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animal rights
I Rescued 4 Chickens From Abuse; Now I’m the One Facing a Felony Trial
I refuse to accept that helping a few baby birds makes me a criminal, let alone a dangerous one.
Sep 09, 2025
As I write this, a GPS ankle monitor shows law enforcement exactly where I am. This invasive device has been strapped to my leg for nearly two years. It has come with me to family dinners, to doctors’ appointments, to university classes, and more. I have been forced to wear it in order to remain free pending a criminal trial, which begins next week. I face nearly half a decade in jail.
My trial is expected to last several weeks, though there is no doubt that I did what prosecutors say. My alleged crime? Taking less than $25 worth of chicken. This wouldn’t normally lead to felony charges or a government-monitored GPS tracking device. But, you see, the four chickens I took were alive.
In the city of Petaluma, about an hour north of San Francisco, nestled between a Subway and a Starbucks, lies a heavily guarded fortress. Nearly every night of the week, more than 40,000 live birds are driven through its gates. In the mornings, their deceased and dismembered bodies are wrapped in plastic, decorated with claims about sustainability, animal welfare, and a lack of antibiotics. Finally, they’re stamped with the brand names “Rocky the Free Range Chicken” and “Rosie the Organic Chicken.” By the time their bodies reenter the outside world, shipped to grocery stores like Safeway and Trader Joe’s, the birds have been thoroughly objectified, their suffering repackaged as ethical consumption.
This fortress is the Petaluma Poultry slaughterhouse, a subsidiary of Perdue, one of the nation’s largest poultry producers. In important ways, Perdue’s Petaluma Poultry represents the worst of animal agriculture. Its branding is frighteningly deceptive, the company a master of manipulative marketing. Petaluma Poultry touts the supposed “luxuries” its chickens enjoy, posting seemingly staged videos of birds frolicking in the grass while, in reality, the birds live and die in factory farm conditions. Factory farming is widely known to be horrific, and companies like Petaluma Poultry represent a major obstacle to stopping it: They advertise animal suffering and slaughter as moral goods.
I know how birds at Petaluma live and die because I have been inside its facilities. In 2023, as an investigator with Direct Action Everywhere, I entered multiple Petaluma Poultry facilities. On these factory farms, I found chickens crowded together in filthy barns. One facility had mortality rates more than double the industry standard. Birds were suffering from severe neglect and dying from blood infections caused by multidrug-resistant bacteria. An investigation of the slaughterhouse found similar trends. One night, in April 2023, over 1,000 chickens from one shipment were condemned post-slaughter when workers opened them up and found their bodies full of infection.
Since 1993, Perdue has claimed its chickens “grow up healthy.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Of the multiple facilities I’ve been inside, I haven’t seen a single chicken I’d describe with such a word. Chickens in the meat industry are systemically unhealthy. They’ve been genetically manipulated to grow three times faster and larger than natural. Their legs collapse as they struggle to hold their own weight. Their hearts fail, and their feet develop pressure sores. The poor health of the birds in Petaluma Poultry facilities is exacerbated by their poor housing conditions and lack of medical care.
In court, I will view myself simply as a representative, a body and a voice, for all of the chickens who have been wronged by Perdue, and by the animal agriculture industry as a whole.
Much of what I have documented at Petaluma Poultry’s facilities is criminal animal cruelty in the state of California. However, repeated reports to law enforcement, over multiple years, have not resulted in any enforcement. Haunted by the knowledge of the immense violence within, I entered Perdue’s Petaluma Poultry slaughterhouse on June 13, 2023. Partially disguised as a worker, I stepped into the cool night and approached a truck stacked high with crates crammed full with baby chickens. I rescued four of them, including one I named Poppy, who had an injured toe, a body covered in scratches, and intestines filled with parasites. I got all four birds veterinary care and shared their stories, asking members of the public to join me in calling for immediate action from law enforcement.
The rescue of four little hens finally sparked law enforcement intervention. However, instead of investigating years of reported criminal animal cruelty, law enforcement set off on a mission to gather evidence on what was likely the first act of compassion to be carried out within the slaughterhouse’s carefully constructed walls—and to charge me with crimes.
Months after the rescue, as I was walking toward the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office to once again file a report of documented animal cruelty at Petaluma Poultry, I was placed in handcuffs and arrested on seven counts of felony conspiracy. I was told about warrants obtained to access my cell-phone data and other records. Though some charges have since been dismissed or consolidated, I still face one felony, three misdemeanors, and nearly five years in jail. I have been forced to wear a GPS ankle monitor and adhere to other harsh pretrial release conditions for nearly two years because the government is afraid I might rescue more birds.
Why? It’s certainly not the monetary value of the birds. The value of a relatively healthy chicken raised in agriculture is only a few dollars, and the routine deaths of thousands before they even reach slaughter is deemed the cost of business. Moreover, there are so many animals in these facilities, it is unlikely anyone would have even noticed four chickens were gone if I had not publicized it. Instead, what is threatening is the idea inherent in my actions: that animals are individuals with lives worth living.
I’m a 23-year-old university student. I’ve been rescuing animals from abuse since the age of 11, when I founded my nonprofit, Happy Hen Animal Sanctuary. In the past, I’ve been able to work with law enforcement. Together, we’ve rescued roosters from illegal cockfighting rings and placed farmed animals in loving forever homes. But now, for saving four chickens, my entire future is at stake.
As I’ve gone to court over the past 20 months, represented by the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project, it has become obvious that the prosecutors are trying to make an example out of me to scare other concerned members of the public. But that’s okay. Let me be an example. Let me be an example of courage in the face of repression and of compassion in the face of violence. Let me be an example of just how impossible it will be to stop the movement for animal rights.
I will not apologize for my actions. I will not hang my head in shame. I refuse to accept that helping a few baby birds makes me a criminal, let alone a dangerous one. To apologize would be to say that Poppy, Ivy, Aster, and Azalea deserved the cruelty inflicted on them. It would be to say they deserved to shiver in a crate, covered in scrapes and bruises, as they were eaten alive by parasites. Any apology would be a lie. I am not sorry I saved their lives.
Next week, I will be taking this case to trial. In court, I will view myself simply as a representative, a body and a voice, for all of the chickens who have been wronged by Perdue, and by the animal agriculture industry as a whole. I will tell the jury about the birds I rescued, and the birds failed by Sonoma County law enforcement.
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With Bird Flu, Our Factory Farmed Chickens Have Come Home to Roost
It was only a matter of time before the horrific and unjust conditions in the animal agriculture system became the proving ground for a pathogen capable of igniting a dangerous pandemic. Now our luck may have run out.
Mar 15, 2025
In Albert Camus’ novel, The Plague, set in the French Algerian town of Oran, rats one day begin showing up dead on residents’ doorsteps, dying with violent spasms and blood pouring from their mouths.
At first, the rats’ death agonies are only a curiosity to the townspeople. But then the rats begin dying in greater numbers, their corpses piling up in the streets. “The staircase from the cellar to the attics was strewn with dead rats, 10 or a dozen of them. The garbage bins of all the houses in the street were full of rats.”
When Dr. Rieux, a physician, remarks upon the strange phenomenon to his mother, she replies vaguely, “It’s like that sometimes.”
The avian flu threat, however, has now given us an opportunity to rethink our existential and ethical relations with the other animals of our planet, and to recognize how closely our fates are bound together.
By the time Rieux realizes what is happening, it is too late. Bubonic plague has come to Oran. Soon it is the townspeople themselves who are dying in agony, their bodies heaping up in mounds—like the rats whose suffering, and fates, they had only days before viewed with indifference...
Lately, I have been thinking of Camus’ novel, as we ourselves teeter on the brink of a new deadly plague—avian flu. Like the people in the story, we too have remained indifferent to the suffering, and shared collective fate, of our fellow creatures. And we continue to do so at our own peril.
For more than a year, I have followed news reports of the H5N1 virus that causes bird flu, or highly pathogenic avian influenza, as it has torn across the world, infecting hundreds of species and killing millions of animals, from storks and snowy owls to cranes and harbor seals, from foxes and herons to finches and lions. Geese have fallen from the skies dead over Kansas City. House cats have died from violent seizures in Iceland and Texas. The virus has decimated colonies of Adélie penguins in Antarctica, wiped out albatross fledglings on the remote South African island of Marion, killed dolphins and manatees off the Florida coast.
Never have scientists seen a virus infect so many species all at once, nor spread so quickly or with such devastating effect. It is the first observed panzootic—a pandemic of “all” animals. Researchers are now calling avian flu an “existential threat” to planetary biodiversity.
While droves of our fellow beings were dying in agony in far-away places, however, few people seemed to notice or care. Even today, we resist acknowledging our own role in the catastrophe—the fact that it is we ourselves, by imprisoning billions of animals in the food system, then allowing the virus to run rampant inside it, who have turned H5N1 into a trans-species bioweapon. And now that bioweapon is turning toward us.
While the H5N1 virus is naturally occurring, it emerged as a global problem only when it became concentrated in the Asian poultry industry in the late 1990s. Farmers at the time killed hundreds of millions of chickens and other birds to try to contain the virus—in many cases, by burying them alive or setting them on fire. Since then, H5N1 has resurfaced again and again on animal farms, leading to the deaths of poultry and humans alike.
For years, epidemiologists have warned that the animal agriculture system was a time bomb waiting to go off. Most of the deadly diseases ever to have afflicted our own species, including cholera, smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, AIDS, and influenza, have been caused by our exploitation of animals for food. Today, three-quarters of all emerging infectious diseases are in fact zoonotic in origin—a consequence chiefly of the modern animal food system.
That system has increased our vulnerability to animal-borne diseases in two ways. First, raising cattle and other ruminants for slaughter requires staggering anounts of land, which destroys animal habitat and crowds species together, thus enabling viruses to find new hosts who lack natural immunity to them. (More than half the surface of the Earth has been turned into farmland, and 80% of that is devoted to raising animals for slaughter.) Second, we have created a permanent source of new plagues by concentrating sick and traumatized animals together in industrialized conditions.
Even with a vaccine, Americans can expect little help from their government should a bird flu pandemic materialize, since President Donald Trump is eviscerating the federal agencies responsible for public health and disease prevention.
Few people are aware of the sheer scale of the global animal food system. But each year, 80,000,000,000 land animals and up to 2,700,000,000,000 marine animals die violently to satisfy growing human demand for animal products. This system is now the most ecologically destructive force on our planet—the leading cause of the mass extinction crisis and the second-leading source of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the main cause of freshwater system loss, algal blooms, and land degradation.
The animal food system is also a moral and epidemiological calamity. Billions of sensitive chickens, pigs, cows, and others are forced into miserable, fetid conditions of intensive confinement, where they are beaten, tormented with electric prods, and then brutally killed at a fraction of their lifespans. Our prisoners suffer such psychological and physiological stress and trauma that millions die even before they can reach a slaughterhouse. So to keep them alive, farmers pump them full of antibiotics. Seventy percent of antibiotics worldwide are fed to farmed animals, a practice which, in turn, is fueling deadly new strains of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs.”
Natural ecosystems constrain the virulence of pathogens like H5N1, by selecting out the most lethal traits that would otherwise keep a virus from spreading by killing its host prematurely. As science writer Brandon Keim observes, however, the “constraints on virulence” ordinarily found in nature are absent on industrialized poultry farms, where birds are killed at a tiny fraction of their normal lifespans. In fact, virulence is selected for.
It was only a matter of time, thus, before the horrific and unjust conditions in the animal agriculture system became the proving ground for a pathogen capable of igniting a dangerous pandemic. Now our luck may have run out.
Last year, the H5N1 virus crossed a crucial threshold, when wild birds exposed to concentrations of the virus on animal farms contracted the disease and spread it to other species along their migration routes. Meanwhile, the Biden administration, deferring to powerful agricultural interests—and seeking to avoid antagonizing rural voters in an election year—squandered every opportunity to track and contain the deadly disease. For months, the U.S. government effectively stood by and did nothing. As a result, H5N1 has now become endemic throughout the U.S. animal agriculture system. And the longer it remains there, the more likely is it to mutate into a form transmissable between humans.
How bad would that be? In 2005, David Nabarro, then the United Nations system coordinator for avian and human influenza, warned that a bird flu pandemic could kill up to 150 million people. That may be a conservative estimate, however, since the known past mortality rate from avian flu in humans has been over 50%, making H5N1 up to 100 times deadlier than Covid-19. Unlike Covid-19 furthermore, a bird flu pandemic would not primarily target older adults or people with underlying conditions, but would kill indiscriminately.
The H5N1 virus is neuropathic, meaning that it attacks the brain, causing conditions ranging from mild encaphalitis to seizures, coma, and death. Children and pregnant women would be especially vulnerable to the virus. When a Canadian teen contracted the H5N1 virus last year, she suffered multiple organ failure and had to be placed on a respirator for months before she recovered. Avian flu has meanwhile killed 90% of the pregnant women who, in past decades, contracted it. “We are in a terrible situation and going into a worse situation,” Angela Rasmussen, a Canadian virologist, recently warned. “I don’t know if the bird flu will become a pandemic, but if it does, we are screwed.”
So far, we have been extremely lucky. The dozens of farm workers who have fallen ill from avian flu this last year, most from exposure to infected dairy cows, appear to have contracted a mild version of the virus. Most have now recovered. Last month, however, the far deadlier D1.1 variant of the virus was discovered in a herd of cattle in Nevada. Should such a lethal variant mutate into a transmissable form, and become capable of binding to receptors in our lungs, the resulting pandemic could lead to societal chaos and mass mortality.
For too long, we have behaved as if our species were “an island entire of itself,” and we were the only beings whose lives mattered or had value.
Just before leaving office, then-President Joe Biden transferred $590 million to Moderna to accelerate development of a bird flu vaccine. Other companies are also working on vaccines. But it’s anyone’s guess if they will be ready in time. Even with a vaccine, Americans can expect little help from their government should a bird flu pandemic materialize, since President Donald Trump is eviscerating the federal agencies responsible for public health and disease prevention. The new administration has slashed the budgets and staff of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and FEMA, suppressed CDC updates on bird flu, and taken the U.S. out of the World Health Organization—the international agency responsible for monitoring and providing guidance on global public health threats, including pandemics.
Worsening matters, any federal response to an avian flu pandemic would be in the hands of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new secretary of Health and Human Services—a notorious vaccine skeptic. President Trump himself would likely respond to a new pandemic not by protecting the most vulnerable Americans, but by using the crisis to expand his own powers, if not to impose martial law.
Perhaps our luck will hold, and we will somehow all avoid getting avian flu. But we can’t count on it. Nor can we afford to go on ignoring the inextricable links between our oppression of nonhuman animals and growing pandemic risk.
The best way to prevent zoonotic pathogens from making us sick in future is to begin transitioning to an all plant-based diet. In doing so, we would not only spare billions of animals further suffering, but also mitigate a great deal of environmental damage to our planet. And we ourselves would be healthier for it. Scientists have shown that vegans have lower rates of heart disease, stroke, cancer, and type 2 diabetes than meat-eaters. One study in JAMA found that vegans may even live longer than “omnivores” who consume animal products.
Tragically, however, rather than rethink our dietary choices, we continue to cling to the animal system, and to its vast cruelties, against the better claims of reason and conscience. Few people indeed seem aware of the violence and suffering that attend even “ordinary” animal production. To produce eggs, for example, tens of millions of chickens are jammed into cages so small that they cannot extend even a single wing. The birds’ beaks are painfully cut off to keep them from pecking at their cell mates in distress. Then the chickens are repeatedly starved to shock their systems into producing more eggs. Finally, they are violently grabbed and thrown into a truck, and brought to the slaughterhouse. There, they are shackled upside down by their legs and have their throats cut, often while still conscious. Many are boiled alive in feather removal tanks. Billions of male baby chicks—of no use to industry—are meanwhile ground up alive or are simply tossed away in dumpsters, to suffocate or die from dehydration.
These and other barbaric practices have no place in society today. Even now, however, Americans are concerned only about soaring egg prices, not about the suffering of the tens of millions of animals being killed in ventilator shutdowns across the country. The idea that we should simply stop eating eggs—for the birds’ well-being as much as for our own safety—appears not to have occurred to anyone.
As an ethicist who has spent decades lecturing and publishing on animal rights, hoping to convince people that there is a better way to live a human life than by imprisoning and killing our fellow beings, I find it beyond discouraging how little progress has been made toward ending our violence against animals in the food economy. The avian flu threat, however, has now given us an opportunity to rethink our existential and ethical relations with the other animals of our planet, and to recognize how closely our fates are bound together.
“Ask not for whom the bell tolls—it tolls for thee.” When the poet John Donne wrote these words, centuries ago, it was customary for churches in England to toll their bells to announce the death of someone in the community. We are deeply connected to one another, Donne was saying, and what happens to one, happens to all.
“No man is an island entire of itself,” Donne wrote. Each of us “is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Every death therefore “diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”
Donne’s poem has taken on new significance, as avian influenza now closes in around us. Our species is not alone on the Earth, but part of the biotic main, a “piece of a continent” teeming with myriad other suffering, mortal beings. And what we do to the other animals, we do also to ourselves.
For too long, we have behaved as if our species were “an island entire of itself,” and we were the only beings whose lives mattered or had value. Now, after long treating our fellow creatures with violence and contempt, as mere “things” to be exploited and killed for our purposes, our karmic debt is coming due, in a ruined Earth and escalating pandemic risks. The tolling of the bell today is avian flu, and it tolls for us.
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Can Preventive Policies Like the OCTOPUS Act Truly Stop Animal Suffering?
Already passed in Washington State and California, this bill seeks to ban octopus farming altogether before it ever becomes reality and before a powerful lobby emerges to defend it.
Nov 27, 2024
Octopuses, with three hearts and remarkable intelligence, remain among the most intriguing non-human species ever studied. Despite their unsuitability for domestication, multiple plans are emerging to farm them intensively.
The most worrying proposal comes from the company Nueva Pescanova, which aims to establish Europe’s first octopus farm in the Canary Islands, as well as breed and kill over 1 million octopuses per year.
In the United States, hope takes the form of the OCTOPUS Act. Already passed in Washington State and California, this bill seeks to ban octopus farming altogether before it ever becomes reality. Animal rights organizations are not stopping there, as they plan to introduce this preventive bill in at least five additional states.
What exactly are preventive policies? Why are they becoming a preferred strategy for animal rights organizations?
Preventive policies function as a preemptive strike, making it possible to ban or regulate activities that have the potential to cause harm. Such policies are particularly valuable in the context of animal welfare because they can stop inhumane practices before they become ingrained, or before powerful lobbying groups form around them. As the old English proverb goes: “Better safe than sorry.”
Why do animal rights organizations favor preventive policies?
One of the most powerful, albeit challenging, ways of countering animal suffering at scale is through policy change. Over the past three decades, preventive policies have gained momentum as a key tool for environmental protection. More recently, animal rights organizations have also turned to this strategy as a way of protecting animals.
The OCTOPUS Act stands as a promising example of how we can protect animals before cruelty becomes entrenched.
Preventive policies are also more politically feasible. At present, octopus meat is caught wild, and local fishermen have not been targeted by the policy. They are even in favor of the OCTOPUS Act because it will protect their activities. There is less resistance to such a ban because no industry currently exists for farming octopuses. Contrast this with efforts to end factory farming for chickens or pigs, where deeply entrenched lobbies make change difficult.
Overall, preventive policies lay the groundwork for long-term, sustainable change. They can create a ripple effect, setting a precedent that can inspire other countries to follow suit. Eurogroup for Animals has already suggested that the European Union should consider similar legislation: “If the U.S. can do it, the E.U. can too.”
Do preventive policies live up to the expectations?
While preventive policies are powerful, they are not without drawbacks. Policies take a long time to draft, introduce, pass through the appropriate legislative bodies, and, at last, implement. In the interim, harmful practices may even develop in other jurisdictions. Preventive policies do not offer the immediate relief that animal advocates are hoping for.
Another concern is that restricting a practice through legal means could give rise to covert practices that are even more harmful or make it more difficult to ensure animal welfare standards. The demand for octopus meat could lead to illegal activities, such as black market trade or trafficking.
It is also challenging to quantify the precise impact of any one policy on animal suffering. Animal protection is multifactorial. Policies are just one piece of the puzzle that includes advocacy efforts, campaigns, public awareness, and social pressure as well as shifts in cultural attitudes. While the OCTOPUS Act may prevent octopus farming in the United States, how much animal suffering will be reduced? We cannot assume that harm will be entirely eradicated without continued effort across multiple fronts.
How can we ensure that preventive policies make a difference?
We must endorse a holistic approach to ensure that policies like the OCTOPUS Act carry the weight we intend. Science and research should inform the drafting of legislation, ensuring that laws are grounded in deep understanding of animal cognition and welfare. Simultaneously, advocacy campaigns and public pressure help generate the social momentum to push these policies forward.
Creative expressions—whether through art, film, or photography—can also play a significant role in raising awareness, in fostering empathy for animals, and in driving change. My Octopus Teacher is a brilliant example of this. While the impact of these efforts is even harder to quantify, they are often the spark that leads to legislative change.
Preventive policies alone are not a silver bullet, but they are an essential tool in the fight for animal welfare. The OCTOPUS Act stands as a promising example of how we can protect animals before cruelty becomes entrenched.
May this bill pass in many other states, create change internationally, and set a precedent to safeguard the lives of billions of animals.
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