Zoe Rosenberg, Animal Cruelty, and the Crisis of Youth Trust

Today, Zoe Rosenberg may go to prison for the crime of rescue. Her trial earlier this year was a sham. Key evidence of animal cruelty that justified her rescue effort, including government reports demonstrating that animals were rotting to death, was excluded from her trial. (More on this below.) And now the consequences for her and her family may be devastating. Zoe suffers from type 1 diabetes and has experienced seizures related to her disease that have sent her to the ER repeatedly. Her mom worries that she will die in jail, given the shockingly bad health care at the Sonoma County jail.

But Zoe won’t be alone in suffering consequences. Zoe’s case is part of a broader pattern of government misconduct that has led to a crisis in youth trust. From the Epstein Files to the War in Gaza, young people have seen what our government is capable of, and it has left them horrified. Earlier this year, Harvard’s Institute of Politics measured that only 19% of young Americans trust the federal government to do the right thing most of the time, a record low. Indeed, levels of trust this low are virtually unheard of. The OECD average among Western countries, for example, is 39%.

What is perhaps even more disturbing, however, is the percentage of young Americans who never trust the federal government to do the right thing: 29%. Intense distrust of this sort is incompatible with the survival of our democracy. Young Americans can’t be expected to pay their taxes, invest in their future, or follow the law when nearly 1 in 3 believe their government is unrepentantly corrupt.

So what can be done to restore trust? Zoe’s case presents some possible answers. The first is transparency. One of the most disturbing aspects of Zoe’s trial is that the government made extraordinary efforts to keep the jury, and the public, in the dark. For example, the prosecution successfully moved the court to exclude documents such as this animal cruelty report from being shown to the jury. The report, which was created by the government’s own veterinarian after examining nine animals rescued from Perdue Farms, shows that the animals were covered in feces, unable to stand, and (in some cases) suffering from open wounds so deep that muscle and bone were exposed.

The government’s own veterinarian concluded that animals at Perdue were being tortured.

Suppressing this evidence helped the government win its case in the short run. But every person who hears what happened in Zoe’s case will lose trust in anything the government says, in the long run.

There is a broader trend here. For centuries, governments may have believed they could keep damaging information out of the public’s hands. This is why Trump, for example, thought he could cover up the Epstein Files — i.e., documents showing communications between convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and government elites. But in a world of smart phones and social media, that can’t be sustained. Mass public outcry forced even the most powerful man in the world to release the files. This is a lesson for the future. Transparency is the only way forward.

The second answer to the problem of distrust is responsiveness. One of the fundamental problems in Zoe’s case is that the government failed to respond to allegations of animal abuse. When we first presented evidence of widespread criminal activity by California factory farms in 2016, including clear violations of the most popular ballot initiative in the state’s history, the government didn’t even bother to acknowledge our complaint. It was not until we occupied an egg farm in 2018 with 500 people that they finally offered us a meeting. By then, it was too late. Trust had been broken.

Again, this is a broader pattern. From housing policy to foreign affairs, our government has demonstrated shocking unresponsiveness to the concerns of ordinary people, especially those who are younger. In California, housing has become so rare that a tiny 384-square-foot home goes for $2 million, pricing young people out of the market. Yet the government refuses to build enough homes. Internationally, the War in Gaza is shockingly unpopular, with only 9% of young Americans supporting Israel’s military action in a recent Gallup poll. Yet our government continues to fund Israel’s war crimes.

This can’t be sustained. Our government must become more responsive, or the crisis of distrust will only get worse.

But both transparency and responsiveness are linked to a deeper solution to distrust: compassion. The most fundamental need of every human, and perhaps every sentient being, is the need to be cared for by the people around them. Yet Zoe’s case shows how our government is focused on the opposite: promoting cruelty. At the very moment that the state was trying to imprison Zoe, it also spent over $1 billion of taxpayer money to roast animals alive, including millions of birds in Sonoma County. It was the cheapest way to dispose of animals who had been exposed to avian flu. Just shut down the vents and turn up the heat, as animals shriek, thrash, and desperately try to escape. The government has suppressed evidence of cruelty, and failed to respond to complaints, because it knows it’s part of the abuse.

But no system built on such cruelty can survive. Cruelty causes people to lose trust and fuels cycles of violence. And the more vulnerable the victim, the more we hate the cruelty. Seen in this light, compassion is not just important for the animals. It’s key to preserving the future of humanity. We will never have victims more vulnerable than the animals in slaughterhouses. We will never be more morally compromised, then, as when we treat these beings with cruelty. As the Vice President himself recently said, you can’t trust anyone who hurts an innocent animal.

This is why all of us, including our Vice President, must stand with Zoe. The restoration of trust, and the survival of our nation, are at stake. If we continue down the path of prosecuting people like Zoe, the cycle of youth distrust will spiral into revolution. In contrast, if the young people of this country see that even those who are most vulnerable are protected, they will see that they can trust our system, too. This will require a rethinking of our diets, and perhaps even our systems of governance and representation. But it’s not just the best way forward. It’s the only one.

Because, in the long run, only the compassionate survive.