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A few hens lay on the ground, unmoving, ill or dead. Many were injured, with festering sores on their feet. Some bled from their posteriors—they were likely suffering from a prolapsed cloaca, a painful, potentially fatal condition often caused by repeated egg-laying. Others looked dirty and ragged, though chickens, given a choice in the matter, tend to be fastidious. Everything, everywhere in this farm for “free-range” chickens was covered in excrement. The industrial hangar was so enormous, filled with so many clone-birds, that I felt like I was staring into an infinity mirror.
It was a moonless night not long ago in Northern California. With me were Alicia Santurio and Lewis Bernier, two activists from an animal-rights group called Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE. We had met a few hours earlier in a supermarket parking lot, where I wrote a lawyer’s phone number on my ankle and slipped my cellphone into a Faraday bag, which blocks wireless signals. The three of us got into a car; its driver stubbed out a cigarette and drove us to an unlit lane amid acres of paddocks and fields.
“From here, we’re going to walk single file, no lights,” Bernier said. “If we see anyone or hear anyone, we’re going to get down and lie on the ground.”
We hiked silently across dark farmland, shimmying through a series of barbed-wire and electric fences. A tense half hour later, we passed a red lagoon filled with feces and chemical runoff, and arrived at a set of industrial hangars, home to tens of thousands of birds laying eggs for high-end foods stores in the region. These birds were supposed to have access to fresh air and open space. But the open spaces available to them—wire lean-tos with a few tiny doors cut into the side of the hangar—were free of feathers and feces, meaning the birds were not using them.
The lights turned on in the hangar next to us, illuminating thousands of hens. “The fact that lights are being turned on at this time of night—they’re never getting a full sleep cycle,” Bernier explained in a whisper. Waking them up tricks their bodies into laying more eggs. We put on sterile coveralls and booties and went inside.
This is chicken farming in America, but what I was in was not a farm, not really. It was an industrial operation for delivering animal parts as cheaply and efficiently as possible. For a moment, I entertained the idea of running to the far side of the hangar and flushing the birds out into the cold night air. How often do you have the chance to save thousands of lives? But I recognized how naive the impulse was as soon as I had it. Instead I just stood there, tears welling in my eyes, imagining what it would be like to live my whole life standing in other creatures’ shit, sores on my feet, struggling to move my own weight, my organs falling out of me.
DxE investigators documenting conditions inside of Rainbow Farms, an egg farm in Stanislaus County, California (Courtesy of Direct Action Everywhere).The DxE activists were there to document animals’ conditions. The group aims to stop the brutalization of farm animals and bring about the end of animal exploitation, ideally by way of a constitutional amendment granting personhood to nonhuman creatures. The mission is clearly a good one: to alleviate extraordinary, omnipresent suffering. Americans eat roughly 10 billion land animals a year, many raised in worse conditions than those chickens.
In service of that goal, DxE performs undercover investigations, rescues animals, publishes whistleblower reports, engages in nonviolent protest, shuts down slaughter lines, files legal complaints, trains activists, and lobbies the government.
But it is perhaps best known for its viral stunts. There was the time an activist wearing a poop-emoji costume disrupted a planning-commission meeting in a small town in Virginia; the time the group sprayed manure all over the lawn of an executive at Smithfield, the world’s largest producer of pork; the numerous occasions when members have seized the microphone from politicians at stump speeches; the time a DxE member named Matt Johnson pretended to be Smithfield’s CEO for a chaotic Fox Business hit.
Last year, Santurio snuck into the Target Center in Minneapolis, where the Timberwolves were playing the Los Angeles Clippers. Just before halftime, she tried to superglue herself to the court while wearing a T-shirt that read GLEN TAYLOR ROASTS ANIMALS ALIVE. Taylor, the owner of the Timberwolves, also owns an egg-farming business, which had recently killed more than 5 million birds using a technique called “ventilation shutdown plus,” in which workers heat a barn until the birds inside are essentially roasted alive. (Taylor did not respond to requests to comment.) Guards hoisted Santurio up before the glue dried.
I believed in DxE’s mission. About its tactics, I wasn’t so sure.
I’m a vegan, if an imperfect and non-strident one. Like many vegans, I’ve always seen it as a personal choice. I don’t see myself as having any kind of authority to tell other people not to eat meat or fish, especially because I was an omnivore for much of my life.
Being vegan means forgoing many of life’s pleasures—cheeseburgers, peppermint ice cream, warm sourdough with cold butter. It means absenting yourself from your own culture—not taking the piece of birthday cake, not going to the amazing new restaurant. It means constantly feeling like you are failing, given the difficulty of avoiding animal products in a world where animals are a commodity. It means living in a way that makes other people feel judged and uncomfortable. It is exhausting, abstemious, weird. One paper found that omnivores view vegans more negatively than any other stigmatized group except for drug addicts.
It is not surprising that the share of people forgoing animal products has barely changed since at least the late 1990s. Just 5 percent of Americans say they are vegetarian, and only a sliver of the population, perhaps 1 percent, truly never eats meat. Globally, the number of animals consumed per capita has nearly doubled in the past five decades, as has the share of animals raised in confined, industrial environments.
DxE believes it can change that, not by turning omnivores into vegans but by turning vegans into vegan activists. It has attracted thousands of donors and participants, mostly Millennials and Gen Zers, over its 10 years of existence. (There’s no formal membership count, as there’s no formal membership process.) But it has also amassed plenty of detractors, who see the group as cultish and its activities as pointless and obnoxious. Social change is hard enough for movements that don’t ask people to give up anything, let alone their grandmother’s brisket.
Direct Action Everywhere got its start when Wayne Hsiung, a Buddhist and a former law scholar at Northwestern University, moved from Chicago to the Bay Area. In Chicago, he told me, he’d been a “comfortable activist”—protesting and distributing leaflets about the virtues of veganism. But he had started to become disillusioned with the animal-rights movement.
The modern animal-rights era dates to the 1960s, when a coterie of academics began pushing people to go vegetarian or vegan not on sentimental grounds (because animal suffering is sad, distressing, a shame) but on moral and legal ones (because animal suffering should not be allowed). The human exploitation of animals amounts to “speciesism,” the psychologist Richard Ryder argued; animals are “the subject of a life,” the American philosopher Tom Regan held, and thus should be able to live their own lives. After the Australian utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer published his bombshell book, Animal Liberation, in 1975, hundreds of thousands of people absorbed these arguments. A radical international movement began to build.
The new animal-rights activists differed from animal-welfare activists in that they did not see the exploitation and suffering of living creatures just as unfortunate. Many saw it as an affront akin to racism or misogyny—and thus saw factory farming as a system akin to slavery, dairy production as a crime akin to rape, cosmetics testing as a violation akin to torture. Radical tactics were therefore not only justified but necessary. In the movement’s heyday, in…
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