Highlights: Wayne Hsiung, an attorney and leading figure in the animal rights movement, was convicted of two counts of misdemeanor trespass and one count of felony conspiracy to trespass last week, after six days of deliberation by a jury in Santa Rosa, California, about an hour north of San Francisco. The case emerged from Hsiung’s role in helping lead two mass protest actions in 2018 and 2019, in which activists removed 70 chickens and ducks from two Sonoma County factory farms: Sunrise Farms, a major egg supplier, and Reichardt Duck Farm. Activists took the animals to receive veterinary care and ultimately to live at animal sanctuaries.

The conviction represents a major turning point for the group Hsiung co-founded in 2013, Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), which has become an increasingly important part of the animal rights movement. DxE is known for its bold, uncompromising tactics, including a practice it calls “open rescue,” in which activists enter factory farms, slaughterhouses, and other places where animals are exploited for profit, film conditions there, and rescue animals who are especially sick or suffering.

Before Hsiung’s conviction last Thursday, DxE had had a surprising run of success with these trials. Hsiung and DxE member Paul Darwin Picklesimer were acquitted in a historic trial in October 2022 for rescuing two sick, suffering piglets from a massive Smithfield Foods factory farm in Utah. Then, in March of this year, activists Alicia Santurio and Alexandra Paul were acquitted in California for removing two chickens from a truck outside a slaughterhouse owned by Foster Farms, a major chicken producer. In both trials, defendants argued that they had taken animals who were in such ill health that they had no commercial value to their owners. In interviews after the Smithfield trial, jurors have said they were horrified by arguments made by prosecutors, comparing animals to inanimate property.

Until now, no DxE activist had been sentenced to jail time for an open rescue.

“The law is creating a double standard by which the corporations are not held accountable and a person who’s charged with trespass is,” Justin Marceau, a law professor at the University of Denver who runs a clinic representing animal activists and plans to work an appeal of Hsiung’s trial, told me. “A big feature of these trials has been the opportunity to expose the lawlessness of the industry and juxtapose that with the trivial infractions by people who are rescuing animals … When you aren’t able to make that contrast for the jury, it’s a lot harder to win.”

“I remember holding this duck, and her ribcage was showing, and she had this huge, gaping hole in her body and just was sitting there with her guts spilling onto my lap, and they stayed there as I was taken to jail," [one member reported].