Breaking news and publications from Direct Action Everywhere.
Media inquiry? Please email press@dxe.io.
PRESS
June 3, 2025
Wired Magazine
Hundreds of emails and internal documents reviewed by WIRED reveal top lobbyists and representatives of America’s agricultural industry led a persistent and often covert campaign to surveil, discredit, and suppress animal rights organizations for nearly a decade, while relying on corporate spies to infiltrate meetings and functionally serve as an informant for the FBI.
PRESS
June 3, 2025
Wired Magazine
BLOG
July 6, 2025
From daring rescues and major investigations to powerful protests, media coverage, and critical courtroom battles, we’ve been pushing the fight for animal liberation forward. Here’s a look at what we made happen this past quarter.
PRESS
July 5, 2025
Pasadena Now
The protest was part of a broader DxE campaign targeting Trader Joe’s ties to Perdue’s Petaluma Poultry, which the group accuses of operating factory farms with systemic abuse... Kandada called the felony charge “absurd,” adding, “The refrigerator is perfectly fine, my hand is fine, but the chickens are not.”
PRESS
July 5, 2025
Pasadena Now
PRESS RELEASE
July 3, 2025
Ani Kandada superglued down inside Trader Joe's original store in Pasadena asking the retailer to stop selling chickens from Perdue's Petaluma Poultry, just hours after another animal rights activist was arrested for supergluing her hand inside Trader Joe's Headquarters in Monrovia, CA
PRESS RELEASE
July 3, 2025
PRESS RELEASE
July 3, 2025
Carla Cabral remained superglued to the desk from approximately 10AM to approximately 11AM, while she demanded a meeting with company executives about documented animal cruelty at Trader Joe's chicken supplier, Petaluma Poultry, which is a subsidiary of national agribusiness giant Perdue Foods.
PRESS RELEASE
July 3, 2025
PRESS RELEASE
June 10, 2025
Animal rights activists with DxE disrupted multiple events at the Summer Board Meeting of the California Poultry Federation, a trade association representing commercial chicken and turkey producers across the state. Among CPF's twenty board members are three executives from Petaluma Poultry, the California subsidiary of national poultry giant Perdue Foods, where DxE investigators have documented widespread violations of animal cruelty laws since 2018.
PRESS RELEASE
June 10, 2025
PRESS
June 8, 2025
Davis Vanguard
Judge Gnoss’s ruling marks a significant moment in the case, reaffirming the role of free speech in legal proceedings involving public interest issues. As the trial approaches, Rosenberg’s prosecution continues to serve as a flashpoint for debates about animal rights, food safety, and the criminalization of activism.
PRESS
June 8, 2025
Davis Vanguard
PRESS RELEASE
June 4, 2025
Describing the requested gag order as “overbroad and vague by any constitutional standard,” Judge Gnoss noted that Ms. Rosenberg’s critics, too, had participated in public discussion about her case, pointing by way of example to a statement by Bill Mattos, President of the California Poultry Federation, describing Ms. Rosenberg’s rescue of four chickens as a “terrorist act.”
PRESS
June 2, 2025
The Intercept
“Animal rights and environmental groups have committed more acts of terrorism than Al Qaeda,” warned an FBI agent who met with Big Ag groups.
PRESS
June 2, 2025
The Intercept
PRESS
May 27, 2025
Fox 26 Fresno
Five activists a part of Direct Action Everywhere, were arrested for taking two sick baby goats from Meyenberg's Vera Goat Dairy in Stratford, police say. The members of the animal rights group rescued two sick baby goats from Vera Goat Dairy, a large operation supplying Meyenberg Dairy, the nation's leading goat milk producer. The goats showed signs of being sick with infections that affect breathing and sight.
PRESS
May 27, 2025
Fox 26 Fresno
TOP PRESS
November 4, 2023
The Intercept
Hsiung’s defense was in many ways stymied from the jump. The judge barred almost all photo and video evidence of animal cruelty from the trial, as has been the case in a number of previous DxE trials. As I’ve previously noted, the decision to disallow such evidence is usually made to benefit a defendant — not showing gruesome images of a murder victim, for example. Such logic has been flipped in DxE cases, including Hsiung’s most recent, to the benefit of powerful agribusiness.
TOP PRESS
August 7, 2023
National Geographic
These crusaders are part of the so-called “open rescue” movement, in which animal rights activists brazenly take animals from factory farm operations. Direct Action Everywhere—better known as DxE—is at the forefront of this movement in the United States...
TOP PRESS
June 13, 2023
The Intercept
In conjunction with the release of an undercover investigation on the factory farm, the group DxE mounted an “open rescue” of birds from a slaughterhouse.
TOP PRESS
March 30, 2023
Salt Lake Tribune
If government agencies were taking these [investigative] reports seriously and protecting animals from cruelty, there would be no need for bills like this. But certain Utah legislators have decided that the real problem with sick, suffering animals is the potential for negative publicity for the industry and so it is the industry, not the animals, that need protection.
TOP PRESS
March 21, 2023
Vox
DxE’s theory — that when you show a jury of ordinary citizens what happens to animals in the meat industry, they’ll agree that they deserve rescue — turned out to be true, challenging the idea that the animal rights agenda is radical or unpopular.
TOP PRESS
March 20, 2023
LA Times
“This is a victory for [the chickens] Ethan, Jax, and all other living beings subjected to abuse by corporations like Foster Farms,” Santurio said in a news release from Direct Action Everywhere. “I have so much love for the chickens in my family and I want all animals to experience that safety and respect.”
TOP PRESS
March 9, 2023
LA Times
“We published this video within an hour with both my name and Alicia Santurio’s name attached to it because we believe what we’re doing is legal and morally right,” Paul said in an interview with The Times.
TOP PRESS
February 14, 2023
New York Times
In any context other than factory farming, treating animals the way we see chickens treated in the Foster Farms slaughterhouse videos would be considered blatant cruelty. Many would also consider it cruel to stand by while someone else handled animals this way. “If there’s someone in my neighborhood watching me boil birds alive, we’d say this is monstrous behavior,” Wayne Hsiung, a founder of DxE, told me.
TOP PRESS
February 9, 2023
San Francisco Chronicle
The message the pigs conveyed in the gas chamber footage is clear: They are in extreme pain, and they want to live. You don’t need the Agriculture Department to tell you that. You can see and hear it for yourself.
BLOG
July 19, 2022
DxE co-founder Wayne Hsiung recently shared the story of a very sick pig who was rescued from Farmer John. This is an excerpt from his Substack blog, The Simple Heart.
BLOG
July 5, 2022
Our signs read “Expose Smithfield’s Deathstar” referring to Smithfield’s Circle Four Farms in Milford, Utah, the largest pig farm in the country. While many criticized the tackiness and absurdity of the action, it garnered much needed media attention.
BLOG
July 2, 2022
Here's what this could mean.
BLOG
June 25, 2022
The protest occurred after yet another horse was killed at the horse racing track that spans Berkeley and Albany.
BLOG
June 25, 2022
Senator Booker spoke about the need for nonviolent direct action and for "not being spectators in democracy!"
BLOG
June 14, 2022
As happy as I am to see Smithfield leave California, they should not be allowed to simply cut and run. They must adequately compensate their workers, provide appropriate care for their pigs, and clean up the damage done to the surrounding community and to the L.A. river.
BLOG
May 20, 2022
Over the last few decades, the Central Valley of California has become plagued by the crisis of dirty drinking water contaminated with nitrates. Latino communities have been disproportionately affected. In the heart of the valley lies Tulare County, a majority Latino district and the largest dairy producing county in the nation.
BLOG
May 5, 2022
This is a response to a recent study by Faunalytics regarding the impacts of protest on diet change.
BLOG
April 14, 2022
High profile sporting events pose a significant opportunity to get eyeballs on a topic– if one is bold enough to risk criminal charges and bodily harm. And it's a tactic that has been used throughout history.
PRESS RELEASE
May 14, 2021
Group currently being sued by billionaire track owners calls for end to horse racing, citing animal cruelty
PRESS RELEASE
May 9, 2021
University administrators falsely claim agribusiness giant isn’t engaged in factory farming, according to students
PRESS RELEASE
April 9, 2021
Citing animal cruelty exposés, activists demand the university stop supplying from factory farms
PRESS RELEASE
April 5, 2021
Workers seen dragging newborn calves by their ears
PRESS RELEASE
March 24, 2021
Activists are calling for Newsom to enact a statewide moratorium on factory farms and slaughterhouses
PRESS RELEASE
March 5, 2021
Following exposé with workers cutting the throats of fully-conscious cows, demonstrators demand moratorium banning new factory farms and slaughterhouses
PRESS RELEASE
March 3, 2021
4 Bay Area residents locked down at Berkeley’s Golden Gate Fields horse racing facility, using heavily-weighted PVC pipes in a direct action maneuver called a “sleeping dragon.”
PRESS RELEASE
March 2, 2021
Graphic hidden-camera footage DxE investigators obtained inside Harris Beef in Selma, CA reveals cows systematically restrained and killed with a slice to the throat while fully conscious.
PRESS RELEASE
February 14, 2021
The activists said they are drawing attention to Smithfield's heartless attitude
