Member Spotlight: Direct Action Everywhere (DxE)
Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) has been a Protect the Protest coalition member since 2021. Lead Organizer Almira Tanner spoke with PtP about DxE’s work to advocate for the liberation of non-human animals and why the organization is a part of this coalition.
Tell us about yourself and about Direct Action Everywhere (DxE).
Transcript:
My name is Almira Tanner and I am the lead organizer at Direct Action Everywhere, which is similar to an executive director. Direct Action Everywhere's mission is to achieve revolutionary social and political change for animals in one generation. What we mean by that is really transforming the way that non-human animals are viewed in our society, and then also treated in the various institutions that we have – the legal system, government, the media, policy, education, etc. We're less focused on individual transformation or getting people to change their consumer habits.
We have a very ambitious plan. Our North Star is an animal bill of rights that would grant other animals basic protections. We call it Rose's law after an individual chicken that was rescued from a factory farm in California.
One of the things that we do as an organization is try to treat the animal liberation movement as the social justice movement that it is; applying lessons from past social movements to the animal rights movement. Obviously every movement is unique and there are a lot of things that are unique about the animal rights movement, but fundamentally it is about ending the oppression of a group of individuals and the powerful doing whatever they want to people who have less power.
What that looks like in practice is a lot of community organizing, a lot of community building, but then also direct action – it's in our name. So a lot of protests, disruptive stuff. But what is probably most unique about our organization is that we do investigations and open rescues at factory farms and slaughterhouses.
Open rescue is a tactic in which you rescue animals from situations of exploitation or distress, and you do so in a way that doesn't hide your identity or hide your face. People may be familiar with the Animal Liberation Front or other organizations like that who have rescued thousands and thousands of animals in a clandestine way, without saying who they are. There's benefits to that for sure, but we feel like the power of open rescue is in the storytelling and in the dramatization of an action like that, and also in the moral message that we feel like what we're doing is both morally and legally the right thing to do. With open rescue we then have the opportunity to gain a lot of public support, and also find ourselves entangled in the legal system – sometimes quite intentionally – in order to use that as an avenue to advance our mission.
Can you tell us about the founding of DxE?
Transcript:
In the mid 2000s when the Green Scare was happening, I don't know if people are familiar with the SHAC 7 case, but it was very scary – multi-year prison sentences for activists in the US. They were convicted under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. It was really horrible and I think that scared a lot of people from doing anything. There was this fear that, if I leaflet, I'm going to go to prison and be called a terrorist. So direct action stopped in the US for animals – I mean, not completely, but it was really taking off and then the repression worked.
So the idea behind the founding of DxE was that we have to bring these tactics back, while taking some of the lessons from the SHAC campaign. So that was the impetus. When people started, they always knew that they wanted to use open rescue as a tactic, but it is a very risky thing to do, and so building up a community and getting to know people was a priority because if you're going to possibly be in a felony trial with someone, you probably want to trust them really a lot!
What is it like to do animal liberation work in coalition or movement spaces where that’s not a priority for many organizations?
Transcript:
Often in the animal rights movement we say we're the orphan of the left, so constantly left out or people dismiss it as not that important or not a high priority, or assume it’s a veganism thing where we just want people to eat quinoa.
Obviously there's a huge intersection between the animal liberation movement and what people are eating. But fundamentally, it is about a huge group of individuals who are sentient and conscious – not up for debate, according to scientists – who are suffering some of the most unimaginable horrors. And the scale of the suffering is something that we can't comprehend. Even just one little slaughterhouse 45 minutes from here will kill one million chickens a month. And that's a pretty small operation. So just the sheer amount of suffering that's happening to animals is so large that I just don't think the numbers even mean anything to people anymore.
It is challenging because the animals are often not able to speak for themselves. I don't love it when people say they're voiceless or they can't speak for themselves. I think they can advocate for themselves to an extent, but they just have zero political power and they're not in any position where they are heard.
So we are an almost completely ally driven movement and that poses a lot of challenges too. I'm not the person who's directly suffering the most from this injustice. That adds these complicating factors for advocating for animals. There are so many issues that are worth fighting for and without taking away from any other movements, we have to show people in other movements how these things are related. And the fundamental root cause of this is very similar, which is oppression of people based on relatively arbitrary distinctions that don't impact their ability to suffer or feel pain or want to live a good life.
What would you say to somebody who wants to get more involved in fighting for animal rights, but doesn’t have the capacity or is not comfortable engaging in direct action?
Transcript:
One thing that people could do is, whenever we're talking about broader issues, you can include animals. The signs that people have on their front lawn – I'm like, one day animals will be on that! And I say I should say non-human animals because we're all animals.
I don't think that the way we’re going to achieve change is by getting each person to go vegan. That's just not realistic until we have systemic changes that allow that to happen on a broad scale. And it's too slow right now. But I also don't want that to come across as, eating animals is totally great! People can have plant-based policies without requiring people to be vegan to be at an event. It can just be that we don't eat animals in this space in the same way that we have our pronouns on our name tags, and we acknowledge the land that we're standing on. It's these practices that we have to show solidarity with other animals and respect for other individuals and causes without people in their personal lives having to necessarily make any changes.
And don't call cops pigs, that's another one. Language is important! We always joke about the cops and the pigs – that is such an insult to pigs. They're really cool.
How does your work overlap with the fight to stop Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs)?
Transcript:
Our focus is on a lot of systemic change – so targeting corporations, legislators – rather than individual consumer change. We then find ourselves on the enemy list of a lot of powerful corporations. Sometimes it's intentional that we get entangled in the legal system – like with open rescue or sometimes we do civil disobedience actions. Other times it's just because we're targeting powerful corporations who can use all their money and their power to hire really expensive attorneys and sue people.
We’ve had several lawsuits that are at least somewhat related to SLAPPs. We've been sued by Costco and Whole Foods. We've been sued by Diestel Turkey Farm, which is a large turkey corporation in California. We were sued by Golden Gate Fields, which is a horse racing track that's owned by these billionaires who have so much money. And most recently we’re now being sued by Perdue, which is the fourth largest chicken company in the country. Just by the nature of what we do, we end up in that area. We're also pretty willing to take risks as an organization, and I think that's a good outlook but it leads to more lawsuits.
We’ll cover this more deeply in a future story, but as you mentioned, DxE has just been SLAPPed by Perdue. Can you tell us a little bit about that lawsuit?
Transcript:
Protest at the home of Perdue’s slaughterhouse director in California. Photo by Michelle del Cueto.
We have been protesting outside the home of the director of Perdue's slaughterhouse in California. They operate as Petaluma Poultry, but it's a wholly owned subsidiary of Perdue. We've investigated and done actions against that chain of factory farms and the slaughterhouse since 2017 and recently escalated to home demonstrations, which I understand are not particularly well loved tactics, but they're also not illegal. There are some jurisdictions that have ordinances against residential picketing, and Santa Rosa, California, which is where these protests have occurred, is not one of those places.
The demonstrations have all been on public property. They haven't included threats of violence. They've actually been pretty tame, not even weird hours or anything like that. So I was honestly pretty surprised. They had a whole list of claims in the lawsuit ranging from harassment to intentional infliction of emotional distress, and then doxing because we made a giant image of the slaughterhouse operator's face with a speech bubble that said, “I torture chickens.” But the photo was from a publicly available website; it's not like we snuck into his house and took a photo of him. We didn't even publish his address anywhere. So it was just a whole list of claims that were pretty outrageous. They've since amended the complaint to drop some of those, but the lawsuit is continuing. Unfortunately a judge did grant a very pared down version of their request for a temporary restraining order. It's much less than what they wanted, but still I don't think it should have been granted at all. And we will be filing an anti-SLAPP sometime in the next two weeks.
Why are you a part of the Protect the Protest coalition?
Transcript:
To get support for ourselves when we are facing these things, but then also be able to reciprocate support with other people and other movements. Right now animal rights is not the target of a lot of the repression that we're facing – that’s very much on people advocating for Palestine, and I'm sure then it's going to extend to other causes and it will come for us eventually. So being there for other people when they're experiencing that is just the right thing to do because we would want that support for ourselves too.
What work undertaken by the Protect the Protest coalition has been most meaningful to you – personally or as a representative of DxE?
Transcript:
It's really helpful to be in spaces to have that connection across different movements and not just this little bubble of animal rights people. There's so much wisdom outside of the animal rights space that sometimes I get frustrated when people don't try to take from that, in the sense that we're all just talking to each other, but clearly we haven't solved this problem yet. I get a lot of value out of hearing what other movements are struggling with or facing, and successes that they've had, and just connecting with people from different organizations.
What are you looking forward to or what gives you hope in the fight to stop SLAPPs?
Transcript:
It's pretty bleak right now, but I believe that repression is actually really important for social movements, if it's handled well. I think that's how social movements win, and I don't know if social movements can win without repression. This could be an opportunity to build more power and solidarity, and gain more public support when people see the overreach or things that even a very conservative person might think is outrageous.
Obviously I'm not excited about all the things that are happening, but I think we can use them to our advantage. Maybe it's also a time for more solidarity because everybody feels the attacks coming. That gives me some hope, knowing that repression is important and it can be used for good.
