By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Farah Siddiqi for California News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
In 2023, UC Berkeley student and activist Zoe Rosenberg removed four severely ill chickens from a slaughterhouse truck in Petaluma, California, and brought them to an animal sanctuary. Now, she's facing over five years in prison. Rosenberg's trial is scheduled for later this year, and her allegations tell a story of horrific conditions at ostensibly "free-range" chicken farms, as well as the steep uphill battle activists face in convincing law enforcement to even investigate allegations of animal cruelty on factory farms.
Rosenberg is an activist with Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), a Bay Area-based animal rights organization. In addition to supporting ballot propositions and hosting conferences, DxE carries out undercover investigations of slaughterhouses and factory farms. In some cases, its activists rescue ill and imperiled animals from such facilities; this is what's known as "open rescue," a popular tactic among some animal rights activists.
The prospect of risking prison time for saving a few chickens, who are routinely sold for less than $20 apiece, may seem outlandish. But DxE activists like Rosenberg see it as a necessary risk to accomplish their ultimate goal: the complete abolition of slaughterhouses and factory farms.
"I think that if people don't take action and don't risk their freedom to create change, nothing will ever change," Rosenberg, who's currently wearing an ankle monitor while out on bail, tells Sentient. "We've seen time and time throughout history that it has been the sacrifices of the very few that have changed the world."
Petaluma Poultry did not respond to Sentient's request for comment on this story, but a company spokesperson denied DxE's claims to the San Francisco Chronicle, characterizing the group as "extremist" and its efforts as "theft."
What Is Open Rescue?
In essence, open rescue is the act of removing animals from dangerous or harmful environments without permission from the person, company or facility that oversees said animals. Those who carry out open rescues don't hide what they are doing, and often publicize their actions. Animals that are removed via open rescue are typically provided with medical care and/or taken to animal sanctuaries.
The goal of open rescues, which date back to at least the early 1980s, is not only to provide relief for the animals in question, but also to highlight the conditions in which farm animals are held, and to normalize the act of rescuing them. But it's a controversial practice, even among activists, and law enforcement officials generally treat open rescues as acts of theft, trespassing or other crimes.
This often leads to prosecution, but in the eyes of open rescue advocates, this isn't entirely a bad thing. Prosecutions often bring media attention and publicity to both the topic in question and the relevant laws surrounding that topic. Rosenberg's case, for instance, draws attention not only to the conditions of factory farms, but also to the fact that removing a few sick animals from a slaughterhouse can get you a half a decade in prison.
Do People Usually Go to Prison for Open Rescue?
Although charges are often brought in open rescue cases, they're frequently reduced or, in some cases, dropped entirely before trial. It's not uncommon for open rescuers to be acquitted, either; in a verdict that drew international headlines, DxE founder Wayne Hsiung and another defendant were facing 60 years in prison for rescuing two sick piglets from a Smithfield Farms facility in Utah, only to be acquitted of all charges.
That said, Hsiung did recently spend 38 days in Sonoma County jail for an open rescue in which he participated, so it's not unheard of for activists like Rosenberg to serve time for carrying out open rescues.
The Incident in Question
On June 13, 2023, Rosenberg entered a Petaluma Poultry slaughterhouse partially disguised as an employee. A truck delivering chickens to the facility was parked outside, and Rosenberg spotted four chickens in the back of the truck who she says were "covered in scratches and bruises." She took them from the truck, left the slaughterhouse and both she and DxE publicized her actions on social media.
Rosenberg says that she intentionally took the chickens that "seemed like they most needed medical attention." Subsequent examinations found that all four birds were infected with Coccidia parasites; one of them also had a respiratory infection and an injured toe, while a third had a foot infection.
Five months later, Rosenberg was arrested and charged with five felonies relating to the June 13 rescue. These charges were later reduced, and as of this writing, she faces one felony conspiracy charge, two forms of misdemeanor trespassing charges, one misdemeanor theft charge and one misdemeanor charge of tampering with a vehicle. Her trial is scheduled for September 15, 2025.
The chickens she rescued were all treated for their illnesses, and are now living at an animal sanctuary.
A History of Animal Neglect At Petaluma Poultry
Petaluma Poultry, a subsidiary of the chicken giant Perdue, presents itself as a humane operation where, in the words of its website, "chickens are free to be chickens."
"Our houses are spacious, with room for birds to move about and exhibit normal behaviors in a low-stress environment open to fresh air," the company's website says. "Our outdoor spaces are at least half the size of the poultry house, and typically as big as the barn itself."
But Petaluma Poultry's advertising is a classic example of humane-washing, when companies try to appeal to animal welfare-minded consumers by depicting their products as more humanely produced than they actually are.
Petaluma Poultry and its contractors have been accused of criminal animal cruelty on a number of occasions, and footage filmed by undercover investigators in the company's farms and slaughterhouse paints a much different picture than the company's marketing.
In 2018, a whistleblower provided DxE with footage from McCoy's Poultry, a factory farm contracted by Petaluma Poultry, that showed chickens collapsed on the ground, unable to stand or walk and surrounded by the corpses of other chickens. Shortly thereafter, Sonoma County Animal Services seized 15 chickens from McCoy's Poultry; six were already dead, while the other nine were injured, malnourished, unable to stand and exhibited signs of distress, according to a subsequent medical report. The facility was later shut down.
In 2023, another activist who infiltrated Petaluma Poultry's slaughterhouse said that she saw workers cutting into chickens while they were still alive, as well as evidence that chickens had been abused, tortured and boiled alive during the slaughter process. They also obtained documents showing that, on a single day in April, over 1,000 chickens were deemed unfit for human consumption after they were slaughtered due to suspicion that they had blood poisoning.
Prior to her arrest for the June incident, Rosenberg herself was involved in a separate DxE investigation of a Petaluma Poultry facility in 2023, where she recorded footage of more chickens suffering in the facility.
"I documented chickens who were collapsed on the floor of their factory farms, too weak to stand, unable to get to food and water, and slowly dying of starvation and dehydration," Rosenberg says. She ended up rescuing two of those chickens as well, both of whom required extensive medical care.
It remains unclear whether authorities prosecuting or investigating these allegations of criminal animal cruelty? And if not, how come?
Rosenberg Raised Allegations of Animal Welfare Abuses
Poultry is the most widely consumed meat in the U.S. and the world, yet there are no federal laws that protect livestock chickens from mistreatment on the farm. The Humane Slaughter Act establishes some baseline requirements for the treatment of livestock, but it specifically exempts chickens from these protections.
In California, however, livestock chickens are protected under a number of different laws. In addition to Proposition 12, which requires poultry producers to give egg-laying hens a specific amount of living space, Section 597(b) of California's penal code makes it a felony to subject an animal to "needless suffering" or deprive them of access to sufficient food or water, among other things.
This law would appear to be relevant in the context of Petaluma Poultry. If a chicken at a factory farm is physically unable to stand (let alone walk), they will be unable to reach the feeding trays and water, and will eventually die of thirst or starvation. If a chicken is boiled alive because they were improperly stunned beforehand, it has suffered needlessly.
The aforementioned investigations uncovered evidence of both of these things happening at Petaluma Poultry and its contracted facilities. Both DxE and Rosenberg claim they've presented multiple law enforcement agencies with this evidence, only to be rebuffed or ignored.
"The most common thing we've had is agencies directing us to another agency, directing us to another agency, directing us back to the place where we started, and just kind of sending us around in circles," Rosenberg says. "We didn't get any helpful response. No one took action."
It was this inaction that led Rosenberg to take the four chickens from the back of the truck in June, she says. After doing so, she again presented her findings to law enforcement, specifically the Petaluma Police Department. This time, she got a response.
"They said they had a detective who wanted to have a call with me, and so I had like a 15-minute call with a detective from the Petaluma Police Department," Rosenberg says. "She very much approached the call from an angle of, you know, 'I'm concerned about the reports you are making.' And so I told her about the animal cruelty that has been documented there."
But Officer Corie Joerger, the detective in question, didn't follow up with her after their call, Rosenberg claims, and ignored her subsequent attempts at communication. A couple of weeks later, Joerger handed Rosenberg a warrant for her arrest regarding the June rescue.
In the preliminary hearing for Rosenberg's case, Joerger acknowledged that Rosenberg had made allegations of animal cruelty, but stated that she did not investigate the matter.
This inaction by law enforcement wasn't an isolated incident. When the investigation at McCoy's Poultry facility uncovered dead birds on the farm floor and others that were unable to move, Sonoma County Animal Services referred the matter to the county sheriff's office for potential prosecution. But no prosecution followed then, either.
Sentient has reached out to the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office, the Petaluma Police Department and Joerger for clarification on these reports, but as of this writing, none have offered any comments.
Petaluma Poultry Is More the Rule Than the Exception
The allegations against Petaluma Poultry might sound extreme. But in fact, many are par for the course on factory farms, and chicken farms in particular.
For instance, the USDA estimates that every year, around 825,000 chickens are boiled alive at slaughterhouses. This is not standard protocol, but rather, the result of standard protocol gone wrong.
At poultry slaughterhouses, chickens are typically hung upside down by their feet and pulled through an electrified pool of water, which is meant to stun them. After that, workers slit the chickens' throats, and after they've bled out, they're placed into boiling water. This is to soften the skin and make it easier to defeather them.
That's how it's supposed to work, at least. In actuality, though, one or both of those first two steps often fail; chickens are either inadequately stunned before their throats are cut, or their throats aren't fully slit, or both. When both of these processes fail, the chicken is inadvertently boiled alive, and feels every bit of pain associated with this.
Similarly, the fact that those chickens at Petaluma Poultry couldn't stand up or walk isn't an accident. Over the decades, farmers have selectively bred chickens to be as fat as possible, as this maximizes the amount of meat they can sell. According to the National Chicken Council, farmed chickens now grow to be over twice as large as they were 100 years ago in less than half the time.
This unnatural rate of growth has wrought havoc on their internal biology, however, and farm chickens now routinely suffer from a number of illnesses and adverse health conditions as a result, including bone deformities, heart attacks, chronic hunger, ruptured tendons and, most relevantly to Petaluma Poultry, difficulty standing up or walking.
Finally, Petaluma Poultry is far from the only chicken producer to make questionable use of the "free-range" label, which is ostensibly regulated by the USDA. In 2023, undercover footage taken from a Tyson Foods-contracted chicken farm in Virginia depicted employees of both the factory and Tyson freely acknowledging that the "free range" label doesn't actually mean anything, and that "free range" birds often "don't go outside."
Why Wasn't Petaluma Poultry Investigated by Law Enforcement?
Though it's unclear why local law enforcement hasn't pursued any investigations into the allegations against Petaluma Poultry, DxE's director of communications has some ideas.
"It would be a massive undertaking for any government agency, no matter how well-staffed they actually might be, to suddenly address the systemic animal cruelty that we know is happening in factory farms," Cassie King, director of communications at DxE tells Sentient. "If they put their foot in the door and acknowledge that it's their responsibility to address these crimes, then there's a landslide of new cases they need to take on, and it's just a huge amount of work."
It also bears mentioning that chicken farms are an enormous part of Petaluma's local economy, and have been for quite some time. Once referred to as "the egg basket of the world," Petaluma was the birthplace of several egg-related technologies at the turn of the century, and pumped out over a half a billion eggs every year at its peak in 1945.
Although the city isn't quite the egg powerhouse it once was, chickens are still big business in Petaluma. Though official estimates are difficult to come by, the city is home to at least seven chicken farms large enough to qualify as factory farms, and those facilities collectively house around 1.8 million chickens at any given time, according to a 2024 analysis by an activist group that opposes factory farms.
To be clear, there's no evidence that the poultry industry's strong presence in Petaluma has played any role in law enforcement's response to allegations of cruelty at the city's chicken farms. But the fact that the Petaluma Police Department publicly celebrates the city's poultry industry, and participates in the annual Butter and Eggs Day festival in a non-law enforcement capacity, is not lost on DxE activists.
Rosenberg Awaiting Trial
For her part, Rosenberg maintains that her actions were legal. She cites the doctrine of necessity, a legal theory holding that it's sometimes permissible to break a law if doing so prevents even greater harm from occurring.
"For example, if a kid is drowning in your neighbor's pool and no one is helping that kid, you have the right to trespass into your neighbor's yard to rescue the kid," Rosenberg says.
How this defense plays out in court remains to be seen, but it's essentially the same argument Hsiung's attorneys successfully used in the Utah case. In the meantime, Rosenberg says she's been encouraged by the public reaction to her case (Paris Hilton is a prominent supporter), and doesn't regret her actions even if they do land her in prison.
"A few years of my freedom is worth significantly less than even one animal's entire life, and certainly less than four animals' entire lives," Rosenberg says. "And so it's absolutely worth it to me on that level."
Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.
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