The Disturbing Truth Behind Poultry Factory Farms 🐔 | Zoe Rosenberg DSH #872

People will just disregard health completely because also people are eating these chickens, health toxins, who knows what they're putting.

We've found, you know, so many diseases and bacteria spreading at these facilities.

I conducted testing myself, collected deceased birds for neproxy, people samples, and we found

multi-drug-resistant zoonotic bacteria.

I recorded this to the USDA.

The head of the USDA office in Sonoma County, she told me that this wasn't her area of expertise.

The United States Department of Agriculture can't deal with this, then who can?

All right, guys, Zoe Rosenberg here showing up on the ankle monitor.

First time on the show.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, yeah, it's an honor to be the presence of you.

Thank you.

I mean, I actually believe in what you're doing.

So let's dive right into the story of how you have the monitor on.

Thank you.

Yeah, so I've been wearing an ankle monitor for over 200 days now since December of 2023.

And what I did was rescue four chickens from Curdue's Petaluma Poultry Slaughterhouse.

We had investigated the company over the several months prior to the rescue and exposed them for pretty horrendous criminal animal cruelty.

And when we reported what they were doing to law enforcement, you know, all I received really was a dismissive email from the district attorney's office.

So I kind of felt in a way that I had no choice but to take action into my own hands to stop what was happening and to help some of these animals.

And so I rescued four of those chickens from the slaughterhouse.

Their names are Poppy, Ivy, Aster, and Azalea.

And several months after that rescue, I was arrested on seven felonies and five misdemeanors,

which at the time totaled up to over 20 years in prison.

And I've been on an ankle monitor since then as well.

Some of the charges have now, you know, kind of moved around or been condensed.

but I'm currently facing up to eight years in prison.

That's insane.

So did you have to get permission to go there?

I'm allowed to travel within the state of California.

I have to tell my pretrial officer when I'm leaving my home county, but I don't need permission.

If I'm going to leave the state of California, then I do need permission.

So I'm a judge.

Wow.

So you're going to have that on until the trial, though.

Yeah, it's a pre-trial condition.

So that's the idea.

It's possible I could get it off before, but.

we

don't necessarily expect that.

And my trial hasn't been scheduled.

So it's kind of just like, I don't know how long I'm going to be wearing this thing.

Yeah, well, the courts are still backed up a while, right?

Yeah, things are moving very slowly.

So, I mean, most likely my trial will be early next year, but we really don't know.

Wow.

So talk to everyone about the conditions you witnessed.

And how did you even know the conditions were that bad in the first place?

Yeah, so Direct Action Everywhere, which is the animal rights group I primarily work with, first investigated petaling muck poultry back in 2018 and on one of their factory factory farms called McCoy's Poultry found chickens who were debilitated, unable to get to food and water, slowly dying of starvation and dehydration.

And when they reported that to law enforcement, just kind of the same story as what happened to me last year,

just no action was taken.

People were kind of shocked because it was just such severe abuse that people really thought they would want to do something about that.

So once again, people rescued chickens back in 2018.

And that was kind of my first introduction to peddling with poultry as well.

One of the, what happened that day was horrible.

The animal rescuers with direct action everywhere tried to rescue 10 chickens.

And they called the police and asked if they would come and help the other chickens, because there were just so many who needed help.

And the police came and stopped.

people from leaving with the chickens.

And one officer, in kind of what seemed like an act of compassion, said the sickest chicken could go and that chicken was Rose and Rose came to live with me at my animal sanctuary that I run called Happy Hen Animal Sanctuary and all the other nine chickens were killed by law enforcement.

Whoa, because they were not sick.

Yeah.

And at that time

the animal patrol department in Sonoma County actually recommended this petal of a poultry factory farm as a suspect for animal cruelty.

So they referred them to to the sheriff's office and the sheriff's office never did anything about it.

So years later,

you know, I kind of wanted to go back and see if anything had been done, if anything had been improved of pedaling poultry.

And I really just found that it hadn't been improved at all.

In one of the barns I investigated, over 10% of the birds had died by the time they were just five weeks old because disease and injury was just so rampant at this facility.

And

in the slaughterhouse, no evidence was uncovered of chickens who had been boiled alive because of the slaughter lines moving too quickly.

And again, yeah, just

it's so disturbing to me that law enforcement is not focusing on that, it's not focusing on stopping that violence and instead wants to put animal rescuers in prison.

I wonder how much poll they have, though, like a regular police officer.

Yeah.

I feel like there needs to be, is there like an organization that oversees this?

Yeah, there's the Sonoma County District Attorney's Office, and they kind of decide what does and doesn't get prosecuted in Sonoma County.

We've reported cruelty to them for many, many years.

And they're also the ones who are prosecuting me.

Wow.

Well, from a business point of view, these guys are probably bringing the county so much money.

Probably they're just going to defend them.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, Petalima Poultry is owned by Purdue.

It's the fourth largest poultry producer in the nation.

This is a massive company that has

jobs to the area that they're going to want to keep them there, right?

Because they probably provide thousands of jobs to that county.

Yeah.

And yeah, it's just sickening that that's a priority over the lives of being the animal for breaking up just

even just telling these companies that they have to have better standards.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If people will just disregard health completely, because also people are eating these chickens.

Yeah.

So all the stress, all the toxins, who knows what they're putting.

Yeah.

And we've found, you know, so many diseases and bacteria spreading at these facilities.

I conducted testing myself, collected deceased birds for necropsy, fecal samples, and we found

moldite drug-resistant zoonotic bacteria,

other zoonotic bacteria that are very dangerous, can cause people's intestines to rot if they're eating these chickens.

And when I recorded this to the USDA, the head of the USDA office in Sonoma County, she told me that this wasn't her area of expertise.

Like, you know, if the United States Department of Agriculture can't deal with this, then who can?

Wow.

Should at least pass it along to someone that can, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

It shouldn't be my responsibility to make sure this gets the worst.

It's, it's their responsibility to protect public health.

Crazy.

And people are eating this and then we wonder why everyone's sick right now.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

I'm a firm believer, like the food you consume, you're also consuming the energy.

Yeah.

So think about the stressful watch because now these chickens, they're selling them at what, like five weeks now?

Six weeks.

Six should be 20.

It used to be 40 when we were growing up.

Yeah.

Chicken doesn't taste the same anymore tastes terrible i'm sure you're vegan but

no

yeah i'm but it's a huge problem um

this the way we've industrialized agriculture yeah it's just it's bad for humans it's bad for the animals nobody is winning except for these companies right they're printing money yeah yeah chickens are uh being sold quicker at cows too right have you investigated cow farms um a little bit um direct action everywhere investigators have more I've done some investigatory work at dairy facilities.

But we've also gotten hidden cameras in

cow slaughterhouses and just exposed how stressful it is for these animals coming

on the slaughter line, just struggle to escape

and just so much fear.

Yeah.

So is your issue just stopping this entirely?

Like where do you want to see this?

Yeah, that's a good question.

You know, my hope in all of this is for animals to be kind of given legal personhood, which I know to a lot of people sounds like a very radical idea.

And, you know, I think a lot of people probably associate personhood with things like the right to vote

and very human things.

You know, I do realize that non-human animals probably will never be able to vote in human elections, and I don't expect that.

But I think they should be treated as individuals with basic rights.

They should have the right to their own lives.

They should have bodily autonomy, just basic things that they currently don't have.

I mean, something like the right to live is something that we take so for granted that non-human animals don't even have.

So you want to get rid of slaughterhouses.

It's hard away.

Yeah.

I think, you know, I'd love to see slaughterhouses, factory farms replaced with animal sanctuaries, places where these animals can live out the rest of their lives.

Yeah.

I would love more sanctuaries.

It's just a lot of people you meet, so I don't know how that would work.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, no, absolutely.

And I think it's something that would be a process and, you know, an industry we'd have to phase out and definitely adjust to as a society.

What do you think about those synthetic meats that are brushing up?

I mean, I think it's definitely a great alternative to

industrial agribuler, to animal agribuler.

I don't think anyone has to eat those synthetic meats.

If people just want to, you know, eat plants as they are, that's great too.

But I think for people who want them, they're a great alternative.

So how are these slaughterhouses killing the animals exactly?

Because there's mass kill methods, apparently.

Yeah.

Well, at the Penaluma Poultry Slaughterhouse,

which is obviously where I rescued these four chickens from,

they hang the chickens upside down in shackles and they move rapidly along a conveyor.

And the first step is that the chickens are supposed to be submerged in an electric stun bath.

So that's supposed to stun them.

So in theory, they're not conscious for the remainder of the slaughter process.

But as you can imagine, you know, these chickens are very afraid.

They don't want to be electrocuted.

They don't want to go into this bath.

So

where their heads are supposed to be submerged in the water, many of the chickens will lift their heads up because

that's how they avoid going in it.

And so a lot of chickens enter the kill floor fully conscious.

House chickens, you know, we've seen with our hidden cameras,

they're struggling, they're flailing.

And then when it's time for their necks to go over the blade, they lift their necks up, they lift up their heads so that they don't get their throats slit.

Wow.

So they're very conscious and aware of what's going on.

And there's a worker on the kill floor who's supposed to manually slit those chickens.

Yeah.

What a job.

I don't know.

But yeah, and understandably, the worker often doesn't do it.

Right.

Which I totally understand.

I wouldn't want to do it either.

But unfortunately, that means that a lot of those chickens enter the scalding tank alive.

Oh my God.

And they're boiled alive.

So they're boiled alive.

Holy crap.

I didn't know it was like that.

I thought it was like a gas neighbor or something.

Yeah.

We've definitely seen, you know, chickens gas to death in mass in various stages of the industry.

Generally, it's not done at slaughterhouses.

But, you know, if there's a disease outbreak, they will often gas chickens to death or kill them through something they call ventilation shutdown, which is when they shut all the ventilation off in a barn and they raise up the temperatures.

And chickens and other animals essentially die from heat stroke.

And that's obviously a totally inhumane way to kill an animal.

Yeah.

Yeah, because there's a few big players in the meat company, right?

There's like four of them.

Yeah, there's some big companies,

Tyson, Purdue, Smithfield,

that, yeah.

So are they all using slaughterhouse like this?

Yes, yeah.

No one's doing it in like a more duban way or.

No.

And that's something, you know, we've definitely investigated a lot over the last few years as there's kind of been the shift to humane meat and ethical consumption, which in theory is great.

And I'm so glad people.

care about animal welfare and want these animals to be treated better.

Unfortunately, these companies have kind of taken advantage of people's concern, of people's compassion for animals, and they have essentially housed animals in the exact same or very, very similar conditions as before, slaughtered them in the same slaughterhouse as before, and just added humane labels and sold meat for twice the price.

Four mold fruit.

Yeah.

Yeah, cross-fed.

Yeah.

Apparently, there's a lot of with the chicken eggs, they say, like free range and stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I have investigated free range egg farms, and it's literally just thousands and thousands and thousands of chickens packed tightly into a shed who never get to go outside.

Totally triple the bread.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they put these pictures of these chickens out in grassy fields.

That's what the consumer is expecting.

That's what they're imagining when they're buying these eggs, but that's not the reality.

It's so manipulative.

You can see, and they're rejecting them too with hormones and vaccines now.

Yeah.

You're consuming that also and people don't even know that.

Yeah.

And it's kind of this impossible situation where like, you know, you're the antibiotic free chicken, but then those chickens are dying of higher rates of disease because they're not getting the antibiotics.

But then if they are getting the antibiotics, you know, we're brewing antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

It's just as long as we're raising animals in this condition, in these conditions, no one's going to win.

Yeah.

So do you think there is like a humane way to consume an animal or are you just totally against consuming animals?

I mean, I don't think personally that there's a humane way to kill an animal because I think that they want to live just like we do.

You know, even if it was done in a way where they didn't feel it, where they weren't afraid, you'd still be taking someone's life.

Fair.

So you see them as like a spear, a wide S-Y-Dogger sanctuary.

How many animals do you have?

We have a little over 100 animals.

We're permanent residents at the sanctuary.

Well, we've saved over a thousand animals over the years, mostly from factory farms and slaughterhouses and some other abusive situations like cock fighting.

Cockfighting.

Yeah.

What's that?

It's a very horrible sport

where two roosters are put in a fighting ring and they're basically forced to fight to the death.

And roosters have been bred to be extremely aggressive

and just, you know, not walk away.

Like normally a rooster, if they're fighting with another rooster, one of them eventually will kind of submit and walk away and leave the fight.

These roosters have been bred to never back down.

Well, they will fight to the death.

And that happens?

It's illegal in the United States, but it happens illegally.

Yeah, I've heard of dog fighting, but cop fighting us.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

You got any dogs?

Yeah, we do.

We have a few dogs.

I'd love to sell that one then.

Yeah, that'd be great.

We'd love to have you.

I'm a big animal lover.

I actually want to start a sanctuary one.

I just feel like, I mean, it's dog expensive, right?

Yes.

Dominantly expensive.

I don't know if I'm ready to say that that's a full-time job, too.

That's feeding them.

And

you need a lot of land out of that, right?

Yeah.

How many acres you got?

We have 40 acres.

Holy crap.

You're balling out here.

40 acres.

Yeah.

Without like a family inheritance?

Oh, yeah.

It's my parents' property.

So they had a sanctuary?

Well, I started the sanctuary myself when I was growing up, when I was 11 years old.

Wow.

I started the rescue.

My mom is a veterinarian, so having her help has been very, very nice.

Guys.

So you've been hosh about this your whole life.

Yeah, yeah.

And growing up, I definitely always slowed the animals.

I was kind of an annoying kid, I think,

about it.

I would put up like

posters all around school, like profiling dogs who needed homes at like local shelters.

And

if other first raiders were going to go and talk to these dogs,

the most effective, probably.

I've been seeing a lot of, I don't like how there's chill shelter for dogs.

I'm going to say it a lot of those on my social media.

It's so sad.

It's really sad.

I wonder if there's a better system because...

These dogs are so smart.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, I mean, I think these shelters need more funding and and the government should be giving them resources so they can just you know house the dogs until they find homes instead of killing them that's not a solution yeah they're killing so many yeah

i don't know the exact numbers but it seems like it's a large amount yeah definitely

yeah we need to figure out how to just have sanctuaries in every county somewhere where dogs could just roam yeah absolutely yeah that would be a much better alternative than taking their lives the mobile yeah cats too right yeah definitely you cat lady

We have cats.

Yeah.

I'm an all-animals lady, I guess.

Yeah.

How many different types of animals do you probably don't even know?

I don't know.

We have most species that are used for food,

plus dogs and cats.

Wow.

Rabbits?

We don't have rabbits.

Squirrels?

No squirrels.

Yeah, I have a lot of squirrels who live wild on the property.

Most all of our neighbors kill the ground squirrels,

but we don't.

So we've got like thousands of people.

We kill them.

Yeah.

Why?

because they they're kind of like gophers they burrow in the ground and people don't like them so they poison them what yeah you can't do that legally you could just poison the squirrel right now yeah

sadly yeah wow i get uh i'm in vegas we get like coyotes sometimes oh well um but i wouldn't kill it unless it was like attacking me you know what i mean some people i mean you're probably against hunting yeah yeah but but yeah i mean this it's totally absurd to me to kill these squirrels when they're just burrowing and doing their thing.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of killing it just for fun.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And some people do do it for fun.

Like I watched we were driving on a country road and this truck like sped up to try to hit this brown squirrel and did end up hitting them, killing them.

That's terrible.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Some people kind of see it as a sport.

We'll hear like gunshots in the area as people like shooting.

shooting at the squirrels.

Wow.

Yeah.

These are living creatures.

Yeah.

People just think of play the game, I guess.

Yeah.

You feeling good about the trial, though?

You feeling like you're going to win?

We'll see.

I think

if we can show the jury evidence of the animal cruelty at Petalima Poultry and share the stories of these animals, that I feel confident they're going to win.

the judge and the prosecutors make it so that we're not able to show that evidence, then you know, I'm less certain.

Another activist faced trial in the same county last year for rescuing animals, and

he basically was not allowed to talk about any of the animal cruelty he had documented.

And honestly, it was just disturbing.

It really felt like he just wasn't allowed to present a defense.

And he was ultimately convicted.

That's concerning.

Why wouldn't you be allowed to stay your case?

So I thought in trial, you're allowed to go away time to stay your face.

Yeah, and you are.

the issue has been that you know the prosecutors have tried to argue effectively that this evidence the animal cruelty evidence will bias the jury by making it kind of an emotional decision for them um

which sure yeah it's very emotional to see animal cruelty but it's also just the truth it's just the reality right

and also since the cameras were hidden you're probably not allowed to use that as evidence right um i'm not sure we we haven't had that issue necessarily a lot of it comes down to you know like what was the defendant's intent

so if it the defendant's intent was based on you know this footage um that was documented then that could be admissible yeah i just hope you get a fair trial i hope so too because seeing what happened with trump and like other examples is like who knows if that's even

a fair system based yeah our legal system is not fair i don't have much faith in it yeah i'm rewarded for you though but if you go to prison for this that's crazy.

I know.

I mean, what damage did you do?

Yeah, of course.

They didn't even know I was there.

They only knew about it because I posted about

self-snitch.

Yeah, well, what we do is called open rescue.

So we have a philosophy that we're open about rescuing these animals.

And we feel it's really important to share their stories, draw their stories out to the world, even if sometimes that might mean taking some legal risks.

And you've done a ton to times before, so you probably didn't even think this was a possibility.

Yeah, I mean, I always know it is a possibility to get prosecuted.

I certainly didn't think this would happen.

I didn't think I'd be wearing an ankle monitor.

You know, and

for four chickens,

up to eight years in prison is just obviously.

I would have understood if it was a bunch and like they lost money or something, but you didn't cause any financial damage.

Well, your video did go viral, but because I might have, but I don't know.

I think that's probably why they did it, because your video went viral, right?

Well,

the videos got some views after the fact, immediately, like 100,000 views.

But I really went viral because of the prosecution.

They kind of made me go viral because people were so shocked that I got an ankle monitor that, you know, tens of millions of people have been watching my videos to find out.

what happened.

And a lot of people just don't believe my story.

They think I'm lying and that I must have done something else other than just rescue these four chickens but i literally just rescued four chickens well hopefully this made them find the shade at least yeah i don't know we'll say it's a trial let's discover it yeah um so how can i like to be actionable with this show how can ordinary people watching this get involved with uh helping out yeah um well definitely the most impactful thing i think anyone can do is joining the animal rights movement.

And, you know, I'm a strong advocate of nonviolent direct action,

protesting, marching, rescuing animals, investigating these facilities.

And if there's an animal rights group in anyone's area, I think.

the most effective thing someone could do is get involved with those groups and take action with them.

But we also, just in terms of this case and this trial,

we have a petition at righttorrescue.com that people can sign.

It's an open letter to the Sodoma County District Attorney's Office, basically asking them to use the resources they're spending on my prosecution to instead investigate the animal cruelty at these facilities.

Guys, we'll link that in the description.

Yeah.

And obviously, you know, once my trial is scheduled, we definitely would love.

If people can come out and support and help share the stories of these animals.

Powerful.

Thanks so much for coming on.

So

we'll link everything below.

Thanks so much.

Yeah.

Thanks for watching, guys.

Check everything out in the description below.

See you guys soon.