TO THE RESCUE: The fight against factory farming is winning criminal trials
A trial offers a chance for rescuers to tell the stories of the animals they saved, connecting the fathomless billions suffering in factory farming to individual animals with lives worth living. Rescuers can advocate on their behalf, and through the remarkable risk they take upon themselves, demonstrate the strength of their convictions and the urgency of the issue.
MARINA BOLOTNIKOVA: After nearly six hours of deliberation, two animal rights activists facing misdemeanor theft charges were acquitted by a California jury. The alleged crime — which the activists freely admitted to — involved taking two sick, slaughter-bound chickens from Foster Farms, one of the biggest poultry companies in the US. Prosecutors called it stealing, but the defendants, Alicia Santurio and Alexandra Paul, both members of the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), called it a rescue.
Santurio and Paul (the latter a former Baywatch actress and longtime social justice activist) had taken the chickens from a truck outside a Foster Farms slaughterhouse in Livingston, California, in September 2021. According to Foster Farms, the animals were each worth $8.16, though the defendants still faced up to six months in jail if convicted. But unlike most criminal defendants, Santurio and Paul welcomed the prosecution — they refused multiple plea deals, including one that came with no jail time and would’ve eventually cleared the charge from their records.
The chickens’ rescue followed a 2021 hidden-camera investigation (conducted by a separate DxE activist) at the same slaughterhouse, which drew attention to the appalling cruelty of poultry slaughter. When the birds — whom the activists named Ethan and Jax — were removed from the slaughter truck by Santurio and Paul, they were both severely ill and struggled to stand. (Many factory-farmed chickens have been bred to grow extremely big extremely fast, and by the time they reach slaughter weight at six weeks old, their legs often can’t support their weight.) Ethan died four days after the rescue, while Jax recovered after intensive veterinary care and now lives on a farm sanctuary…
The acquittal “is a statement in defense not just of these two women’s right to rescue animals, but the right of every living being to be protected from corporate abuse,” said Paul’s attorney, Wayne Hsiung, a co-founder of DxE who has been a defendant in two other rescue trials, outside the courthouse in Merced, California. “It should be a clarion call for animal-abusing corporations that if you are going to hurt animals, people will intervene and stop you, and they will be defended by our community and by American citizens.”
Since its founding a decade ago, DxE, a grassroots animal rights group, has been testing out this strategy, which it calls “open rescue”: activists walk into factory farms and slaughterhouses and simply remove animals suffering there, taking them to receive veterinary care and eventually to live out their lives peacefully on animal sanctuaries. The tactic serves an elegant double purpose, saving animal lives in the immediate term while intentionally provoking conflict with a legal system that treats living beings on farms as though they were inanimate property rather than sentient individuals…
Santurio and Paul’s victory comes after a historic trial last October, in which DxE activists were acquitted by a Utah jury after facing a decade in prison for rescuing two sick, dying piglets said to be worth $42 each from Smithfield Foods, America’s top pork producer. More and more of the group’s rescues are making their way to trial (two more cases are scheduled for this year), where activists often facing lengthy prison sentences attempt to convince juries that they have a “right to rescue”…
Direct action represents “the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free,” as the late anthropologist David Graeber put it… By doing this, activists are refuting animals’ status as chattel, albeit indirectly. Animals’ property status makes it exceedingly hard to fight directly on their behalf in court, as seen in the unsuccessful recent lawsuit that attempted to establish personhood for Happy the elephant and free her from the Bronx Zoo.
If animals can’t stand in court, human activists can put their freedom on the line for them instead. “Because animals still don’t have legal standing, this is, in a roundabout way, the only way we can get their issues spoken about in a courtroom,” Jeremy Beckham, a former executive director of the Utah Animal Rights Coalition and an aide to DxE’s legal team for the Smithfield trial, told me via text. “Rescuers can advocate on their behalf in a public trial, and through the remarkable risk they take upon themselves, demonstrate the strength of their convictions and the urgency of the issue.”
A trial offers a chance for rescuers to tell the stories of the animals they saved, connecting the fathomless billions suffering in factory farming to individual animals with lives worth living…
Judge Lo, at the end of the trial, told jurors that “this is not just about two chickens. It’s about very important principles.” This is, of course, why the factory farm industry sought to punish two activists for taking property valued at less than $20. As activists bring more cases, the risk of harsh industry, law enforcement, and political backlash increases. The FBI, which has historically categorized animal and environmental activists as terrorists, has already investigated DxE for multiple incidents and played a significant role in the Smithfield trial. In Utah, legislators swiftly passed an “anti-rescue” law after the Smithfield trial to prevent activists from using the same defense that helped DxE win.
But that everyday citizens are siding with DxE (some jurors have even spoken about how revelatory the experience was for them) is evidence enough that these fights are worthwhile — and they’ve made me more optimistic than I’ve ever been about the animal movement’s future. SOURCE…
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