In three of those operations, in which he helped remove animals from pig and turkey farms in Utah and an egg farm in California, he and his fellow D圎 activists filmed their operations with virtual reality cameras: custom-built stereoscopic depth-capturing rigs far larger and more sophisticated than the simple 360-degree camera footage the activists had shown me at their Airbnb.
#Animal liberation front in action series
If that description of the conflict sounds hyperbolic, it’s perhaps because the stakes are particularly high for Hsiung himself: He faces up to 60 years in prison on charges-including burglary and theft of livestock-related to a series of animal extractions he’s carried out over the past two years. They’ve tightened security against groups like his that seek to break into their facilities and film surreptitiously-all while processing more animals through their feeding barns and slaughterhouses than ever before.
The companies that run them have lobbied for “ag-gag” laws that criminalize dissemination of video and photos from within their walls. For decades, factory farms and slaughterhouses have, for economic reasons as much as PR ones, been moving away from urban areas to remote rural ones, out of the public eye. “To convince the public that these massive agribusiness concerns, which are inflicting horrible suffering on animals, that are huge assembly line productions-that this is good.”ĭefeating that disinformation has become an “arms race,” Hsiung says, one that stretches back to Upton Sinclair’s 1906 meat industry exposé, The Jungle. “That takes some next-level hacking,” Hsiung says.
Before embarking on his second career as the leader of D圎’s guerrilla animal liberation group-a loose network of thousands of activists in chapters around the world-Hsiung spent years working as a lawyer and academic researching behavioral economics.įrom that behavioral economist’s perspective, he still marvels at the social influence of the global meat industry, the soothing images of small farms and happy pastures that it puts on packages of bacon, he says, to obscure the reality: a collection of factories whose contribution to climate change rivals that of automobiles, where tens of billions of creatures live out their short lives in confined squalor, overseen by underpaid migrant workers performing dangerous, grueling labor. Hsiung speaks a bit like a spiritual guru, albeit one with the accelerated patter and citation-filled arguments of a political podcast host. Now they see no sign of those injured animals other than a bloodstain on the floor.Īt our first meeting, Hsiung sits cross-legged on a bed in his home in a lush subdivision in Berkeley, California, a house he shares with a rotating cast of guests, currently around half a dozen activists and seven animals. They return to one pen where, the night before, they freed a group of injured piglets caught under a cage door. Others lie dead in corners of the pens or in piles of feces.
#Animal liberation front in action free
Reaching into a pen, the group’s leader helps to free one squealing piglet whose foot is caught in the grate. Tiny piglets covered in birth fluid and blood stumble around on the metal grate floors. The animals in these so-called gestation crates appear not to be able to turn around or even take a step.ĭucking and running through a half-covered hallway between the barns, the two activists enter another barn where they find mothers that have just given birth inside those same crates. On the other side, sows-each at least as intelligent and emotionally sensitive as a dog-are locked individually into metal pens roughly the dimensions of their bodies. On one side of the two intruders, stretching beyond the edges of their headlamps’ light, full-grown pigs are crammed eight to a cage the enclosures are just large enough that the activists can see small patches of concrete floor between the animals.