A Woman Removed Birds That Were Going to Die in a Factory Farm. Was It a Rescue or a Crime?
On a Monday afternoon in the end of September, a 23-year-old student left a courtroom in Santa Rosa, California. Surrounded by her lawyers, she moved briskly through the hallways of the courthouse, by over a hundred potential jurors.
Attached to her formal coat was a small metallic bird, sparkling on her jacket.
These were the concluding moments of jury selection for her legal proceedings. She was facing two minor offenses for trespassing and one count of vehicle interference, as well as one count of felony conspiracy. If convicted on all charges, she could spend up to four and a half years in incarceration.
The question isn't the perpetrator … It's about the motivation.
The facts at the center of the case were uncontested. Just past midnight on 13 June 2023, Zoe and fellow activists of the collective Direct Action Everywhere drove to a slaughterhouse facility, a processing center about a short drive north of San Francisco. Disguised as workers, they encountered a truck filled with numerous birds crammed in containers. They removed four chickens, put them in containers and departed.
The events were uncontested because Zoe and her companions had subsequently released video footage of what they had done. “The identity isn't in question,” Rosenberg’s lawyer, the defense lawyer, often states. “It’s a whydunit.”
Following their exit, the rescuers checked the poultry – which they called four named hens - more thoroughly. Rosenberg says they were soiled with excrement and suffering from wounds and abrasions.
Carraway would explain in legal proceedings that her aim was not to take unlawfully but to provide assistance. The panel would be tasked with deciding, practically, how far compassion can go before it crosses into criminality.
As the child of an animal doctor, Rosenberg grew up on 16 hectares in San Luis Obispo county, California, surrounded by a menagerie of creatures.
When she was nine, the household acquired hens for the yard. She remembers clearly their identities readily: her feathered friends. Until then, She held the widespread belief that poultry weren't intelligent, but getting to know them shifted her opinion. “I realized they have distinct characters and that their minds are sharp, and that they possess great worth.”
Two years later, She saw an internet clip of activists entering a major egg producer in the country and taking birds. It was the first time witnessed a industrial agriculture facility, and she was disturbed by the environment: thousands upon thousands of hens confined in enclosures. It was also her introduction to the concept of “open rescue”, the term activists use to explain actions in which they enter agricultural facilities or labs and rescue suffering beings. They disclose their activities, regularly releasing recordings of what they do.
Following the viewing, Rosenberg immediately knew that was something she wanted to do, and she emailed the director of the group behind it. (“She had no idea I was 11,” Zoe remembered.) The next year, in the mid-2010s, she founded the San Luis Obispo chapter of DxE, a then new non-profit.
In recent history, activist collectives have gained a reputation for using direct actions – like efforts from the group comparing meat consumption to the Holocaust or stunts that involve splattering fur with fake blood. The reasoning is straightforward: shock value is required to jolt people out of complacency about livestock pain. However, it frequently backfires: driving individuals away. In a society where eating meat is the norm, many see such protests as a individual insult – and experience condemnation, not conversion.
The group continues this approach; they have staged protests outside a butcher shop in the area and interrupted a meal at the beloved restaurant the venue.
But the group’s signature move has been publicized rescues. From the activists’ perspective, a benefit of this method is that it not only highlights to an unfairness – it seeks, to some extent, to address it. It aims at the business rather than blaming everyday people, and allows a look into the secret realm of livestock farming.
“The court cases that we have are kind of a vehicle to present the issue to a diverse panel of our community members, and to the public via news outlets,” said a group representative, the spokesperson. “Should it be illegal, or is it moral, to rescue an animal in distress in a commercial operation?”
Currently, the group points out, there are legal protections for rescuers in California and 13 other states providing legal safeguards if they access a vehicle to rescue a threatened creature. The claim is that the same principle should apply to all animals in distress.
Over the past decade, as stated by the representative, members of the group have been involved in dozens of rescues. In the past few years, the group has saved two piglets from a industrial farm in Utah; a pair of birds from a company truck outside a slaughterhouse in the county; and pets from a breeding and research facility in WI. Following the rescue, the activists provide them with veterinary care and find them shelters.
Mike Weber runs Weber Family Farms with his relative in the area. The property has been inherited for many decades, he stated. They produce eggs with a large flock, housed in about two dozen buildings. The business, which is powered by more than 2,500 solar panels, also converts waste into compost.
Back in 2018, the group conducted a significant event on his farm. Several hundred activists showed up to protest. A fraction of these stormed on to the property and {broke into a chicken house|accessed a poultry building|entered a coop