They Just Locked Her Up for Rescuing Animals. They Have No Idea What They’ve Started.

Zoe, with one of the many animals she has rescued from slaughter.

Today, a 23-year-old UC Berkeley student, Zoe Rosenberg, will be imprisoned for the “crime” of carrying an animal from slaughter to sanctuary. But the real target of her prosecution is not Zoe. It’s you. The industry hopes that Zoe’s incarceration will scare you from taking action to rescue animals too.

And in the past, that strategy has worked out. Back in the mid 2000s, a wave of prosecutions crushed the grassroots animal rights movement. Fueled by a rising tide of direct action, the movement was becoming a political force, with open rescues and other bold actions making national headlines. (Read Paul Shapiro’s insightful account on this period.) But multiple prosecutions — against Adam Durand, Sarahjane Blum, and, most prominently, the SHAC7 — brought this momentum to a halt. My friends Lauren Gazzola and Josh Schwartz served years in prison as a result.

In 2013, I and a number of other Bay Area animal advocates launched a network, Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), with the aim of rebuilding the grassroots. Our informal call to action was “Find your voice. Find some friends. And fight like hell.” And people across the globe answered the call, with activists as far as South Korea harnessing the power of nonviolence to take the fight for animal rights directly to the places of abuse.

Like the surge in the mid 2000s, this new wave of direct action, with DxE and a large number of other grassroots groups, was generating real power. We shut down massive animal-abusing corporations, passed groundbreaking laws such as the California fur ban, and rescued hundreds of animals from abuse. And, once again, prosecutors are trying to crush the movement. From Canada to Germany to the United States, legal repression is rising to a fever pitch. The incarceration of Zoe Rosenberg is merely the latest effort. She’ll be forced into jail today in Sonoma County for the “crime” of rescuing four hens from slaughter.

Beginning in 2015, waves of open rescue spread across the globe, including at this Central California egg farm.

And the animal rights movement could not be in a better place. These words might surprise you, given the history I’ve explained above. But there are fundamental differences between what’s happening today and what came before.

The first is that the movement has learned to use repression to seize attention. Back in the 2000s, it was virtually impossible to break the establishment narrative. Large media outlets like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal were the only way to bring mass attention to a cause. And those platforms were controlled by corporate power. The Wall Street Journal’s front page story attacking members of a group called Hugs for Puppies as “home-grown terrorists” was representative of the media on animal rights activists from that era. (Fun fact: Hugs for Puppies later became The Humane League, one of the most prominent animal advocacy organizations to this day.)

The establishment stranglehold on attention, however, has ended. With the rise of social media, and other low-cost ways to reach billions across the globe, stories can become ascendant even when corporate gatekeepers try to stop them. Zoe’s case, for example, has generated an astonishing 200 million video views on social media, more than any animal rights story in years. That grassroots attention has forced the establishment media to respond, with nearly a dozen stories in the top outlets in the nation, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Washington Post. The attentional lesson of Zoe’s case is simple: do more of this!

But it is not just the quantity but the quality of the attention: increasingly, the world is turning against violence. This might be a curious statement to make in light of the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and the increasing divisions across the globe. But it is indisputably true. The turn against violence can be measured in body counts. The War in Iraq killed 600,000, about 10x as many as the War in Gaza over a similar time period. It can also be measured in how mass violence is portrayed. The establishment media’s fawning coverage of the Iraq War, most notably with the New York Times’ collusion with the US government to spread false information about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, has been replaced by hard-hitting investigations by that same newspaper accusing the government of war crimes. Indeed, the single most damaging story about the US government, over the last few weeks, has been a story about the Trump administration’s apparent killing of drug smugglers in the open seas. Even when the public dislikes those you’re killing, it’s hard to defend violence.

You can see this shift in the stories that are told about animal rights. For example, the San Francisco Chronicle, which has published smears about animal rights activists for many decades, wrote a feature story that compared Zoe to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. One side of this debate has literal killers, and the other side has rescuers. No one in the world, not even corrupt politicians or newspaper tycoons, wants to be on the side of the killers in that debate.

But there is something even more important that has changed: the movement’s resilience and unity in the face of repression. The political scientist Hahrie Han has pointed out that no movement can survive, much less thrive, unless it finds effective responses to backlash. Indeed, the most transformative movements, like the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, turn backlash into an engine for change. Unity in the face of repression is key to that goal. The March on Washington in 1963 was only possible because all the major civil rights organizations, which had been viciously fighting with one another for years, came together behind a unified message in the face of efforts to crush them. The rest, of course, is history: by 1964, groundbreaking federal legislation on civil rights had been achieved.

Back in the 2000s, the animal rights movement had neither resilience nor unity of this sort. Tone-deaf protests where arson was threatened were used to paint the activists as terrorists; the movement had not strategically planned its messaging and campaigns with a focus on having to eventually defend themselves in court. Mobilization fell off the cliff, with protests shrinking from hundreds to a dozen or fewer. Worse yet, the movement split under the pressure. Prominent NGOs such as the Humane Society condemned grassroots activists as extremists. This worsened the climate of distrust between the grassroots and NGOs and largely broke the movement for a decade.

Prominent NGOs turned against grassroots activists in the mid 2000s.

How different things are today. Zoe and her fellow activists engineered their cases from Day 1 — with legal opinions, mobilization strategies, and a culture of nonviolence — to harness the energy of repression to create change. And it shows. When I talk to grassroots activists today, they’re not scared. They’re inspired. (The main bottleneck to the next and even bigger surge is the lack of institutional scaffolding.) And many of the leading figures in the NGO sector, such as Lewis Bollard and Mercy for Animals, have, far from denouncing Zoe, offered statements of support. Heck, even celebrities such as Joaquin Phoenix and Paris Hilton have jumped in on the Free Zoe campaign! Far from being crushed, the movement is unified and ready for the next wave.

There will, for sure, be headwinds to come. Some of these will be personal and quite severe. I have texted with Zoe’s mom today about her fears. There is concern that Zoe, who has faced diabetic seizures and hospitalization in the last few months, could die if she is denied medical care, as is often the case in US jails.

But that does not change the overall calculus. Even in the face of the repression — or perhaps because of it — the movement is in a better place than ever before.

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What else is going on?

• The first round of the Animal Rising (AR) beagle trials is going to the jury in the next few days — and one of the charges has already been dismissed. This is an extremely important case to watch, with potentially dramatic consequences (10 years in prison) for the defendants. Follow the case and offer AR your support.

• The European Union is about to make key decisions regarding some of the worst atrocities of factory farming — and your voice (even if you are not an EU resident) could make a difference. Anima International, one of the most effective animal advocacy groups, is leading the charge in this campaign, and I trust them when they say every voice counts. Take 15 minutes and participate.

• It’s official: I’m moving to London. I’ll have more to say about this soon. But New York, I’ll miss you (and I’ll be back regularly). But if you are in England, hit me up. I’ll see much more of you, and very soon.