One Monday afternoon in the end of September, the University of California, Berkeley attendee left a courtroom in the city of Santa Rosa. Accompanied by her lawyers, she moved briskly through the courthouse corridors, beyond dozens of prospective jurors.
Fixed on her black blazer was a small metallic bird, sparkling on her jacket.
It was one of the last days of jury selection for her legal proceedings. She stood accused of two minor offenses for unauthorized entry and one for tampering with a vehicle, as well as a serious conspiracy allegation. Should she be found guilty, she could face up to over four years in incarceration.
It’s not a whodunit … The focus is on the reason.
The central events of the trial were uncontested. Shortly after midnight on a June night in 2023, the group participants of the organization the activist network traveled to a poultry processing plant, a meat plant about a short drive north of the city. Posing as employees, they came across a vehicle filled with thousands of live chickens confined in cages. They removed four chickens, placed them in buckets and drove away.
The events were uncontested because the group members had subsequently released film clips of the incident. “The identity isn't in question,” Rosenberg’s lawyer, Carraway, frequently remarks. “It's about the motivation.”
Once they departed the facility, the group inspected the birds – that they dubbed four named hens - more thoroughly. She stated they were splattered with diarrhea and showing injuries and sores.
Carraway would explain in the courtroom that Rosenberg’s intent was not to take unlawfully but to help the birds. The panel would be tasked with deciding, in effect, the limits of compassion before it turns illegal.
The daughter of a veterinarian, She spent her childhood on 40 acres in San Luis Obispo county, the state, in the company of cats, dogs, goats, guinea pigs and rabbits.
During her childhood, the they obtained poultry at home. She can still rattle off their monikers without pausing: the seven chickens. Before that time, Zoe believed the common assumption that poultry weren't intelligent, but interacting with them altered her perspective. “I discovered they have distinct characters and that their minds are sharp, and that they possess great worth.”
Subsequently, She saw an online video of activists entering a major egg producer in the country and rescuing hens. She had never before seen inside a factory farm, and she was shocked by the conditions: thousands upon thousands of hens packed tightly into cages. This also introduced her to the concept of “open rescue”, the description used by rescuers to describe operations in which they access commercial farms or labs and rescue suffering beings. They disclose their activities, regularly releasing recordings of their actions.
Following the viewing, Rosenberg immediately knew that this was her calling, and she emailed the director of the group behind it. (“They didn't know my age,” she noted.) A year later, in the mid-2010s, she established the regional group of the organization, a emerging advocacy group.
In recent history, animal rights groups have gained a reputation for using confrontational tactics – like Peta’s campaign linking animal products to tragic events or publicity grabs using fake blood. The reasoning is straightforward: it takes shock to jolt people out of complacency about creature distress. But the result is often the opposite: driving individuals away. In a society where eating meat is the norm, many see such protests as a direct criticism – and sense blame, not enlightenment.
DxE follows in this tradition; they have staged protests at a retail store in the area and caused a disturbance at the renowned dining spot the establishment.
But the group’s signature move has been publicized rescues. From the activists’ perspective, one virtue of the tactic is that it not only highlights to an wrongdoing – it tries, modestly, to correct it. It also targets the industry rather than implicating individual consumers, and provides a view into the unseen environment of animal agriculture.
“Our legal battles are a method to present the issue to a randomly selected jury of our peers, and to the public via news outlets,” said a group representative, the spokesperson. “Is it a crime, or is it the right thing to do, to help a being who’s dying in a industrial facility?”
At present, DxE activists note, there are statutes allowing intervention in CA and 13 other states offering immunity if they access a vehicle to rescue a threatened creature. Their argument is that the identical logic should apply to all animals in suffering.
Over the past decade, as stated by the representative, members of the group have participated in about 60 such operations. In recent times, rescuers have removed two piglets from a industrial farm in Utah; two chickens from a Foster Farms truck at a facility in the county; and three dogs from a breeding and research facility in Wisconsin. Following the rescue, the rescuers ensure treatment and find them shelters.
The proprietor manages Weber Family Farms with his brother in Petaluma. The farm has been in his family for over a century, he stated. The farm focuses on poultry with just under 1 million chickens, located in various coops. The operation, which is energized by solar power, also recycles droppings for soil.
During May of 2018, protesters carried out a major action on the property. A large group showed up to protest. Some of them invaded the farm and {broke into a chicken house|accessed a poultry building|entered a coop