Rescue at Oakland Slaughterhouse Shows New, Potent Tactics of Growing Animal Rights Movement

Glenn Greenwald, Leighton Akio Woodhouse

An Oakland slaughterhouse, Saba Live Poultry, was occupied last weekend by more than 200 people, protesting the atrocious conditions in which animals are kept before being slaughtered. Oakland police arrested 23 people and charged them with trespassing, for entering the facility, filming abuses, and removing at least three animals for rescue. Activists described seeing intense suffering, abuse, and cruelty. Video images — from the short film above produced by The Intercept — confirm their accounts. Live bunnies were standing atop the rotting carcasses of other rabbits. Chickens were stuffed into cages so tiny that they were prevented from breathing. Still-living quails and chicks had been thrown into trash cans along with dead ones. And many animals, who had not been given food or water for days, were cannibalizing one another in cages in a desperate, instinctive attempt to survive. One of the activists, Priya Sawhney of Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE, said that walking onto the kill floor was “one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen in my life. We saw bodies of animals on the floor, bloodied heads of chicken, animal feet, blood everywhere.” She added, “In one of the trash cans I looked in, there were dead quail along with quails still alive, one of which I picked up to rescue.” Masterson is a Lebanese-American who was raised in the Muslim faith. In an interview with The Intercept, he explained why the principles and values instilled in him by that faith, as well as his experiences as an Arab-American, led him to his devotion to animal rights: “A core tenet of Islam is to treat others compassionately. People generally have compassion toward animals, but our actions aren’t consistent with that.” Worse, Masterson said, is this fundamental notion at the heart of animal abuse that “humans are superior to animals and therefore have the right to impose gratuitous suffering. What’s the basis for this claimed ‘right’?” All of the activists who spoke to The Intercept agreed that support for animal rights is growing rapidly around the U.S. “I think it will be one of the big causes of my generation,” the 23-year-old Masterson said. Not only are protests far larger than even five years ago, but so is online interest in animal abuse, veganism, and consumer demands against the worst corporate abusers. Animal rights is clearly on the brink of becoming a fully mainstream cause. The latest protest, aside from generating more visibility, seems likely to produce concrete and immediate reforms. Rather than responding with anger and recrimination, Saba’s owner agreed to sit down for a vegan lunch with one of DxE’s lead organizers, Wayne Hsiung (pictured below during his arrest last weekend), to discuss needed reforms...more