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Credit to Author: Andy Greenberg| Date: Thu, 05 Dec 2019 11:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n This animal liberation group actually wants to be put on trial. Their goal: force jurors to wear VR headsets and immerse them in the suffering of animals bound for slaughter.<\/p>\n Just before midnight<\/strong> somewhere in the western United States, a white pickup truck\u2019s high beams light up a stretch of dark highway.<\/p>\n The driver slows as his three passengers peer through the cab\u2019s front and rear windshields, looking for the headlights of any cars that might catch them in the act of trespassing.<\/p>\n \u201cLet\u2019s be prepared to jump.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou have your bag and walkies?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cStop here. Here, here, here.\u201d<\/p>\n As the truck speeds off, the three figures scramble quietly off the highway shoulder and into a terrain of scrub brush and jagged gullies. For the next 15 minutes, they walk down an unlit dirt road in near total darkness; even the waning moon\u2019s sliver of light is hidden behind clouds. But their noses tell them they\u2019re in the right place. They\u2019re engulfed in a smell that intensifies as they walk: a blend of barnyard animal, excrement, and decaying flesh. The silence is interrupted only by the crunch of their feet on the sand and then, after a few minutes, sporadic, far-off guttural animal bellowing. They\u2019re approaching their destination, a massive industrial pig farm.<\/p>\n As the three near the facility\u2019s long, low-slung barns arrayed behind giant, man-made lagoons of pig feces and blood, they spot the guardhouse. A TV seems to flicker inside, as it had on the three previous nights. To avoid the building, they leave the road, circling away from the shed through a dry riverbed, and approach the barns from the opposite side.<\/p>\n In the darkness, one of the three intruders switches on a pair of night vision goggles and scans for guards\u2014it\u2019s her turn to remain outside and serve as lookout. The other two pull on Tyvek suits and polyurethane boot covers and run toward the barns.<\/p>\n The team\u2019s leader and smallest member worms through a hole in the enclosure and lifts a bolt on a door to let the other one in. Then the two activists, members of an animal liberation organization known as Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE, start their work: They pull out cameras and begin documenting the inside of the facility, a typical factory farm of the kind that produces the vast majority of the pork Americans eat.<\/p>\n On one side of the two intruders, stretching beyond the edges of their headlamps\u2019 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. On the other side, sows\u2014each at least as intelligent and emotionally sensitive as a dog\u2014are locked individually into metal pens roughly the dimensions of their bodies. The animals in these so-called gestation crates appear not to be able to turn around or even take a step.<\/p>\n Ducking and running through a half-\u00adcovered hallway between the barns, the two activists enter another barn where they find mothers that have just given birth inside those same crates. Tiny piglets covered in birth fluid and blood stumble around on the metal grate floors. Reaching into a pen, the group\u2019s leader helps to free one squealing piglet whose foot is caught in the grate. Others lie dead in corners of the pens or in piles of feces. They return to one pen where, the night before, they freed a group of injured piglets caught under a cage door. Now they see no sign of those injured animals other than a bloodstain on the floor.<\/p>\n I see all of this\u2014the crates, the dead piglets, the bloodstain. Not in person, which would have required me to break the same trespassing laws as the DxE activists, but in their raw video recordings, which they show me the next day as we sit around a dining table of their Airbnb in a nearby town, reviewing the footage while a vegan pizza grows cold in the center of the table.<\/p>\n One of the DxE trespassers shot the footage with a Sony A7 III camera; he also retrieved several tiny cameras, small enough to escape workers\u2019 notice, which he\u2019d hidden around the farm on an earlier intrusion. Another activist had carried a less standard piece of equipment: a $400, 360-degree camera mounted on the end of an extension arm, recording everything around it with a pair of fish-eye lenses for a stripped-down experience of virtual reality<\/a>.<\/p>\n That crude VR capture is, of course, missing some of the horrors described to me: The squeals are dampened. The smell is absent\u2014I\u2019d only experience it firsthand when we drove near the farm the next day, so that they could film it from above with a quadcopter drone, while swarms of flies from the nearby pig sewage lagoons filled their truck.<\/p>\n But through their ultrawide-angle lenses, I can get a hint of what it\u2019s like to be inside the facility. On one of the activists\u2019 laptops, sitting on the table of the Airbnb, I use the trackpad to rotate my point of view down an endless corridor of the barn\u2019s cages. I swing the perspective to the front, and then to the back. In each direction, rows of doomed animals stretch out, farther than I can see, into the darkness.<\/p>\n Wayne Hsiung, cofounder of Direct Action Everywhere.<\/p>\n Direct Action Everywhere\u2019s cofounder<\/strong>, a compact 38- year-old Taiwanese American man named Wayne Hsiung, describes the American meat industry as a kind of vast dystopian hoax.<\/p>\n \u201cAnimal suffering is something \u00adpeople intrinsically care about,\u201d Hsiung says. Americans can\u2019t stand to see an animal die onscreen in a TV show. They obsess over a dentist who kills a beloved lion on a hunting trip in Zimbabwe, and they lavish billions of pageviews on cute animal videos on social media. To keep that same public happily buying hot dogs requires nothing less than a Matrix-like system of mass delusion, he argues. \u201cThe fight against animal agriculture,\u201d Hsiung says, \u201cis the fight against misinformation.\u201d<\/p>\n At 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. Hsiung speaks a bit like a spiritual guru, albeit one with the accelerated patter and citation-filled arguments of a political podcast host. Before embarking on his second career as the leader of DxE\u2019s guerrilla animal \u00adliberation group\u2014a loose network of thousands of activists in chapters around the world\u2014Hsiung spent years working as a lawyer and academic researching behavioral economics.<\/p>\n From that behavioral economist\u2019s 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. \u201cThat takes some next-level hacking,\u201d Hsiung says. \u201cTo convince the public that these massive agribusiness concerns, which are inflicting horrible suffering on animals, that are huge assembly line productions\u2014that this<\/em> is good.\u201d<\/p>\n Defeating that disinformation has become an \u201carms race,\u201d Hsiung says, one that stretches back to Upton Sinclair\u2019s 1906 meat industry expos\u00e9, The Jungle<\/a><\/em>. 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. The companies that run them have lobbied for \u201cag-gag\u201d laws that criminalize dissemination of video and photos from within their walls. They\u2019ve tightened security against groups like his that seek to break into their facilities and film surreptitiously\u2014all while processing more animals through their feeding barns and slaughterhouses than ever before.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fight against animal agriculture,\u201d Hsiung says, \u201cis the fight against misinformation.\u201d<\/p>\n At the same time, the animal rights movement has gained an arsenal of tools to fight what they see as the information blackout around the meat industry. \u201cDrones, secret cameras, VR, social media,\u201d Hsiung says. \u201cOver the past few years there\u2019s been an eruption in technology, and that\u2019s leading to a cataclysmic battle.\u201d<\/p>\n If that description of the conflict sounds hyperbolic, it\u2019s perhaps because the stakes are particularly high for Hsiung himself: He faces up to 60 years in prison on charges\u2014including burglary and theft of livestock\u2014related to a series of animal extractions he\u2019s carried out over the past two years. 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 DxE 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.<\/p>\n Hsiung wasn\u2019t caught in the act of those intrusions. He and several other DxE members were charged only after they published the virtual reality footage they\u2019d captured, which included images of their unmasked faces. DxE carries out what the animal liberation movement calls \u201copen rescue,\u201d a practice dating back decades in which animal rights activists publicly reveal their actions and identities to claim moral high ground. In some cases, hundreds of DxE activists have marched into animal facilities together, in daylight, to take out animals in acts of mass protest, sometimes streaming their actions live on Facebook. Even the anonymous DxE activists I met the day after their midnight pig farm operation intended to eventually reveal themselves\u2014they said they were just waiting for the most strategic moment to do so.<\/p>\n DxE rejects framing these actions as civil disobedience. Instead, the group points to statutes in common law and some US state laws that allow bystanders to trespass to stop animal cruelty or help an animal in a life-threatening situation. Someone who rescues a starving piglet from a factory farm, they say, is no different from someone who breaks a window to save a dog locked in a hot car\u2014an argument that has yet to be tested in court as a defense for factory farm intrusions.<\/p>\n While DxE\u2019s technological savvy has put it in the spotlight, the group\u2019s radical tactics have also set it apart from other animal rights activists, as has its abolitionist view that no \u201chumane certified\u201d or \u201cfree-range\u201d certifications represent an acceptable compromise. The agribusiness trade group WATT Global Media has written<\/a> that DxE \u201ccould very well be the most dangerous animal rights organization out there.\u201d<\/p>\n Hsiung with DxE members Priya Sawhney and Paul Darwin Picklesimer, outfitted as they would be for an intrusion into a factory farm.<\/p>\n Even some animal rights groups, while sympathetic to DxE\u2019s views, set themselves apart from its absolutist approach\u2014targeting ostensibly conscientious businesses like Whole Foods and Chipotle, along with the very worst animal rights offenders\u2014and acknowledge that, in a world where meat consumption has increased for decades, an incrementalist approach may be more effective. \u201cIf people are going to continue to eat animal products, we have an obligation to reduce animals\u2019 suffering,\u201d says Andrew deCoriolis, executive director of Farm Forward, an animal rights group that advocates for smaller-\u00adscale, more humane animal farming. \u201cIf we can ensure that animals have lives worth living but preserve animals being raised for food, that would be much better than the track we\u2019re currently on.\u201d Other animal rights activists quietly believe that DxE\u2019s approach of inviting criminal prosecution seems more likely to achieve martyrdom than real progress.<\/p>\n But even as Hsiung\u2019s charges mount, he\u2019s never been more optimistic about the effects of his work. This spring, he and a codefendant, Paul Darwin Picklesimer, will face trial in Utah for breaking into Circle Four Farms, one of the world\u2019s largest pig farms, and taking out two piglets. Both say they look forward to the proceedings as a rare opportunity. After years of open rescues that ended in dismissed charges, they believe the meat industry is finally ready for a direct confrontation, one that will allow them to put the industry itself on trial and broadcast the footage they\u2019ve been collecting for years to a far larger audience.<\/p>\n In fact, they hope to use their trial to stage an unprecedented, Clockwork Orange<\/em>\u2013style stunt that will combine DxE\u2019s legal and technological innovations: They plan to request that the jury\u2014and perhaps the prosecutors and judge too\u2014be required to strap on VR headsets and be immersed in the scenes the activists captured inside Circle Four. That footage, the activists point out, constitutes the central evidence against them. The jury\u2019s reaction to it may determine whether they\u2019re convicted as vandals and thieves or exonerated as rescuers of animals that DxE argues would otherwise have died and been discarded as trash.<\/p>\n Whether this radical legal tactic will fly in court may come down entirely to the discretion of a judge, who will have to decide whether the VR material\u2019s relevance to the case outweighs its emotional impact, which could prejudice the jury against Circle Four. \u201cThe big question is whether they\u2019ll be able to talk a judge into letting the VR stuff in,\u201d says Hadar Aviram, a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School\u2019s Animal Law and Policy Program who has focused her recent research on DxE. \u201cThe footage is quite arresting. I can see a jury, even in a rural county, a farming county, being very sympathetic to people trying to bring that to light.\u201d<\/p>\n If, in a kind of VR-induced miracle, Hsiung and his codefendants do convince a Utah jury of their legal argument, they believe they\u2019ll have won a victory against factory farms that could unlock a new wave of similar operations. \u201cWe\u2019ll have a precedent that says the right to rescue is legally recognized, that if an animal is suffering, ordinary citizens have the right to give them care,\u201d Hsiung says. \u201cI\u2019ll go right back to the factory farm, literally right after the trial, walk right back in and take another piglet out.\u201d<\/p>\n And if he loses? \u201cThen there will be a lot of people asking why a person is sitting in prison for decades,\u201d Hsiung says, \u201cfor recording some videos and taking two piglets to the vet.\u201d<\/p>\n A pig living on a sanctuary farm for rescue animals in Half Moon Bay, California.<\/p>\n Wayne Hsiung grew up<\/strong> in a small town in Indiana, the son of two Taiwanese immigrants who moved to the US so that his father could study chemistry and later take a job as a scientist at Eli Lilly. His parents had spent periods of their own childhoods going hungry in the wake of China\u2019s civil war, and they were delighted to discover that Americans ate meat at practically every meal. But Hsiung, one of only two Asian children in his classes, was deeply lonely, ostracized, mocked and bullied for his race and accent. He begged his parents to get him a dog, a mutt he found in the classified ads, who he says became his best and only friend.<\/p>\n Not long after, when Hsiung was 8, his family took a trip to mainland China to meet relatives for the first time since the split between communist China and Taiwan. But Hsiung\u2019s most vivid memory from that trip remains a dinner his extended family held at a \u201cwildlife\u201d restaurant in Guangzhou, a controversial southern Chinese cuisine that specializes in exotic animals. Hsiung remembers live snakes, raccoons, dogs, and monkeys all captive and available for diners to choose from. Request one, and it would be killed and cooked on the spot.<\/p>\n Hsiung was horrified. He dreamed of the animals\u2019 screams for months, he says. \u201cFirst, that trip instilled in me from a very young age, incontrovertibly, that some of the things we\u2019re taught by authority figures must be wrong,\u201d Hsiung says. \u201cSecondly, I learned that there was something fundamentally flawed about the way human beings interact with animals.\u201d<\/p>\n When Hsiung was 15, a boy from his school ambushed him, held him down, and slashed his face with a blade. His parents were scared enough by the incident that they allowed him to apply to college early, and he enrolled at DePauw University in Indiana when he was only 16; the next year he transferred to the University of Chicago. College was another turning point in his life. He read Animal Liberation<\/a><\/em>, the seminal animal rights tract written by the philosopher Peter Singer, which laid out the argument that all beings should be treated in accordance not with their intelligence but with their capacity to feel pleasure and pain, the core tenet in the fight against what Singer calls \u201cspeciesism.\u201d Soon Hsiung became a vegan, a Buddhist, and then an animal rights activist, leafleting on campus and handing out DVDs of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals\u2019 documentary Meet Your Meat<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n Over the next few years, Hsiung started down the path of a career in behavioral economics and law; at one point he \u00adcowrote a paper with his mentor, the nationally influential law professor Cass Sunstein, on how climate change would impact animal populations. He was fascinated by Sunstein\u2019s theories of social change\u2014how surfacing implicit preferences or emotions in individuals can trigger social \u201ccascades,\u201d chain reactions in which a person\u2019s admission of their unspoken feelings or experience can unlock many others to do the same. But over time he began to feel detached from his legal studies and depressed about the academic future ahead of him.<\/p>\n So one night, on a whim, he decided to trespass into a slaughterhouse intending to rescue an animal. Chiappetti Lamb and Veal was one of the last operational meat facilities in urban Chicago, a building Hsiung had walked by repeatedly, whose smells and sounds had haunted him. He entered around 2 am, simply opening a gate and walking in.<\/p>\n Inside the company\u2019s stockyard, he found an enclosure of baby cows and lambs cowering in the corners of their pens. He hadn\u2019t bargained for the animals\u2019 size and quickly realized he wouldn\u2019t be able to take any of them out by himself. He left empty-handed but found himself returning to the slaughterhouse again and again. On some of those trips he brought a cheap point-and-shoot camera with him. But the resulting photos never quite captured the feeling of being there. \u201cThe key details\u2014the quivering of the lambs, the patches of rotting skin\u2014were lost,\u201d he would later write<\/a>. \u201cAnd the earth-shattering experience of being surrounded by baby animals suffering in filth would remain locked in my mind.\u201d (The company that now owns the Chiappetti facility said it couldn\u2019t comment on its conditions in the early 2000s.)<\/p>\n By that time, Hsiung was working as a visiting law professor at Northwestern University. But he decided to quit his job. He spent the next four years breaking into slaughterhouses and farms around the country by night to rescue animals, working as a full-time activist until he ran out of money and then taking jobs in corporate law to raise enough to continue. Those early operations were anything but open rescues\u2014even now, Hsiung refuses to share details about them, claiming that doing so would endanger collaborators in fragile legal situations. Still, they allowed him to hone the playbook that DxE would use years later, scouting targets, practicing investigative techniques, learning about the supply chain of the US meat industry.<\/p>\n From the beginning, Hsiung believed open rescues would be far more effective. \u201cIf we really believe in what we\u2019re doing, we can\u2019t be scared to show people,\u201d Hsiung says. But to take that risk, he\u2019d need a grassroots movement and a media strategy strong enough that every prosecution or lawsuit the group\u2019s rescues triggered would only amplify its message and recruit more followers.<\/p>\n Before cofounding Direct Action Everywhere, Hsiung attempted to launch four other groups, each of which fell apart in turn. Finally, in 2012, he moved to the Bay Area and tried a different strategy, emulating the group Improv Everywhere, whose performance art stunts had gone viral on social media. DxE tried applying the same tactics to animal rights protests, staging die-ins at Chipotle restaurants around the country or lining up to read poems in front of a grocery store meat counter while employees hurled abuse at the protesters.<\/p>\n In 2014, DxE carried out its first open rescue, breaking into a Petaluma, California, egg farm that supplied what it claimed were \u201ccage-free\u201d eggs to Whole Foods. Inside, the activists recorded video that showed hens crammed into crowded sheds\u2014hardly what most consumers would imagine \u201ccage-free\u201d means\u2014and taking out two symbolic hens that they left at an animal sanctuary. (Whole Foods declined to comment for this story.)<\/p>\n By the time DxE released that video, in early 2015, Hsiung had his eyes on a bigger target: Circle Four Farms, one of the world\u2019s largest pig farms. The sprawling facility in Milford, Utah, which belongs to the Chinese-owned conglomerate Smithfield Foods, reportedly sends 1.2 million pigs to slaughter every year from its hundreds of barns, a complex that DxE nicknamed the Deathstar.<\/p>\n In 2007, Circle Four had pledged to phase out the gestation crates that keep pregnant sows practically immobile. In 2013, the company released a YouTube video that showed its new group housing system<\/a>, with animations and cheery music. Hsiung was skeptical of those claims, which entailed a massive project that Smithfield had said would cost $300 million. So he and DxE began to make plans to go in and see the farm for themselves.<\/p>\n A DxE operation at a California egg farm.<\/p>\n Images taken by DxE at Circle Four Farms in Utah.<\/p>\n Images taken by DxE at Circle Four Farms in Utah.<\/p>\n In the living room<\/strong> of his house in Berkeley, Hsiung sits me down on a stool and puts an Oculus VR headset on my head, along with a pair of over-ear headphones. Hsiung\u2019s two dogs, one rescued from a dog meat farm in Yulin, China, and the other from a Chicago dogfighting ring, laze on the couch in front of me, warily keeping their distance from the strange cyborg creature that\u2019s invaded their home.<\/p>\n A few seconds later, Hsiung\u2014now a virtual Hsiung, standing in front of me in the dark of a Utah desert night, not the physical one I\u2019d just been talking to\u2014is showing me a dumpster whose floor is lined with dead piglets, the bloody carcass of a full-grown pig thrown face down on top of them. I\u2019m now watching Operation Deathstar<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cAll right folks, we\u2019re about to head into Circle Four,\u201d virtual Hsiung says to the camera as he and a group of DxE activists\u2014one holding an elaborate, custom-made VR recording rig that\u2019s been digitally stitched out of the footage\u2014approach a door of one of the barns in the dark. \u201cThis is the heart of evil.\u201d<\/p>\n Inside the barn, the sights are largely the same as the ones in the 360 footage I\u2019d been shown by the anonymous DxE activists in the field: countless screaming pigs confined in the dark, claustrophobic gestation crates, crushed and dead piglets lying in their mothers\u2019 feces. But in this more immersive VR version, the pigs\u2019 squeals are louder and more unrelenting, the stereo\u00adscopic depths of the barn\u2019s enormity more overwhelming, the visceral stress of the scene far more immediate.<\/p>\n Strapped into the experience, I physically cannot look away. The hairs on my neck stand up, and I find myself feeling something unexpected: fear. \u201cThere\u2019s a kind of primal animal connection,\u201d Hsiung says when I recount my experience to him afterward. \u201cYou feel that all these animals are scared. You ask yourself, what are they scared of? So you feel scared too.\u201d<\/p>\n