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The Wayne Hsiung Case and the Cost of Animal Rights Ignorance

Many pride themselves on being Animal rights lawyers. But what does that really entail? In 2018 and 2019 activists from Direct Action Everywhere engaged in the mass rescue of chickens and ducks from two Sonoma County, California, factory farms. The animal lawyering around that case – and the unique value of a direct action right to rescue as a serious commitment to animal personhood, where we refuse to bend to a system that treats them as property – is changing the nature of animal law.

Animal lawyers have traditionally sued many companies and governments to try to protect animals. But the law exempts from protection the vast majority of animals, is rarely if ever enforced, and even if animal rights lawyers have a good case, courts are likely to dismiss the case for political reasons – often urging the lawyers to first get more clarity from legislatures.

That is why many who lost faith in animal law have turned to concrete deliverables of market solutions, like investing in vegan products. This approach still uses animal law – like civil lawsuits brought on behalf of the truly humane and plant-based businesses that lose tens of millions of dollars to the false advertisers constantly cutting costs by constantly violating cruelty laws. If law enforcement can’t do it, maybe the market – partnering with the law – can.

But there are also animal lawyers out there fighting for animal liberation, those doing a different type of animal law that challenges the legitimacy of the legal system that enabled the deadly climate crisis by appropriating the nonhuman world as a human resource, a move that will kill millions of humans in the future. These lawyers represent – and work with those who do rescue animals directly. These activists are engaged in a truer form of humane education, exemplifying what it means to not treat animals as property in practice, even when it means those activists are going to prison.

Direct Action Everywhere and the Trials of Sonoma County

The DXE activists, well aware of the cruelty in the facilities that law enforcement refused to acknowledge, came in peaceful waves to bring many animals out and into care. They did so openly and under well-researched theories of social change. They did it in a state that prided itself on protecting animals, a vanguard that could be challenged to live the ideals it proclaimed and lead by example. While laboratories, puppy mills, canned hunts, and other targets constantly violate cruelty laws, factory farms – enabled for decades by anthropocentric environmentalists as massive nonprofits – are also major contributors to climate change, a threat to even the children of those who own them.

The activists’ tactics were simple. If you know about cruelty, halt it, and render care. While many had pursued exclusive justice, a top-down code for lawyers only, theirs was inclusive, democratic, and clear.

Prior mass rescues had shown everyday people, those who sat on juries, those who had to smell and hear the factory farms extracting wealth from animals in the community, and from the environment, often acquitted the activists.

The Trial, Sentencing, and More Arrests and Charges

This jury did not acquit. The trial lasted eight weeks, with the jury deliberating for six long days. The court – sitting in a community that saw itself as agricultural and rural relative to the cities just south of it – had severely limited what evidence the jury could see. Many factory farms in the county advertise as humane, though investigators tell a very different story. I have personally sued farms there for false advertising.

In the end, it was Wayne Hsiung, co-founder of the organization, who was found guilty of one felony conspiracy and two misdemeanor trespassing charges. Hsiung was sentenced to three months in jail, and two months of probation – a relatively light sentence.

Just after Hsiung’s conviction, three more activists were arrested and charged in connection with the rescues. The move is thought to be a message to activists to stay out of the county and allow the illusion of decency there – the hiding of cruelty and the threat to the future of the children that live there – to continue.

Sometimes the police and prosecutors are not the good guys. They target activists instead of animal abusers.

Bottom-Up Justice or the Kind One Can Explain to Children

Is there a bridge between traditional Animal rights that focus on individualized cases using both direct and indirect tactics, and a more macro form of animal law that can address the Anthropocene and the deadly climate crisis flowing from it?

Is there a better way to align Animal rights with the other burgeoning social justice movements it needs to succeed? Animal rights and law without liberation do not ensure consent or equitable relations with nonhumans. They do not respect animals’ whole selves – the fullness of their entirety, their relationships, their homes and habitats, their wills and moods – their complex lives. And they do not account for how animals’ freedom from suffering aligns with humans’ freedom from the same. There is an alternative emerging: Animal law as animal liberation, both micro and macro.

Across the nation, many are risking prison defending their right to not be forced to be mothers against their will, protesters willing to stand in front of the homes of Supreme Court justices backing laws meant to make them mothers. They are concerned with consent as well, not the thinness of pleasure and suffering, but the fullness of autonomy, of relations, and the freedom of a life of valuable choices. Life is more than the absence of suffering – ignoring that fact for animals is to minimize them, as those who neglect them do. Ignoring that fact – treating animals’ homes and habitats as something for human use rather than the source of mutual autonomy that liberates us all – ensured the climate crisis.

Those reproductive rights protesters may find common ground with animal rescuers, demanding birth equity-based climate reparations for any child they would have to ensure any child is born in a place, at a time, and with resources, that give them a fighting chance. Many who have worked with DXE – like Alexandra Paul and Alicia Santurio – now back this form of protest. Wayne Hsuing has been quoted as supporting the inclusion of macro animal liberation work in the Animal rights movement.

The theory of these macro “total liberation” reparations logically precede any other state authority because they remake the state through its constituents. The reparations are specifically because those seeking them planning smaller or more ecocentric, more equitable, and more empathetic families that over time would transform the world towards democracy and nature. This is a real, tangible, and functional social contract. It entails, refusing – on the macro or existential level of who our species should be – to treat nonhumans and their worlds as human property. That move may not save all of the millions the climate crisis will kill, but how many lives saved justifies the try? For caring people, not many.

The trials of DXE and other direct-action liberationists will continue around the nation as many question whether to show what it means to not treat animals as property and to model that liberation for others. Does their overlap with climate activists who want to liberate the nonhuman world at a macro level via family reforms portend victory, as hundreds of millions of human lives are now at stake as well? We shall see.

It may be that factory farms in Sonoma County are on the wrong side of history, and the children who live there know it. We owe it to the activists making history unfold, as social justice movements did in the past, and who know true justice comes from vulnerability, bottom-up both on a micro and macro level; not power, top down.