Why Zoe Rosenberg Faces Prison for Saving Lives

When Zoe Rosenberg stepped onto a Petaluma slaughterhouse truck in June 2023 and removed four sick, dying chickens, she wasn’t stealing. She was rescuing. But in the upside-down world of animal agriculture, rescuing the oppressed is a crime, while those inflicting the violence go unchallenged.

For this act of compassion, Rosenberg faces up to five years behind bars.

The chickens, branded by the industry as “free-range” and by the legal system as “property”, were bruised, battered, and infected with parasites. Left there, they would have been killed for profit. Rosenberg did what any decent person would do if they saw a neglected dog on the side of the road: she intervened.

But unlike dogs, chickens have no meaningful legal protections. In fact, in the U.S., they’re not even covered under the pathetically limited Humane Slaughter Act. Factory farms can, and do, subject them to systemic neglect and suffering, all while hiding behind happy-sounding labels and marketing lies.

Rosenberg, a Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) activist, presented evidence of cruelty to the Petaluma Police. She documented animals too weak to stand, left to die slowly on filthy floors, and animals being boiled alive in slaughterhouses. She handed that evidence over, again and again, and got the same response activists everywhere have come to expect: nothing.

Not only did the police ignore the abuse, they turned their attention to Rosenberg, eventually arresting her on multiple charges, including felony conspiracy.

The message is clear: the crime isn’t animal cruelty, it’s exposing it.

Petaluma Police didn’t even bother to investigate Rosenberg’s allegations. They didn’t visit the farm. They didn’t review the footage. They didn’t seize the dead and dying animals. They served Rosenberg an arrest warrant instead.

Why? Follow the money. Petaluma has built its economy on chickens. It was once the self-declared “egg basket of the world.” Today, it’s still home to millions of birds trapped inside industrial farms that the local police happily celebrate in community festivals. There’s no clearer example of the fox guarding the henhouse.

Open rescue, removing suffering animals from exploitation and refusing to hide while doing so, has been a staple of the animal rights movement since the 1980s. But it terrifies the industry because it cuts through the PR. It shows the public what’s really happening behind closed doors.

The industry calls it theft. Activists call it rescue. The public, when shown the footage, tends to agree with the rescuers.

Even courts sometimes do. In recent years, DxE activists have been acquitted after rescuing piglets from Smithfield and chickens from Foster Farms. The legal system might be rigged, but cracks are forming.

Still, prosecutors will throw everything they can at activists like Rosenberg, because they need to make an example out of those who refuse to look the other way. They need to scare people into thinking that rescuing a chicken is a bigger crime than boiling one alive.

Petaluma Poultry, owned by Perdue, sells itself as a paragon of “humane” farming. Their website boasts of chickens “free to be chickens” in “low-stress environments.”

But undercover footage tells a different story: birds collapsed on filthy floors, unable to reach food or water. Chickens butchered alive. Chickens boiled alive. Over a thousand birds in one day discarded as unfit for human consumption due to suspected blood poisoning.

This isn’t a few bad apples. This is the system working exactly as designed.

Petaluma Poultry is not the exception. It’s the rule. The entire chicken industry runs on lies, breeding animals so unnaturally large they can barely stand, let alone survive in the conditions they’re forced into.

Labels like “free-range” are nothing more than corporate greenwashing, slapped on products to soothe consumer guilt while the animals rot in misery.

Rosenberg’s actions fall under the legal principle of necessity, breaking a law to prevent a greater harm. It’s the same argument that’s been used to justify breaking into a car to save a dog left to bake in the sun.

But the court system, like the police, is built to protect property, not victims. In this case, the victims are chickens, and the property belongs to a billion-dollar industry.

Prosecutors know this. They know the moment they acknowledge Rosenberg’s argument in court, they open the door to hundreds, if not thousands, of similar cases. They don’t want that precedent. They want Rosenberg silenced.

While Rosenberg waits for her trial, the chickens she saved are thriving at a sanctuary. Meanwhile, the slaughterhouse that left them to suffer continues business as usual. Not one worker has been arrested for torture. Not one executive faces charges for systemic neglect.

In this system, rescuing victims is criminal. Abusing them is business.

That’s the world Rosenberg, and activists like her, are fighting to change. A world where chickens aren’t property. A world where the crime is the abuse, not the rescue.

And if the price of fighting for that world is jail time? Rosenberg has made her choice clear.

“A few years of my freedom,” she says, “is worth less than even one animal’s life.”

Would you risk your freedom to do what’s right? Because Rosenberg already has.