Wegmans crowds up to nine hens into tiny, barren cages at its company-run egg facility, allowing each hen less than half a square foot of space. On May 16 Adam Durand, president of the Rochester, NY-based group Compassionate Consumers, was sentenced to six months in jail for trespassing on a Wegmans’ egg farm when he and others filmed chickens in battery cages in 2004. The “open rescue” resulted in a film, “Wegmans Cruelty,” showed hens covered in flies, trapped in manure pits and hens with their necks stuck in cages.
Open rescues are acceptable acts when they provide direct care to animals in need, grounded in nonviolence and document how the law fails to protect animals from institutionalized cruelty. (For more on open rescues, see my essay, “A Personal Overview of Direct Action in the United Kingdom and the United States,” in Terrorists or Freedom Fights?
Durand and his colleagues deserve our applause for showing the truth of chickens in battery cages.
Kim Stallwood is an independent scholar and author on animal rights. His forthcoming book, Animal Dharma, explores what it means to care deeply about animals. Starting in 1976, he has held leadership positions with some of the world’s foremost organisations in the UK and US, including CIWF, BUAV, PETA, The Animals’ Agenda, Animals and Society Institute and Minding Animals International. A vegetarian since 1974 when as a student he worked in a chicken slaughterhouse. A vegan since 1976. His evil twin is the Grumpy Vegan.
New Book!
Kim Stallwood's forthcoming book explores what it means to care deeply about animals and discovers how we can live peacefully with ourselves and others by proposing four key values: truth, compassion, nonviolence and interbeing.
