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
PRESS
September 17, 2025
The Daily Californian
“Each and every one of these chickens was an individual,” Rosenberg said at her press conference. “With a personality, thoughts and feelings. Each and every one of them had been deprived of just about everything.”
PRESS
September 17, 2025
The Daily Californian
BLOG
September 15, 2025
Updates and summaries from Week 1 of the Perdue Rescue Trial.
BLOG
September 15, 2025
Updates and summaries from Week 1 of the Perdue Rescue Trial.
PRESS RELEASE
September 15, 2025
Zoe Rosenberg, 23, is charged with felony conspiracy and 3 misdemeanors for rescuing chickens from Perdue’s Petaluma Poultry slaughterhouse
PRESS
September 15, 2025
KQED
Direct Action Everywhere is known for “open rescues,” in which activists enter farms where they believe animals are being abused and remove them. The group said it aims to expand laws that allow rescuing dogs from hot cars to include removing animals from farms where abuse is suspected.
PRESS
September 15, 2025
KQED
BLOG
September 12, 2025
The Perdue Rescue Trial begins on Monday, September 15th at the Sonoma County Superior Court in Santa Rosa, California.
BLOG
September 12, 2025
The Perdue Rescue Trial begins on Monday, September 15th at the Sonoma County Superior Court in Santa Rosa, California.
PRESS
September 9, 2025
Common Dreams
My trial is expected to last several weeks, though there is no doubt that I did what prosecutors say. My alleged crime? Taking less than $25 worth of chicken. This wouldn’t normally lead to felony charges or a government-monitored GPS tracking device. But, you see, the four chickens I took were alive.
PRESS
September 9, 2025
Common Dreams
PRESS
September 2, 2025
Capital Daily
The Empress Hotel—and the entire Fairmont chain—is going fur-free, much to the satisfaction of a local animal rights group that has been calling for the policy changes... for the past three years, fellow members of the Victoria chapter of Direct Action Everywhere staged monthly protests by the Empress and wrote chalk messages on the sidewalk in front of the hotel.
PRESS
September 2, 2025
Capital Daily
PRESS
September 2, 2025
The New York Times
Ms. Rosenberg, 23, says that she found chickens at Petaluma Poultry covered in scratches and bruises, including some with high fevers and serious infections. There was also evidence, she said, that birds were being scalded alive, instead of killed before broiling, because the slaughter lines were moving too quickly.
PRESS
September 2, 2025
The New York Times
PRESS
September 1, 2025
The Daily Californian
Cardboard ocean waves, sailor hats and a 16-foot sailboat set the scene Saturday outside of the Trader Joe’s on University Avenue. Animal welfare activists aboard the boat parked outside the store warned customers passing by to “steer away” from Perdue’s Petaluma Poultry, a company the activists allege engages in animal cruelty.
PRESS
September 1, 2025
The Daily Californian
TOP PRESS
May 1, 2025
San Francisco Chronicle
Just four months after she graduates on May 17 with a bachelor’s degree in social movement strategy, the straight-A student will stand trial in a Sonoma County courtroom for her June 2023 incursion into Petaluma Poultry, a processing facility owned by agribusiness giant Perdue Farms. If convicted for taking four chickens Perdue valued at around $24, she faces up to 5½ years in prison.
TOP PRESS
October 10, 2024
Vox
In principle, there’s a lot of sense in capping the size of factory farms. Measure J’s proponents are betting that progressive Sonoma County, better known for its tasting rooms than its slaughterhouses, can push California — and the nation — in that direction.
TOP PRESS
October 9, 2024
The Intercept
Videos shared with The Intercept prior to the report’s public release show, among other scenes, lambs with their throats slit hanging upside down and thrashing on the slaughter line; one animal with an internal organ that has been torn inside-out and left dangling behind it as it heads to slaughter; injured lambs being led to slaughter; workers laughing, spanking animals, and engaging in simulated sex acts with nearby machinery as lambs are having their throats slit; and the apparent use of so-called Judas sheep — adult sheep kept alive at the facility and used to lead the young sheep to slaughter.
TOP PRESS
August 30, 2024
San Francisco Chronicle
In dimly lit indoor aisles at Weber Family Farms in Petaluma, hundreds of thousands of white chickens live out their 90 weeks of life. They fly from perch to perch. They dust bathe in the bedding. They nip at water dispensers. They lay egg after egg. And they never leave. These barns are at the heart of a bitter fight that Mike Weber and Samantha Faye are waging for the future of local farming.
TOP PRESS
April 4, 2024
Los Angeles Times
Lewis Bernier, an animal rights activist supporting the initiative, said he has visited several factory farms across the country, documenting inhumane treatment, and one farm in Sonoma County stands out as having “the worst and most systemic animal cruelty that I’ve ever seen.”
TOP PRESS
March 15, 2024
The New Yorker
Instead of planning actions, many activists now spend their time litigating microaggressions and small disputes within their ranks... As a response, [DxE co-founder Wayne] Hsiung has tried to promote a maxim of "braver spaces, not safer spaces," which encourages the animal rights community to put aside their individual concerns, if possible, and do things like risk felony jail time for the cause.
TOP PRESS
January 30, 2024
The Guardian
If successful in Berkeley, a liberal San Francisco Bay Area town that’s often been at the forefront of US environmental policy, the method can be replicated elsewhere, [activists] say. “We can pave the path to abolishing factory farming,” said Cassie King, an organizer with Direct Action Everywhere, one of the groups that pushed for the measure.
TOP PRESS
November 9, 2023
Vox
Hsiung’s trial and conviction show the extraordinary difficulty of trying to discuss what happens to animals on factory farms in a legal system that only sees them as property. At both factory farms in this case, DxE had documented gruesome conditions prior to their open rescue actions and had submitted animal cruelty complaints to authorities (though no action was taken by legal officials, King said). Yet it was the activists, not the farm owners, who were criminally charged and had to explain themselves to a jury.
TOP PRESS
November 8, 2023
Wired
For the first time, guerrilla animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere reveals a guide to its investigative tactics and toolkit, from spy cams to night vision and drones. Bernier says that DxE decided to publicly release its guide, even in the wake of Hsiung’s conviction, to help activists who are already committed to carrying out covert investigations do their work more safely and effectively.
BLOG
March 29, 2020
BLOG
March 24, 2020
BLOG
March 24, 2020
BLOG
August 7, 2019
BLOG
July 5, 2019
PRESS RELEASE
January 21, 2023
Saturday’s Bay Area demonstration was a nonviolent disruption of Sprouts Farmers Market, recreating DxE’s first-ever action but with a far larger assemblage than the seven activists who participated in 2013. As at the original action, activists delivered a slam poem describing how farm animals live and die while standing in the store’s “meat” section.
PRESS RELEASE
January 18, 2023
Investigator Raven Deerbrook recorded over 16 hours of footage from multiple angles, which shows pigs screaming, gasping, thrashing violently and trying to escape as they descend into the pit of CO2 gas. Former federal prosecutor Bonnie Klapper reviewed the video and determined that use of these devices on pigs violates federal law.
PRESS RELEASE
January 7, 2023
Activists installed images representing each horse who died in 2022 along the fence at I-80 and hung a 100-foot-long “Shut Down Golden Gate Fields” banner from the pedestrian bridge above I-80.
PRESS RELEASE
December 3, 2022
“Humans can consent to run and risk injury. The horses do not, and when they get injured and can’t run anymore, they are killed."
PRESS RELEASE
November 17, 2022
The investigation at Foster Farms found an E. coli-infected turkey chick, buckets of dead chicks, and a litter beetle infestation. Said former U.S. prosecutor Bonnie Klapper, "[The arrest] is an absurd action on the part of the Berkeley police and one which serves only to protect corporations engaged in animal cruelty from being held accountable by consumers.”
PRESS RELEASE
November 12, 2022
The two factory farm investigators who were found “not guilty” last month joined the protest.
PRESS RELEASE
November 10, 2022
Rescued turkey chick had an infection called omphalitis caused by E. coli.
PRESS RELEASE
October 9, 2022
Activists take on a multibillion-dollar industry -- and win.
PRESS RELEASE
October 3, 2022
Two men face 10+ years in prison in a case decried by legal experts as unconstitutional retaliation for exposing abusive conditions
