LIGHT THE WAY: Rescuing farm animals from cruelty should be legal
In any context other than factory farming, treating animals the way we see chickens treated in slaughterhouse videos would be considered blatant cruelty. Many would also consider it cruel to stand by while someone else handled animals this way.
FARHAD MANJOO: For about six weeks in the summer of 2021, an activist working with the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE, gained undercover access to one of the largest chicken slaughterhouses in California, a Foster Farms facility in the Central Valley city of Livingston.
Using hidden infrared cameras that can see in the dark, the DxE activist captured video showing a production line moving too quickly — about 140 chickens are killed every minute on each of the four slaughtering lines in Livingston — to offer any kind of humane death for the animals. Live birds are seen thrown, crushed, left for dead and suffocated under piles of dead birds. Some aren’t properly stunned before they’re killed. And while the DxE footage doesn’t show this, inspectors working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture have reported seeing evidence that birds at the Livingston facility had been dunked alive in a boiling water tank for defeathering…
But the footage presents an ethical challenge to a society that claims to care for animal welfare: What should happen to people who try to save these chickens?…
Over the past few years DxE has conducted a string of such “open rescues,” in which activists record themselves, often in daylight, taking a small number of chickens, pigs, beagles and other animals from facilities where they have documented inhumane treatment. In addition to saving the lives of the animals, the rescues are an attempt to provoke law enforcement into pursuing criminal trials against the rescuers — trials in which the activists want to publicize the unseen brutality that pushed them to act.
Their larger goal is to establish a “right” to rescue animals that face inhumane treatment in agriculture. In any context other than factory farming, treating animals the way we see chickens treated in the Foster Farms slaughterhouse videos would be considered blatant cruelty. Many would also consider it cruel to stand by while someone else handled animals this way. “If there’s someone in my neighborhood watching me boil birds alive, we’d say this is monstrous behavior,” Wayne Hsiung, a co-founder of DxE, told me.
Shouldn’t the same be true of animals we’re going to eat? Don’t we have a moral obligation to do whatever we can to save animals from inhumane factory-farming facilities, or, at the very least, to not punish people who do try to help?…
These cases turn the abstract suffering of farm animals into questions about specific animals suffering in specific ways. The pigs rescued from Smithfield were visibly severely ill. According to DxE, one of the chickens taken from Foster Farms died within days of the rescue, and the other required intensive veterinary care to recover. The one who died was given the name Ethan. Jax, the chicken who survived, is at a sanctuary in California. Even meat lovers don’t want to eat sick animals.
DxE submitted its Foster Farms findings to law enforcement and animal welfare authorities. California’s animal cruelty laws make it a felony to subject an animal to “needless suffering,” “unnecessary cruelty” and to cause it to be “cruelly killed.” While there is an exception that allows animals to be killed for food, there’s nothing in the law that exempts farm animals from humane treatment; it is just as illegal in California to mistreat a chicken at a slaughterhouse as a kitten in your own house. SOURCE…
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