I Was Arrested at the Nation’s Largest Organic Chicken Farm

A nonviolent protest reveals fraud and criminal animal cruelty at a massive “humane” poultry producer.

A felony trial relating to this mass open rescue concludes this week. Follow the Sonoma Rescue Trial Twitter for updates and the Simple Heart blog for trial reflections from Wayne Hsiung, the last remaining defendant. 

This is the second post in a three part series on open rescue.

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On a misty morning in September 2018, I gathered at a park in south Berkeley with over a hundred animal rights activists to take what was then the biggest risk of my life.

I was a college senior at UC Berkeley studying for law school at the time. Months earlier, I joined Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), an animal activist organization that claimed to have been exposing fraud and cruelty at “humane” commercial farms around the nation. 

For most of my life, I had been a vegetarian. I cared about animals and saw documentaries on industrial agriculture as a child that led me away from animal products. But I saw these concerns as relatively mild quirks of my personal life. After all, there may be some bad companies out there, but as a whole, the government set standards for farms, and many of them seemed to be becoming “organic” and “certified humane” anyway. With all the regulation and certifications, animal agriculture couldn’t be cruel as a whole, could it?

Now, I had a chance to see for myself. 

After an hour-long briefing, we broke and shuffled into a convoy of passenger vans. Our destination was kept confidential to a handful of organizers to avoid tipping off the industry and local authorities.

What I didn’t know is that our convoy was heading towards the largest organic poultry farm in the nation. 

Petaluma Poultry, owned by Perdue Foods, was a major supplier to Whole Foods. The New York Times had published two articles praising Purdue’s animal welfare practices, positioning the company as a spearhead in a new era of humane meat. And one of their flagship facilities was located in Sonoma County, less than a two hour drive north of my campus at UC Berkeley.

To the rest of Sonoma County, it was a sleepy overcast morning. For many of us, it would be one of the most important days of our lives. 

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My car was the first to arrive. We pulled over onto a sleepy road in the Sonoma countryside. An occasional horse stood on the horizon amid the green hills around us. I wondered if our mission to uncover industrial animal cruelty had brought us to the wrong place. 

The rest of the convoy arrived shortly after. A crowd of people and banners formed on the gravel road. Soon after, DxE activist Wayne Hsiung began a livestream and announced that our march would begin.

For months, he said, undercover investigators had documented filthy, overcrowded conditions at the facility of over a hundred thousand birds that violated state animal cruelty laws. And when they reported these conditions to the authorities, they did nothing.

Now, in the middle of a factory farm, we were going to set up an on-site medical facility and bring care directly to suffering animals. I lugged a tent over my shoulder as we walked. Others carried medical fluids and scrubs. 

Priya, another activist on the livestream, summed up our mission: “We’re going to bring compassion to one of the most violent places on Earth.” 

This was not the first daylight open rescue that DxE had conducted. Since 2017, DxE had gathered ordinary people in civil disobedience at several slaughterhouses and factory farms around the Bay Area. The previous action at Sunrise Farms, a massive Whole Foods egg supplier also in Sonoma County, led to forty activists being willingly arrested. No one was criminally charged. Each time, things went largely according to plan. 

No one in previous actions was arrested who didn’t expect to be. There was no reason this time should be different, right?

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The property looked charming and bucolic. A massive chicken statue stood at the front by the road. We walked up a short winding road and passed a bungalow and a building painted red to look like a farm house. Most people held up white flowers in one hand and a peace sign in another. I carried the medical tent on my shoulder.

For a surprisingly long moment, no one stopped us. Then we heard a vehicle approaching. A woman stopped us at the front gate. “Get off my property! This is private property!” 

Under California Penal Code 597e, it is legal to enter someone’s property to aid to animals who have been denied food and water for over twelve hours. Wayne offered a letter to the farm owner describing our right to give aid to the animals we knew were being neglected at this facility. She rejected the letter.

The rest of us continued marching. The farm was a series of dirt roads lined by long metal sheds. Discolored roofs stood atop off-white corrugated metal. Tattered tarps flapped in the wind. Two of the sheds had wire enclosures next to them, each with a few dozen to a hundred chickens outside on dirt. 

A severed chicken foot lay on the ground as we marched past. 

Having arrived squarely in the center of the farm, some activists slipped on white biosecurity suits and began to enter sheds. Farm employees rushed to hold facility doors shut, but the activists were too many. The woman aggressively drove past us while yelling on the phone to other farm employees and the police. 

“They’re stealing our chickens, goddammit! They’re stealing our ch—!” 

I handed the tent I was carrying to other activists and joined one of the gatherings. I stood there observing. It felt like being in the eye of a storm. White biosecurity suits rushed past facility workers. A police helicopter began to circle overhead; police sirens made their way towards us in the distance.

I reflected on the risk I was taking being here. I had only known this activist group for a few months. I was taking practice LSATs and preparing for law school. Were we justified in entering this property that, with the occasional severed limb, seemed otherwise taken out of a children’s book? Was I right to entrust this rag-tag activist group with my freedom?

Then I saw the birds.

Inside, activists live streamed the conditions. Ten thousand birds were confined in each industrial shed. Some were collapsed on their backs, chests rising and falling heavily as they struggled to breathe. Others flapped desperately on the floor, legs collapsed and unable to walk. Undercover footage had documented similar conditions for months — and today was no exception.

 Among the living were the dead.

An activist handed me and other activists towels with dead birds wrapped inside. I saw mangled bodies that were indistinguishable from heaps of dirt. Tattered feathers, exposed bone, red flesh. Some bodies were unrecognizable as animals. 

I had been briefed that birds on chicken farms typically suffer from overcrowding, disease, and cannibalization. Now, I was seeing what that looked like with my own eyes.

California state animal cruelty laws define it as illegal to maliciously and intentionally maim, torture, mutilate any animal — and there is no exemption for farmed animals. When I saw the birds, it was clear to me that the real criminals were not those of us who were trying to give aid to sick and dying animals. It was the massive facility that was abusing these animals in the first place. 

Factory farmers in the county would later justify these conditions. This is a farm with hundreds of thousands of birds. It’s like a city filled with people. With a large enough number, some will become sick, and some will die.

In time, I would realize the grotesqueness of this logic. A city is not just a mass of bodies. It has hospitals and grocery stores. It has families and emergency services. In a complex of industrial sheds, each crammed with over ten thousand chickens bred to grow to six times their normal size and collapse under their own weight before being slaughtered at only six weeks old, this was no city. 

This was a death camp for kindergarteners.

 — 

A line of law enforcement officers detained us as we began to depart from the farm. The clouds grayed as it began to rain. Activists held about a dozen birds who were in urgent need of medical attention. Dehydration. Broken wings. Ammonia burns from lying in their own feces. If they did not receive rapid intensive care, they would die.

Over an hour-long stand-off, Wayne attempted to negotiate. He explained our legal right to give aid and the medical urgency of the situation. 

I wondered what was running through the officers’ minds. One of them, an athletic-looking man with a military buzzcut, fixed his eyes on the birds. He hunched over slightly, his eyes fixed on one of the mangled bodies. I imagined what he was thinking: these people might be breaking the law… but God, are these birds in awful shape.

Nonetheless, an officer gave an order for us to be arrested. Officers ripped dying birds out of the hands of other activists who through their cries pleaded with the officers not to hurt the animals. 

While I put my hands behind my back and felt plastic zip ties tighten around my wrists, I solemnly reflected on the irony of the situation: We are not the criminals here. The farm is. And we’re being arrested for trying to expose it. An officer recited to me those strangely familiar words: “You have the right to remain silent.”

Later, a state veterinary report would reveal the injuries of the birds who were seized by authorities. The birds, it read, were in “distress,” had “exposed muscle tissue and bone,” and had a “necrotic smell.” In other words: they were literally rotting to death. The injuries were so severe that the government’s own veterinarian recommended the farm for charges of criminal animal cruelty. And yet, we were the ones being arrested. 

They ushered us past the chicken statue and loaded us onto a bus set for county jail. We sang songs despite protests from the bus driver. 

I’m gonna keep on walking forward… keep on walking forward… never turning back.

Later, I would learn that not all of the birds we tried to rescue were taken by the authorities. During the stand-off, one officer took mercy on the animals. She asked us which bird needed the most help. She told an activist to take the sickest bird and run. She was rushed to veterinary care and taken to an animal sanctuary. They named her Rose.

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Sonoma authorities held us in county jail overnight where they announced our charges. The molasses pace of our jail intake was punctured by a gasp as the first activist received the news of our charges: felony burglary, felony conspiracy, and grand theft. Our bail was set at $20,000 each — a total for all fifty eight of us of nearly $1.2 million. 

In the days after our release, I reflected on the answers I had set out on my journey to seek. I had seen “humane” animal agriculture with my own eyes — that even the Whole Foods’ and Purdues of the world were engaging in criminal animal cruelty that would shock the conscience of anyone who found out. And that the government, far from regulating these industries, was actively prosecuting those who tried to expose it.

Today, five years later, the era of open rescue trials has begun. As I write this, Wayne Hsiung is on trial for trespass and felony conspiracy for leading hundreds of people in demonstrations against factory farms in Sonoma County. 

It is a chance for a jury of ordinary people to see what I have seen and decide who the real criminals are: the activists shining light on cruelty, or the corporations fighting to keep it in the dark. 

Twice now in a row, animal activists have been acquitted for rescuing sick and dying animals from slaughterhouses and factory farms. I’m confident that similarly, the jury in the Sonoma Rescue Trial will make the right choice. 

When they do, it will further inspire people around the world who agree that rescuing animals is not a crime; that companies should not be allowed to torture innocent creatures and call it “humane”; and that our laws should not treat animals as mere property to abuse, but rather living beings who deserve compassion and respect.

This has been Part 2 in a three part series on open rescue. Read Part 1 here and subscribe for Part 3.