{"id":759013,"date":"2019-12-09T07:25:33","date_gmt":"2019-12-09T12:25:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=759013"},"modified":"2019-12-09T07:25:55","modified_gmt":"2019-12-09T12:25:55","slug":"meet-the-activists-risking-prison-to-film-vr-in-factory-farms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=759013","title":{"rendered":"OPEN RESCUE: Meet the Activists Risking Prison to Film VR in Factory Farms"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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DxE carries out what the animal liberation movement calls Open Rescue, a practice dating back decades in which animal rights activists publicly reveal their actions and identities to claim moral high ground.<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

ANDY GREENBERG:<\/strong> ‘Direct Action Everywhere\u2019s co-founder, a compact 38-year-old Taiwanese American man named Wayne Hsiung, describes the American meat industry as a kind of vast dystopian hoax. \u201cAnimal suffering is something \u00adpeople intrinsically care about,\u201d Hsiung says. Americans can\u2019t stand to see an animal die onscreen in a TV show. They obsess over a dentist who kills a beloved lion on a hunting trip in Zimbabwe, and they lavish billions of pageviews on cute animal videos on social media. To keep that same public happily buying hot dogs requires nothing less than a Matrix-like system of mass delusion, he argues. \u201cThe fight against animal agriculture,\u201d Hsiung says, \u201cis the fight against misinformation”…<\/em><\/p>\n

From that behavioral economist\u2019s perspective, he still marvels at the social influence of the global meat industry, the soothing images of small farms and happy pastures that it puts on packages of bacon, he says, to obscure the reality: a collection of factories whose contribution to climate change rivals that of automobiles, where tens of billions of creatures live out their short lives in confined squalor, overseen by underpaid migrant workers performing dangerous, grueling labor. \u201cThat takes some next-level hacking,\u201d Hsiung says. \u201cTo convince the public that these massive agribusiness concerns, which are inflicting horrible suffering on animals, that are huge assembly line productions\u2014that this is good.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Defeating that disinformation has become an \u201carms race,\u201d Hsiung says, one that stretches back to Upton Sinclair\u2019s 1906 meat industry expos\u00e9, The Jungle. For decades, factory farms and slaughterhouses have, for economic reasons as much as PR ones, been moving away from urban areas to remote rural ones, out of the public eye. The companies that run them have lobbied for \u201cag-gag\u201d laws that criminalize dissemination of video and photos from within their walls. They\u2019ve tightened security against groups like his that seek to break into their facilities and film surreptitiously\u2014all while processing more animals through their feeding barns and slaughterhouses than ever before.<\/em><\/p>\n

At the same time, the animal rights movement has gained an arsenal of tools to fight what they see as the information blackout around the meat industry. \u201cDrones, secret cameras, VR, social media,\u201d Hsiung says. \u201cOver the past few years there\u2019s been an eruption in technology, and that\u2019s leading to a cataclysmic battle.\u201d If that description of the conflict sounds hyperbolic, it\u2019s perhaps because the stakes are particularly high for Hsiung himself: He faces up to 60 years in prison on charges\u2014including burglary and theft of livestock\u2014related to a series of animal extractions he\u2019s carried out over the past two years.<\/em><\/p>\n

In three of those operations, in which he helped remove animals from pig and turkey farms in Utah and an egg farm in California, he and his fellow DxE activists filmed their operations with virtual reality cameras: custom-built stereoscopic depth-capturing rigs far larger and more sophisticated than the simple 360-degree camera footage the activists had shown me at their Airbnb. Hsiung wasn\u2019t caught in the act of those intrusions. He and several other DxE members were charged only after they published the virtual reality footage they\u2019d captured, which included images of their unmasked faces. DxE carries out what the animal liberation movement calls \u201copen rescue,\u201d a practice dating back decades in which animal rights activists publicly reveal their actions and identities to claim moral high ground’.\u00a0<\/em> SOURCE…<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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