“Open rescues,” closed jail cells, undercover video, & two challenges to “ag gags” in Canada
SANTA ROSA & LOS ANGELES, California––Mass media food sections, as always, fixated during the run-up to Thanksgiving 2023 on how best to roast turkeys.
Vegan and vegetarian media comparably focused on promoting plant-based alternatives to turkey dinners
Direct Action Everywhere founder Wayne Hsiung, however, writing from jail in Sonoma County, California, and Ronnika A. McFall of the Los Angeles-based charity Mercy for Animals, sought to redirect some attention toward activist strategies for turkey and other animal liberation from the food chain.
“Bizarre ritual”
Blogged Hsiung in an essay entitled Why We Should Rethink Thanksgiving, “Turkey at Thanksgiving is one of the most bizarre rituals in American culture.
“First, all of us literally eat the same thing — and something we rarely otherwise eat. 85% of Americans have turkey on Thanksgiving, leading to the slaughter of over 45 million birds (and over $1 billion in sales) on a single day. It’s the most successful food marketing campaign in history.
“Second, the original act of generosity by Native Americans that inspired Thanksgiving had nothing to do with turkeys. When Squanto discovered starving Pilgrims in 1621, he brought eels and corn, not turkey. But ‘eels at Thanksgiving’ just doesn’t have the same ring.”
(Facebook & Instagram screenshot from video)
“That’s not how pardons are supposed to work!”
Hsiung, 42, an attorney by trade, went on to question the annual turkey “pardoning” ceremonies conducted by the U.S. President at the White House, which end by “carving up the flesh of another animal who is virtually identical to the one pardoned — a genetically engineered sibling, in fact. That’s not how pardons are supposed to work!” Hsiung objected.
“You don’t pardon one man, then execute his brother, when neither has committed any crime.
“But it gets even worse,” Hsiung said. “To show his commitment to the ag industry, President Biden gets his turkeys from Jennie-O, a subsidiary of poultry giant Hormel Foods. Jennie-O is a factory farm where a 25-pound animal is crammed with thousands of others into an indoor shed where each one receives around two square feet of space. It’s so crowded inside that the company burns the turkeys’ beaks off when they’re babies to prevent them from tearing each other to pieces when they inevitably peck each other in the farm.
(Wayne Hsiung Facebook photo)
“I won’t be having a ‘normal’ Thanksgiving”
“I won’t be having a ‘normal’ Thanksgiving,” Hsiung acknowledged. “I’m sitting in a Sonoma county jail. But maybe it’s time for all of us to give up some normal traditions — and leave cruelty off our Thanksgiving plates.”
Why was Hsiung in jail for Thanksgiving?
Hsiung, explained Vox deputy editor Marina Bolotnikova on November 9, 2023, “was convicted of two counts of misdemeanor trespass and one count of felony conspiracy to trespass, after six days of deliberation by a jury in Santa Rosa, California, about an hour north of San Francisco. The case emerged from Hsiung’s role in helping lead two mass protest actions in 2018 and 2019, in which activists removed 70 chickens and ducks from two Sonoma County factory farms: Sunrise Farms, a major egg supplier, and Reichardt Duck Farm.
“Activists took the animals to receive veterinary care and ultimately to live at animal sanctuaries.
A major turning point?
“The conviction represents a major turning point,” Bolotnikova assessed, “for the group Hsiung co-founded in 2013, Direct Action Everywhere.”
Direct Action Everywhere, Bolotnikova summarized, “is known for bold, uncompromising tactics, including a practice it calls ‘open rescue,’ in which activists enter factory farms, slaughterhouses, and other places where animals are exploited for profit, film conditions there, and rescue animals who are especially sick or suffering.
“With these tactics,” Bolotnikova wrote, “the activists openly invite prosecution, hoping to flip the script of a criminal trial by presenting evidence of animal cruelty to the jury and arguing that their actions were not only defensible, but necessary. Success, they hope, would set a legal precedent in favor of intervening to help animals suffering in the factory farm system.”
Not new tactic
“Open rescue” is not actually a new tactic.
Farm Sanctuary rescued a lamb in an “open rescue” situation near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as early as 1986, and was involved in another prominent “open rescue” court case in 2002.
Pasado’s Safe Haven sanctuary founder Susan Michaels (1956-2018) led a major “open rescue” of more than 250 laying hens at Lake Stevens, Washington, in February 1999, assisted by the Pigs Peace Sanctuary and the Northwest Animal Rights Network.
“Open rescue” & suicide bombing
“Open rescue” was extensively practiced for several years in Australia before the late United Poultry Concerns founder Karen Davis later in 1999 brought Australian activist Patty Mark to the U.S. to teach the technique.
But most U.S. organizations that have experimented with “open rescue” long ago abandoned it as an inefficient use of activist resources. Somewhat like suicide bombing, “open rescue” tends to expend the supply of people fanatical enough to do it long before exhausting the inertia of the target.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Ethical arguments fail with meat-eating public
Comparisons of “open rescue” to other civil disobedience tactics used successfully in human rights causes tend to lack persuasive power to the public, even when the public agrees that the animals rescued were cruelly suffering.
Partly this is because “open rescue” cases, and the associated ethical arguments, rarely get much attention. Even when they do, the publicity tends to be local.
The participants articulate enough to make a strong argument to the public, like Hsiung, tend to be locked up on charges such as breaking-and-entering and property theft that are easily understood by most people, and not easily excused when committed for what are not self-evidently persuasive reasons to non-vegetarians and vegans.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Surprising run of success”
Hsiung and Direct Action Everywhere have won more mass media notice and sympathy for “open rescue” cases than any of their U.S. forebears.
“Before Hsiung’s conviction,” Bolotnikova observed, “Direct Action Everywhere had a surprising run of success.”
For example, Hsiung and fellow Direct Action Everywhere member Paul Darwin Picklesimer were in October 2022 “acquitted of all charges for rescuing two sick, suffering piglets from a massive Smithfield Foods factory farm in Utah,” Bolotnikova recalled.
(See Acquittal of “open rescue” activists rattles factory farms from Utah to China.)
Hsiung could get three & a half years in prison
“Then, in March 2023,” Bolotnikova continued, “activists Alicia Santurio and Alexandra Paul were acquitted in California for removing two chickens from a truck outside a slaughterhouse owned by Foster Farms, a major chicken producer.
“In both trials,” Bolotnikova wrote, “the defendants argued,” successfully, “that they had taken animals who were in such ill health that they had no commercial value to their owners,” an argument Hsiung was barely allowed to make in the Sonoma County courtroom.
“Until now,” Bolotnikova finished, “no Direct Action Everywhere activist had been sentenced to jail time for an open rescue. That’s about to change. Hsiung is now being held in jail at least until his sentencing hearing on November 30, 2023. Attorneys in the case say he could face up to three and a half years in prison.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Nick Schafer & Amy Soranno appeal sentences
More likely, Hsiung will receive a warning sentence comparable to those meted out to Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada husband-and-wife vegan activists Nick Schafer and Amy Soranno for breaking and entering and mischief, for their part in exposing alleged animal abuse at the Excelsior Hog Farm in Abbotsford, British Columbia in April 2019.
Schafer and Soranno were on October 12, 2022 each jailed for 30 days, followed by one year on probation.
The British Columbia Court of Appeals heard their request for a retrial on November 23, 2023, while Americans celebrated Thanksgiving.
(See Excelsior Hog Farm protest leaders Soranno & Schafer get 30 days each.)
Undercover video still works after 33 years
What Schafer and Soranno were convicted of doing amounted to a hybrid of the mass invasions of poultry farms by “open rescuers” led by Hsiung in the actions bringing his conviction, and the much more widely practiced, better accepted technique of videotaping animal neglect and abuse on factory farms.
Undercover videography from inside factory farms and slaughterhouses has time and again proven persuasive to the public since Becky Sandstedt, a 31-year-old airport cocktail waitress in St. Paul, Minnesota, introduced the technique in 1990 as a lone concerned individual.
Canadian “ag gag” challenge
Seeing is believing, a picture is worth a thousand words, and beyond the clichés, undercover video of actual farm and slaughterhouse conditions can remain before the public online indefinitely, whereas video of “open rescues” tend to show much more of the human participants than of the norms for the animals involved.
Further, despite repeated attempts over decades by agribusiness to pass and obtain enforcement of so-called “ag gag” laws that would forbid or inhibit undercover videography, courts in at least six U.S. states have struck down “ag gags” as violations of the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and press with the regularity of bowlers throwing strikes.
The first challenge to a Canadian “ag gag” law went to court for initial arguments in Toronto, Ontario, on October 30, 2023, brought by Animal Justice, freelance journalist Jessica Scott-Reid, and Toronto Cow Save activist Louise Jorgensen.
The Schafer/Soranno case is an indirect challenge, since in their case the conventional charges of breaking and entering and mischief were used to effect an “ag gag”, instead of an explicit “ag gag” law.
Turkey farm video
Mercy for Animals, a pioneer of doing undercover videography that may have produced more farm and slaughterhouse documentation since 2001 than all other animal advocacy organizations combined, on November 21, 2023 “released an undercover investigation of two farms in Minnesota — the nation’s top turkey-producing state — exposing the routine cruelty that turkeys endure in the meat industry,” spokesperson Ronnika A. McFall announced.
“Certain to make Americans rethink their holiday feasts,” McFall promised, the video showed “Turkeys raised in unnatural conditions, crammed by the thousands into windowless warehouses; baby turkeys left in piles, some struggling to breathe as they lie trapped under the dead, turkeys with painful eye infections, leg or wing injuries, head bruising, slashes to their skin, and bleeding wounds denied veterinary care; baby birds left on their backs, unable to right themselves or dying of apparent sudden cardiac arrest; chicks caught in electrical wires placed where they instinctively try to perch, some electrocuted or suffering burns on their heads and feet.; and birds shoved and kicked onto conveyor belts that load them into trucks headed to the slaughterhouse, roughly grabbed by the wings and hurled inside when they fall off the belts.”
H5N1 hit turkey farms in same region
The Mercy for Animals video appeared to have been made around the same time, a month earlier, that the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy reported an H5N1 avian flu outbreak in Meeker County, Minnesota, that brought the deaths of 72,100 turkeys at one farm and more than 110,000 turkeys at other facilities in neighboring South Dakota.
Keep animals in overcrowded, unsanitary and highly stressed conditions, and disease is an inevitable consequence.
Birds & politics don’t mix well in Colorado
In Denver, Colorado, meanwhile, governor Jared Polis and “first gentleman” Marlon Reis on November 20, 2023 conducted a “turkey pardon” that reportedly sent four turkeys to a sanctuary.
Polis and Reis have cultivated an animal-friendly image that included a July 6, 2019 statement from Reis in opposition to a cull of non-migratory Canada geese.
Some of their efforts have backfired. Polis, for example, in June 2020 appointed activist Ellen Kessler to the state veterinary board, despite her evident lack of qualifications.
“Her appointment almost immediately generated controversy because of derogatory statements she made, primarily on Facebook, about farmers and ranchers,” reported Marianne Goodland for the web site Colorado Politics.
“Lazy & nasty”
“In one post a month after her appointment, Kessler said that “4-H clubs don’t teach children that animal lives matter.” She reposted a story in August 2020, also on Facebook, that alleged dairy farmers sexually abuse their cows, likely referring to artificial insemination, a routine practice for at least 60 years.
“On January 22, 2022,” Goodland continued, “Kessler called ranchers ‘lazy’ and ‘nasty,’ responding to a Facebook post by ‘first gentleman’ Marlon Reis,” and “accused ranchers of using their cows to ‘bait’ wolves in order to receive compensation for the loss of their animals.”
Kessler resigned from the Colorado veterinary board on January 24, 2022. Kessler might have been regarded as a martyr for animal advocacy, except that on January 28, 2022 a furnace repairman reported to the Colorado Humane Society severe neglect of 13 doves and cockatiels he found in Kessler’s basement, only 11 of whom survived the ordeal.
Charged on March 9, 2022 by the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department with 13 counts of animal cruelty, Kessler pleaded guilty in September 2023 to a single count of misdemeanor animal cruelty. Kessler received a deferred jail sentence and was assessed fines plus costs of $1,928.50, plus attorney’s fees, veterinarian costs, and the cost of cleaning her home.
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Note. I like turkeys abd I have raised turkeys but not for food. Just because I like them. But, I like all birds.
Then Ellen Kessler. She has spent years harassing bird owners…meanwhile she kept birds in cages so filthy the repairman who saw them stated the feces had filled the cage bottoms and was oozing over the sides. A dozen bird cages can be kept clean in about 15 minutes a day but ole Ellen just didn’t have time for that. Instead she called ranchers and farmes LAZY!!!! Hypocrite.
Here’s what I did for Thanksgiving: Refused to celebrate the bloodbath of 45 million turkeys for one holiday year after year. I refused to celebrate Thanksgiving at my sister’s house because her husband “has to have” turkey on Thanksgiving. If not a turkey, a pig roast. My brother-in-law is black and a big meat-eater. At a Mexican restaurant that offered vegetarian options on the menu, I asked them to veganize my choices and I would post their business information on Facebook as a favor. My brother-in-law confronted me with this statement: “You animal-rights people!”
Your family experience is your family experience, but demographic research indicates that about 8% of African-Americans are self-identified as vegetarian or vegan, and up to 19% of Mexican-Americans (9% self-identified as vegan), compared to about 3% of all other Americans.
I could say so much. But I won’t.
Sharing with gratitude, and all the rest unsaid.
David Daleiden is a hero to conservatives for his undercover investigations of Planned Parenthood trafficking in human body parts, but many of these conservatives support “Ag-gag” legislation preventing animal activists from doing likewise on factory farms, fur farms, rodeos, vivisection labs, etc. Unless an issue is brought out into the open, as was the case with the civil rights movement bringing racism, Jim Crow, peaceful protesters being set upon with dogs and water cannons into the homes of American living rooms, or Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame spotlighting the plight of migrant farm workers, change is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
The U.S. Supreme Court on October 2, 2023 declined to hear an appeal from David Daleiden and his Center for Medical Progress seeking to overturn a $2 million civil judgement against him won by Planned Parenthood in a case brought under the Racketeer Influenced & Corrupt Organizations Act, alleging fraud, conspiracy, trespassing, illegal eavesdropping, and illegal secret recording which violated the rights of medical patients as defined by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.
Summarized Andrew Chung of Reuters, “Daleiden and his team portray themselves as investigative journalists and have said that the judgment against them in the suit threatens undercover reporting.”
Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress, however, have long histories of aggressive anti-abortion activism, and none of actually committing journalism, even in a highly partisan manner. Summarized Molly Redden for The Guardian, Daleiden’s allegations based on his videos were “broadly considered to be false, the product of aggressive and misleading editing.”
Similar allegations have been made about undercover videos made by animal advocates, but have not been proven in court. Further, most undercover videos made by animal advocates have, as a whole, shown sequences of repetitive actions in barns and slaughterhouses, not single incidents.
While I understand the motives behind “open rescue,” I have to agree that advocates’ time and energy can be more effectively allocated to undercover investigations or other pursuits that don’t involve possible jail time. Let’s face it, how much help can one provide to the cause while sitting behind bars. It’s a noble effort, but in the end, it doesn’t serve to help the thousands of other suffering victims sitting at these facilities. We also risk giving the public and the ag industry an excuse to view us as “extremists” – and if we can’t get our target audience to relate to us, our message is lost. We might become heroes among our peers for a short while, but it doesn’t ultimately help the animals.
In this case, the defendant was trying to expose deceptive claims about “humane” practices and attempting to seek medical care for suffering animals who would have likely been discarded like trash – if not ultimately (and illegally) ending up on dinner plates.
This is what it has come to in a society where the agricultural giant has control. Because there is big money involved and they don’t care about consumer health while folks shovel drug-and-cholesterol-and pus-ridden animal products into their mouths.
Big Ag doesn’t care about the billions of animals whom they torture and butcher to death. But one would think that the jury and the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office that prosecuted Wayne Hsiung would have also considered the investigative footage taken at the facilities. That footage would have shown the horrific abuse of so many animals. What about that crime? Instead of the D.A. taking any action against animal abuse, their office pursued charges against the person who exposed the abuse and rescued sick and dying animals – animals that shouldn’t have become part of the food system in the first place if these facilities were following health and safety regulations.
I hope some folks will think about that next time they want to joke about eating animals or criticize animal advocates who are out there fighting not only against the cruelty – but for the health and safety of consumers. This is your world and if you speak out against an injustice where the odds are stacked against you, good luck.
Wayne Hsiung’s punishment seems rather harsh for trespassing, but is likely intended to deter attempts at exposing the factory farming and slaughterhouse travesties. And this is why they don’t want cameras inside those facilities. Because the footage would be the stuff of our nightmares. Sadly, it’s reality for the victims.
Your recent piece about me is full of inaccuracies. My position on the state board of Veterinary Medicine was that of a public member and, as such, I was a fully qualified candidate. Don’t you think I was vetted by the Govenor’s office? Of course I was! Second, your dates of these incidents are incorrect. These events occurred in 2022 (nearly two years ago) and not in the current year of 2023, as you write. But I guess that happens when you get your material from slovenly “journalists” and take it as the gospel. The list of charges is also incorrect. I will not share my story with you, but know this . . . under animal control’s “care,” four of my elderly birds perished within a month. I’ll help you with the math. That’s one-third of the number they confiscated. One-third.
Reading your synopsis is a sure reminder to never trust the media.
Spell-check programs, including ours, have a tedious habit of “correcting” dates to the current year, which then have to be re-corrected. The dates involving Ellen Kessler have now been correctly corrected.