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. But the notion that because removing animals from factory farms looks extreme 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?
MARINA BOLOTNIKOVA: 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.
The meat industry has every reason to portray direct action activists as ignorant and deceitful, but in my experience as a journalist, these people are some of the most credible sources regarding factory farming. They know what happens on the ground because they see it themselves, and they document it for the world to see. They’re organized, strategic, and very smart. This isn’t to say that they’re perfect witnesses or don’t get things wrong, something that no person can claim to do. DxE has pulled pranks, like pretending to be the CEO of Smithfield Foods on cable news, but these antics are meant to be revealed as such. Unlike employees of the industry, these activists don’t have a financial incentive to lie. They’re eager to talk to journalists and back up their claims with evidence—unlike factory farm flacks, who run away from reporters when confronted with their industry’s pervasive cruelty.
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. DxE has, at various moments, been bedeviled by personal and political conflicts that are difficult for outsiders to make sense of. This has been painful for the animal movement, but it ought not to obscure the fact that exposing violence and liberating animals from it are some of the movement’s most powerful strategies. The vulnerability of activism to both conflict and government crackdown highlights the need for many groups with their own philosophies of change, so the movement isn’t dependent on a single organization’s infrastructure.
Despite immense industry efforts to thwart them, the radical wing of the animal rights movement accomplishes an extraordinary amount. DxE’s photography and videography has captured some of the best up-close encounters with animals suffering on factory farms available anywhere. Activist Kecia Doolittle, who worked as a nonprofit professional before joining DxE, created Project Counterglow, a separate organization that uses publicly available information aiming to map every factory farm in the country. The federal government, meanwhile, doesn’t even know where many factory farms are, The Counter reported last year, because meat industry lawsuits have blocked them from keeping a list…
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.
It’s an open secret that animal agriculture is usually a zone of exclusion from animal treatment laws. Things that ought to be clear cases of systemic criminal animal cruelty or at least warrant an investigation—like, DxE and its lawyers have argued, ventilation shutdown—are ignored by police and assumed to be untouchable. By exposing atrocities that the state refuses to prosecute, activists are also showing how lawless the meat industry is, and that it’s up to laypeople to stop it.
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. SOURCE…
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