What they want is to stop us from doing open rescue because they know how the stories of individuals like Rain can challenge the very foundation of our laws, legislation, and society. But that’s exactly why we must continue rescuing animals and telling their stories to the world.
WAYNE HSIUNG: On December 6, a North Carolina jury found animal rights activist Wayne Hsiung guilty of felony breaking or entering and felony larceny for rescuing baby Rain from a goat “meat” farm. The Judge issued a suspended sentence. Wayne will have to do two years of supervised probation, and pay $250 in restitution.
Wayne issued the following statement: ‘Given that I was facing years in prison, this is a lenient sentence, and it tells me that the Judge and prosecutors didn’t really want to lock me up. What they want is to stop us from doing open rescue because they know how the stories of individuals like Rain can challenge the very foundation of our laws, legislation, and society. But that’s exactly why we must continue rescuing animals and telling their stories to the world’. SOURCE…
ADRIENNE MATEI: On a rainy night in February, 2018, animal rights activist Wayne Hsiung sneaked into a small scale North Carolina farm and, depending on your perspective, either stole or rescued a baby goat. The maneuver was highly risky – on a live stream, Hsiung tells his audience what awaits: an electric fence, barking dogs and armed security guards, according to the farm’s website.
Undeterred, Hsiung and his co-conspirators filled their pockets with dog treats and broke into the Sospiro farm, owned by farmer Curtis Burnside. “One of the reasons we’re doing this today is because we want to show the world – whether it’s factory farmed or it’s from a small-scale farm – [that] these animals don’t deserve to die,” says Hsiung to the camera, his face bathed in red light. “And we believe killing an animal intentionally is criminal animal cruelty.”
In darkness, Hsiung and others from the activist organization he co-founded, Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), make their way past the farm’s electric fences towards a barn. After placating the guard dogs with vegan peanut-butter treats, Hsiung finds what he’s after: a baby goat – sick, he believes – in a small pen with its mother. They escape with the goat unharmed, but Hsiung accidentally drops a piece of crucial evidence: his driver’s license… Burnside… alerted authorities after finding the license in the morning.
Hsiung was allegedly unaware of this – he went on to live his life, naming the baby goat Rain in the meantime. Then, three months later, when he returned to North Carolina for a vegan festival, he was arrested at Asheville airport. As the person who physically carried the goat on the live-stream, and who left his ID behind, Hsiung, alone among his co-conspirators, stands accused of the crime…
Did Hsiung really have to trespass on private property and abscond with a kid in order to make a statement about animal rights? “There’s a phenomenon in psychology called the identifiable victim effect,” Hsiung explains, of his choice to perform and livestream open rescues. “When you reduce some sort of global atrocity or suffering through the lens of a single individual, it suddenly becomes so much more vivid and powerful,” he says. “We’re trying to tell a story of individual animals in a way that really moves people.”
For him, it’s also about smashing what he believes is a myth: of benevolent small-scale farms, which may talk of free-range and happy animals, but which in fact can harbor cramped living conditions, not provide veterinary care, and slaughter animals…
Hsiung is now hoping jurors in North Carolina will agree with his interpretation of the law. In a landmark case that could predict the future of the right to rescue distressed animals, he faces up to six and a half years in prison for felony charges of larceny and breaking and entering, based on what the video shows him doing next…
Hsiung, now 40, has had many run-ins with the law over his 15-odd years of animal rights activism. In 2007, after what he says was a “peaceful protest” against the use of fur in fashion outside a Burberry store in Chicago, criminal charges were levied against him. (He takes credit on behalf of DxE for later spearheading California’s landmark fur ban in 2019 – DxE was pivotal in its passing in Berkeley and San Francisco.) Yet the charges against him, he says, have always been dropped – until now. SOURCE…
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