into brutal violence.
Much as everyone hoped he would pull through, Charlie did not make it. He died after three days at the vet. There are many more farm animals like him out there, dying in a mass of corpses. His memory reflects the most important lesson of all about direct action: Factory farms aren’t like some horror movie that’s inaccessible to us, but something that ordinary people can physically intervene in. Activists are showing that anyone can, if they give themselves permission, start creating the world they want to live in. SOURCE…
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