On a chilly, early morning in January 2019, a group of animal rights activists descended upon a poultry farm in central Texas. Donning plastic gloves, medical masks, hazmat suits, and T-shirts emblazoned with “Meat the Victims,” they slipped through the unlocked door of a massive, windowless barn.
Inside, they found 27,000 chicks densely packed across the floor, like “just a sea of yellow,” recalled Sarah Weldon, one of the activists. “There were a lot of chicks that were already deceased, in various stages of decomposition,” she said. “Some were so deformed you couldn’t even tell they used to be baby chicks, just fluffs of feathers.”
Activists with Meat the Victims, a decentralized, global movement to abolish animal exploitation, later uploaded gruesome photos of injured and dead chicks to social media platforms. This is how, Weldon suspects, the police identified her and issued a warrant for her arrest, along with 14 other activists. She was charged with criminal trespassing, a Class B misdemeanor, and quickly turned herself into jail.
The local police weren’t the only ones paying attention. An FBI agent in Texas had been secretly monitoring the demonstration. His focus? Weapons of mass destruction.
The FBI has been collaborating with the meat industry to gather information on animal rights activism, including Meat the Victims, under its directive to counter weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, according to agency records recently obtained by the nonprofit Animal Partisan through Freedom of Information Act litigation. The records also show that the bureau has explored charging activists who break into factory farms under federal criminal statutes that carry a possible sentence of up to life in prison — including for the “attempted use” of WMD — while urging meat producers to report encounters with activists to its WMD program.
“The very framing of civil disobedience against factory farms as terrorism is a form of government repression.”
Animal rights lawyers and advocates view this new frontier for WMD allegations as a pretense, a fictive way to legitimize the criminal prosecution of animal rights activists.
The FBI declined to comment on these plans or clarify whether it is still actively considering charging activists under statutes for WMD.
“This kind of escalation in charging or threats of charges is textbook escalation by government actors against successful efforts by social movements that they disagree with or find subversive,” said Justin Marceau, a law professor who runs a legal clinic for animal activists at the University of Denver. “The very framing of civil disobedience against factory farms as terrorism is a form of government repression.”
The bureau has floated the idea of charging animal rights activists under a statute prohibiting biological weapons, a subtype of WMD, the records show. This may include toxins, viruses, and microorganisms used to deliberately spur death and disease.
Marceau described this focus on agroterrorism as an effort to pin blame on activists for the rampant disease outbreaks on factory farms.
“It’s a transparent form of scapegoating and blame shifting” that avoids “talking about the disease risks that come from having animals intensively confined in these high stress conditions,” he said, referring to factory farms. “We know these are just petri dishes of disease and contamination.”
A Quiet Collaboration
The new records — two FBI memos and a presentation — reveal a burgeoning relationship between the meat industry and the FBI’s WMD Directive, charged with countering the most serious biological, chemical, radiological, and nuclear threats. Each of the FBI’s 56 field offices has a designated agent (a “weapons of mass destruction coordinator”) tasked with investigating suspected uses of WMD.
Back in Texas in 2019, Holmes Foods, Texas’s largest privately owned chicken producer, tipped the feds off to Meat the Victims’ entry into a factory farm on January 26. The company purchases chickens from the poultry broiler the activists entered.
Just a day after the action, the chicken producer contacted the Dallas FBI outpost for “guidance on preparing for future incidents,” the records show. The following morning, the local WMD coordinator got on the phone with company executives and other local FBI agents to gather information about the incident.
Holmes Foods’ executives told the FBI that “no damage or product loss was immediately identified” in the poultry barn. Yet Dallas’s WMD program documented the incident as part of its intelligence gathering on “animal rights environmental extremism,” which the FBI considers a form of domestic terrorism. This was collected “for situational awareness purposes,” the records show — a phrase that some claim law enforcement agents use as a cover to surveil activists exercising First Amendment rights. “What they call situational awareness is Orwellian speak for watching and intimidation,” Baher Azmy, a legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, previously told The Intercept.
Holmes Foods declined to comment.
This collaborative relationship between the FBI’s WMD outpost in Dallas and the meat industry continued into the following year.
The Meat Institute (formerly North American Meat Institute), the largest trade association for poultry and livestock industries in the United States, invited a federal agent to its 2020 Animal Care and Handling Conference to “provide insight into agroterrorism and federal law enforcement’s approach to protecting the United States meat industry,” the records show.
At the virtual conference, the agent for Dallas’s WMD program presented a slideshow, titled “Agroterrorism in the Meat/Livestock Industry,” before a crowd of over 80 attendees largely from the meat industry. The agent detailed the “emerging” WMD and domestic terrorism threats posed by animal rights activist groups — naming Meat the Victims as well as Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE — which often break minor criminal laws, such as prohibitions on trespassing, to bring attention to animal cruelty.
The agent warned that these “minor criminal actions associated with animal rights activist extremism have a tendency to escalate toward substantial direct actions, to include the unintentional introduction of biological materials, toxic chemicals or other hazards into a herd and/or flock,” the records note.
The agent urged industry groups to report instances of civil disobedience to the WMD Directive or Joint Terrorism Task Forces and shared a map displaying all FBI field offices.
They also discussed the legal strategy being explored by the FBI, including potential charges under federal criminal statutes related to biological forms of WMD. One statute defines a WMD as any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector, while another criminalizes sharing information on making or using such weapons.
The FBI agent highlighted the charges faced by Meat the Victims activists in Texas and emphasized the potential domestic terrorism and WMD food sector connections, hinting at potential criminal charges for such activism.
Animal Partisan’s legal counsel noted the contrast in the FBI’s approach towards protecting the meat industry versus animal rights activists, highlighting the disparity in treatment.
The FBI has attempted to portray animal rights activists as biosecurity threats in previous instances, citing concerns about the spread of contagious diseases. However, activists like Zoe Rosenberg from Direct Action Everywhere maintain strict biosecurity protocols while rescuing animals from facilities.
Despite following biosecurity measures, activists like Rosenberg have faced prosecution and accusations of bioterrorism, creating challenges for their advocacy work.
The risks posed by lack of biosecurity in poultry farms, as observed by activists like Weldon from Meat the Victims, underscore the importance of their interventions in exposing potential threats and preventing disease spread. Please rewrite this sentence.
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