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Yesterday, I said goodbye to my best friend. 
Starting today, and for the next two years, I will be prohibited [ [link removed] ] from contacting or coming within 100 yards of Priya Sawhney and 13 other people, including most of my closest friends, as punishment for “conspiring” to give aid to sick and dying hens at Sunrise Farms, a factory farm in Sonoma County that supplies eggs to Whole Foods.
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Just days earlier, on December 14, another court in Sonoma County issued an even more bizarre order. Zoe Rosenberg, who has been accused [ [link removed] ] of “conspiring” to rescue animals from poultry giant Perdue Farms, was prohibited by Judge Kathleen Navarro from “possessing” any domestic bird. These are the very animals that Zoe, as a founder of Happy Hen Animal Sanctuary, has spent her entire life trying to protect; now, without any semblance of due process, Zoe will be taken from the living beings she loves. 
In both of these cases, false and irrelevant evidence was presented suggesting that Priya, Zoe, and other activists pose a threat to the public. At my sentencing hearing, for example, an industry executive accused me of “bioterrorism.”  My offense? Organizing others, including elderly women and children, to hold flowers outside of a factory farm. 
In Zoe’s pre-trial hearing, the prosecutors falsely claimed – with no evidence – that Zoe’s efforts to give medical care to dying animals were a threat [ [link removed] ] to public health because of disease outbreaks at factory farms. The court failed to acknowledge that the only actual evidence of sickness and disease at these facilities was related to the industry’s own practices. This includes unlawful confinement [ [link removed] ] that leaves animals living in squalid conditions with 1 square foot of space each, and employees violating biosecurity protocols by walking into sheds without bothering to wipe down their shoes [ [link removed] ]. Zoe is being made a scapegoat for the industry’s own misconduct. 
Halfway across the country, in Colorado, another conspiracy trial has been unfolding [ [link removed] ] with very different court rulings. This time, it is poultry executives and not rescuers who have been in the crosshairs. Over the last decade, the government has accumulated overwhelming evidence that the titans of the poultry industry are unlawfully cooperating to increase prices (and corporate profits). In 2014, the major players in the chicken industry suddenly increased their prices at the same time, instantly doubling the profit margin of the biggest players. While the executives claimed this was due to a supply shortage, they were unlawfully coordinating the price hikes behind the scenes – and celebrating their conspiracy. One executive called the sudden financial boon a “chicken nirvana.” Another wrote “FYI. Do not fwd. not exactly a legal conversation.” But when prosecutors attempted to introduce evidence of negative impacts to the public caused by the industry’s actions, such as increased prices for consumers, the judge rejected it as irrelevant and inadmissible. Let’s say that again. In a case involving a conspiracy to fix prices, the court excluded evidence that prices for consumers were being impacted! 
The poultry executives, despite overwhelming evidence of guilt, were acquitted [ [link removed] ] of conspiracy in July 2022.
In these cases, the judicial system has bent over backwards to insulate poultry tycoons from accountability – while fabricating evidence of wrongdoing by animal rescuers. One of the most perverse things about the verdicts in these conspiracy cases is that there was overwhelming evidence that the tycoons knew their conduct was criminal – as one executive put it, “not exactly… legal” – yet they were all acquitted.
In contrast, there was zero evidence that animal rights activists at Sunrise Farms thought what we were doing was illegal. Every witness at trial, including a distinguished criminal law professor and even the prosecution’s own investigators, testified that we believed honestly in the legality of our actions.
Yet somehow the industry executives were acquitted of having any unlawful intent, and I was convicted and sent to jail — and torn away from all the people I love.
But these are not unique instances of judicial corruption. There is a broader pattern at issue here that can only be described as a war on compassion. Those who seek to profit from animal cruelty are protected; those who seek to treat them with compassion are persecuted. 
Across the nation, for the last 20 years, this war has been fought with all the tools of military conflict. Surveillance (my phone and social media accounts have been tapped by the authorities), infiltration (undercover officers have attended not just marches but vegan potlucks), and even the use of military force. 
The goal of such measures has been to put fear in the hearts of those who seek compassion for animals. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, has written [ [link removed] ] that the government’s decades-long effort to portray peaceful advocacy as terrorism, through heavy-handed prosecutions such as the one at Sunrise, is meant to “effectively chill and deter Americans from exercising their First Amendment rights to advocate for reforms in the treatment of animals.” And, in the past, this militaristic effort by the industry has succeeded; as I’ve written [ [link removed] ] previously, the grassroots animal rights movement suffered immensely from the prosecutions that occurred in the mid-2000s. 
But something has changed: we are learning to use the tools of nonviolent conflict to fight back. The “no contact” order imposed on me, for example, was also imposed many years ago on animal rights activists, including Lauren Gazzola, who were convicted of conspiracy for running a website called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty [ [link removed] ] (SHAC). The collapse of leadership in the SHAC movement, triggered in part by these constraints on the activists’ freedom of association, ended the campaign. But the associational constraint in my case will have virtually no impact on our campaigns because we built our movement as a grassroots network [ [link removed] ], akin to the Civil Rights Movement, and not as a traditional nonprofit. You can take out the “leaders,” and it will only make the movement grow. 
Similarly, the court order prohibiting Zoe from possession of birds will backfire because it will inspire more people to rescue animals in her place. Indeed, that is precisely what happened after my own prosecution: Zoe and others continued rescuing animals after I was taken out of commission by criminal charges. This is how the strategy of nonviolence works. So long as we maintain the moral high ground, efforts to prosecute one activist will simply motivate others to step up. 
In the long term, of course, our goal is not just to save a handful of animals or win a few criminal cases. Our aim is to end the war on compassion. It is utterly nonsensical that we live in a political system that encourages the executives at Perdue to continue torturing animals and deceiving consumers, while rescuers like Zoe are barred from “possessing” animals to care for them – or from showing the public the truth. These ethically grotesque efforts by prosecutors show that our political system has gone off the rails, like a hostile artificial intelligence [ [link removed] ]. We need fundamental and systemic change to realign the system with the values that matter most, like compassion and kindness.
But to create that change, we must be willing to fight back. I am heartbroken by the prospect of losing my friends. Zoe is surely devastated that she can no longer rescue the birds whom she loves. But the attention and motivation brought by these heavy-handed measures will simply increase the energy for change. This is unfolding even in my own life. I was not planning to do much work for the Sonoma County ballot initiative [ [link removed] ], for example. Now that they’ve taken Priya away, and targeted Zoe, however, you can count on me to redouble my efforts. 
And if we succeed, not only will factory farms in Sonoma County be banned. We will have turned the tide against the war on compassion. Perhaps, for the first time in the county’s history, the government will end the persecution of animal rights activists and go after corporations committing animal cruelty instead.
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