Breaking news and publications from Direct Action Everywhere.
Media inquiry? Please email press@dxe.io.
TOP PRESS
October 9, 2024
The Intercept
Videos shared with The Intercept prior to the report’s public release show, among other scenes, lambs with their throats slit hanging upside down and thrashing on the slaughter line; one animal with an internal organ that has been torn inside-out and left dangling behind it as it heads to slaughter; injured lambs being led to slaughter; workers laughing, spanking animals, and engaging in simulated sex acts with nearby machinery as lambs are having their throats slit; and the apparent use of so-called Judas sheep — adult sheep kept alive at the facility and used to lead the young sheep to slaughter.
TOP PRESS
October 9, 2024
The Intercept
PRESS
October 25, 2023
Davis Vanguard
Hsiung was indeed transparent in his closing, telling the jury, “We did what we did because 11 days before the rescue effort at Sunrise, I saw this bird, half blind, unable to move away, unable to even jump up two feet to reach food and water and I left her to die. When I left her to die, that broke my heart.”
PRESS
October 25, 2023
Davis Vanguard
PRESS
October 24, 2023
Press Democrat
Hsiung emphasized his intent to help struggling animals in the 2018 demonstration. But he denied involvement in the second one in 2019.
PRESS
October 24, 2023
Press Democrat
PRESS RELEASE
October 19, 2023
“The thousands of signatures we’ve collected this summer are a testament to how enthusiastic the people of Berkeley are about disassociating with these cruel industries that run counter to our values,” says Berkeley resident and DxE organizer Kitty Jones. “It is high time we move past a system of industrialized exploitation of animals.”
PRESS RELEASE
October 19, 2023
PRESS
October 19, 2023
Sentient Media
Perhaps the most well-known case of open rescue involves two piglets, Lily and Lizzie. Ill and underweight when they were found by activists at a Smithfield-owned (the largest pork producer in the U.S.) facility in Utah, Circle Four Farms, the pigs were rescued by activists and relocated to animal sanctuaries, which the FBI then raided in search of the pigs’ DNA.
PRESS
October 12, 2023
Press Democrat
An image of a chicken with an eye injury and that was believed to be too frail to flee humans was indicative of the chicken population at a poultry farm just outside Petaluma where activists held a protest in 2018, one of them told a jury Thursday.
PRESS
October 12, 2023
Press Democrat
PRESS
October 11, 2023
Daily Californian
A similar group of deaths occurred at Golden Gate Fields in November 2021, when four horses died over the course of a week. “This type of pattern is common for horse racing,” said Samantha Faye, lead organizer of Stop Blood Sports and spokesperson for DxE.
PRESS
October 6, 2023
Press Democrat
[Direct Action Everywhere/DxE] argues they believed the animals were being mistreated. Referencing California’s animal cruelty laws, they contend they had the right to rescue animals in distress.
PRESS
October 6, 2023
Press Democrat
PRESS
October 6, 2023
Davis Vanguard
In Deputy District Attorney Robert Waner’s opening statement, the prosecutor told jurors Hsiung and DxE activists believe that compassion should be extended to all animals.
PRESS
October 6, 2023
UnchainedTV
The judge in the Sonoma rescue trial of animal rights activist Wayne Hsiung has ruled against allowing him to show videos of suffering ducks and chickens to the jury.
TOP PRESS
October 10, 2024
Vox
In principle, there’s a lot of sense in capping the size of factory farms. Measure J’s proponents are betting that progressive Sonoma County, better known for its tasting rooms than its slaughterhouses, can push California — and the nation — in that direction.
TOP PRESS
October 9, 2024
The Intercept
Videos shared with The Intercept prior to the report’s public release show, among other scenes, lambs with their throats slit hanging upside down and thrashing on the slaughter line; one animal with an internal organ that has been torn inside-out and left dangling behind it as it heads to slaughter; injured lambs being led to slaughter; workers laughing, spanking animals, and engaging in simulated sex acts with nearby machinery as lambs are having their throats slit; and the apparent use of so-called Judas sheep — adult sheep kept alive at the facility and used to lead the young sheep to slaughter.
TOP PRESS
August 30, 2024
San Francisco Chronicle
In dimly lit indoor aisles at Weber Family Farms in Petaluma, hundreds of thousands of white chickens live out their 90 weeks of life. They fly from perch to perch. They dust bathe in the bedding. They nip at water dispensers. They lay egg after egg. And they never leave. These barns are at the heart of a bitter fight that Mike Weber and Samantha Faye are waging for the future of local farming.
TOP PRESS
April 4, 2024
Los Angeles Times
Lewis Bernier, an animal rights activist supporting the initiative, said he has visited several factory farms across the country, documenting inhumane treatment, and one farm in Sonoma County stands out as having “the worst and most systemic animal cruelty that I’ve ever seen.”
TOP PRESS
March 15, 2024
The New Yorker
Instead of planning actions, many activists now spend their time litigating microaggressions and small disputes within their ranks... As a response, [DxE co-founder Wayne] Hsiung has tried to promote a maxim of "braver spaces, not safer spaces," which encourages the animal rights community to put aside their individual concerns, if possible, and do things like risk felony jail time for the cause.
TOP PRESS
January 30, 2024
The Guardian
If successful in Berkeley, a liberal San Francisco Bay Area town that’s often been at the forefront of US environmental policy, the method can be replicated elsewhere, [activists] say. “We can pave the path to abolishing factory farming,” said Cassie King, an organizer with Direct Action Everywhere, one of the groups that pushed for the measure.
TOP PRESS
November 9, 2023
Vox
Hsiung’s trial and conviction show the extraordinary difficulty of trying to discuss what happens to animals on factory farms in a legal system that only sees them as property. At both factory farms in this case, DxE had documented gruesome conditions prior to their open rescue actions and had submitted animal cruelty complaints to authorities (though no action was taken by legal officials, King said). Yet it was the activists, not the farm owners, who were criminally charged and had to explain themselves to a jury.
TOP PRESS
November 8, 2023
Wired
For the first time, guerrilla animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere reveals a guide to its investigative tactics and toolkit, from spy cams to night vision and drones. Bernier says that DxE decided to publicly release its guide, even in the wake of Hsiung’s conviction, to help activists who are already committed to carrying out covert investigations do their work more safely and effectively.
TOP PRESS
November 4, 2023
The Intercept
Hsiung’s defense was in many ways stymied from the jump. The judge barred almost all photo and video evidence of animal cruelty from the trial, as has been the case in a number of previous DxE trials. As I’ve previously noted, the decision to disallow such evidence is usually made to benefit a defendant — not showing gruesome images of a murder victim, for example. Such logic has been flipped in DxE cases, including Hsiung’s most recent, to the benefit of powerful agribusiness.
BLOG
September 19, 2022
Why is it that 60 years after the Freedom of Speech Movement, we can’t rally more than 200 people to fight for the future of our planet? Why is it that when we’re being faced with injustices like racism, fascism, worker abuse, animal abuse, income inequality, loss of reproductive rights and environmental destruction, one of the most progressive student bodies in the world barely rises up?
BLOG
September 18, 2022
Rose was the sole survivor of all the birds at McCoy’s that day, and amid the tragedy that occurred for the others, Rose’s story offered a glimmer of hope. The fact that her rescue was permitted was proof that they all deserved to be rescued, that even the police knew rescuing them was the right thing to do.
BLOG
September 10, 2022
The systems we have designed for animals are mentally abusive from the very beginning.
BLOG
August 23, 2022
The #SmithfieldTrial is moving to Washington County, Utah because the judge agreed it would be a challenge to find an impartial jury in Beaver County.
BLOG
August 16, 2022
Despite this supposed safeguard, if a local entity wants to take the lives of Canada geese, an application and a verbal statement over the phone grants instant permit approval from the USDA –which killed 26,000 Canada geese last year alone.
BLOG
August 11, 2022
These stories - the story of Smithfield, the story of Lily and Lizzie, and the story of government and industry collusion - are too important to tell for us to just give in to intimidation and bullying.
BLOG
August 3, 2022
Let this story be a reminder that animals do fight for their freedom and that they participate in their own liberation.
BLOG
July 21, 2022
Activists gathered for a vigil exactly two years after the release of Unseen, a documentary that exposed the horrors inside Yosemite Foods, a slaughterhouse in Stockton, California, that kills 2,000 pigs every day.
BLOG
July 19, 2022
DxE co-founder Wayne Hsiung recently shared the story of a very sick pig who was rescued from Farmer John. This is an excerpt from his Substack blog, The Simple Heart.
PRESS RELEASE
March 22, 2025
A handful of counter-protesters showed up with a Trump flag and a cardboard sign reading “Eat chicken.” They heckled the speakers and disrupted photos by standing in front of the photographers.
PRESS RELEASE
March 20, 2025
“I’m appalled that Trader Joe’s would continue to knowingly sell abused animals,” said Sally Zito of Los Angeles, who joined today’s protest in Monrovia. “I have delivered letters and I’ve called corporate headquarters and asked to talk to Trader Joe’s buyers, and they denied this request. They are putting their profits over the lives of animals.”
PRESS RELEASE
March 15, 2025
The protest spotlighted the zoonotic pathogens found at Petaluma Poultry, including salmonella, campylobacter, antibiotic-resistant Enterococcus, and Clostridium perfringens. Two protestors wore the type of biosecurity suits that are required for investigations and held yellow caution tape in front of the store’s meat section, which contains chickens slaughtered at Perdue’s Petaluma Poultry slaughterhouse
PRESS RELEASE
March 3, 2025
“If Ms. Rosenberg had rescued a drowning dog from a neighbor’s pool, she would be applauded, not prosecuted,” said Mr. Carraway. “The fact is, California law does not distinguish between rescuing a dog from a pool and rescuing sick and injured chickens from a slaughterhouse. Those who profit off animal agriculture may not like it, but that is the law.”
PRESS RELEASE
March 1, 2025
Outside the store, protestors set up a “human meat” display with an activist covered in fake blood and lying on a tray wrapped in plastic to represent the abused chickens whose plastic-wrapped bodies are sold at Trader Joe’s.
PRESS RELEASE
February 15, 2025
Protestors displayed a giant Elon Musk head with a speech bubble reading “I TORTURE MONKEYS.” With some activists dressed as monkeys inside cages, others held signs reading “Primates are not prototypes.” Several Bay Area residents, including a former animal experimenter, gave speeches condemning the cruelty and ineffectiveness of animal testing.
PRESS RELEASE
February 2, 2025
On Saturday evening, animal rights activists disrupted the dinner service at the upscale restaurant Playa Mill Valley in Marin County, asking the restaurant to cut ties with Perdue’s Petaluma Poultry due to documented animal cruelty.
PRESS RELEASE
January 29, 2025
Jason Arnold, Director of Operations for Perdue’s Petaluma Poultry slaughterhouse, ignored activists’ requests for a meeting regarding documented criminal animal cruelty at the slaughterhouse
PRESS RELEASE
December 14, 2024
Activists covered in fake blood lay down on a giant “plate” to bring attention to the violence behind serving dead animals as food during the holidays. Protestors also called on Safeway to cut ties with Perdue’s Petaluma Poultry, where undercover investigations have exposed sick and injured animals left without care.
