Rescuing Farm Animals

For about six weeks in 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 Livingston.

Using hidden cameras, 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 a humane death. Live birds are seen thrown, crushed and suffocated under piles of dead birds. Some are not properly stunned before they are killed. And while the DxE video does not show this, inspectors working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture have reported seeing evidence that birds at the facility had been dunked alive in a boiling water tank for defeathering.

Foster Farms denies any wrongdoing; in a statement, a spokesman told me that allegations of inhumane treatment “are without merit and a disservice to the thousands of Foster Farms team members that are dedicated to providing millions of families in the Western United States and beyond with a quality nutritious product.”

But the video presents a challenge to a society that cares for animal welfare: What should happen to people who try to save these chickens?

Two DxE activists, Alexandra Paul and Alicia Santurio, will go on trial next month on charges of misdemeanor theft for taking two chickens from a truck outside the Livingston slaughterhouse in September 2021. They argue that what they did was not steal but rescue — that after trying other ways to protect chickens at the facility, they took the only option left to them, no different from breaking a window to rescue a puppy locked in a hot car.

DxE has conducted a string of such open rescues, in which activists record themselves. They are an attempt to get law enforcement into pursuing criminal trials against the rescuers — trials in which the activists want to publicize their cause.

The larger goal is to establish a right to rescue animals that face inhumane treatment. 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. “If there’s someone in my neighborhood watching me boil birds alive, we’d say this is monstrous behavior,” Wayne Hsiung, a founder of DxE, told me.

Shouldn’t the same be true of animals we are going to eat?

Last fall, a Utah jury acquitted Hsiung and another DxE activist, Paul Darwin Picklesimer, of burglary and theft for taking two sick piglets from a farm owned by Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest producer of pork. Jurors accepted the argument that they were rescuing animals, not stealing.

California’s animal cruelty laws make it a felony to subject an animal to “needless suffering” or “unnecessary cruelty” or to being “cruelly killed.” While there is an exception that allows animals to be killed for food, there is nothing 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 house.

Paul, who faces trial, told me she felt that she had no choice but to personally rescue any birds she could. She said she has turned down a plea deal that would have involved no jail time; if convicted, she could face up to six months in jail.

“I want to go to trial because I want to elevate the stories of these chickens,” Paul said. She added that “the only reason that people know what’s happening to animals in these places — in factory farms, in labs or behind circus doors — is because of animal rights activists.”

What is our moral responsibility in stopping cruelty?