Rescue or Crime? UC Berkeley Student Faces 5 Years in Sonoma Poultry Farm Case

In 2023, Zoe Rosenberg and other animal rights activists entered a Petaluma poultry farm after dark, plucked four chickens from their crates and carried them off the property.

She has called the heist a “rescue” of mistreated, bruised and scratched-up animals, but the farm’s owners, and Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office, see her actions differently.

Rosenberg, a UC Berkeley senior, is currently standing trial for felony conspiracy and various misdemeanor charges, including trespassing and tampering with a vehicle, related to the incident.

Closing arguments are expected Tuesday afternoon, bringing an end to a case that has shone a national spotlight on animal welfare. A jury will decide whether Rosenberg participated in a justified rescue, as her legal team put it, when she illegally entered Petaluma Poultry — or a crime that could merit up to four and a half years in prison.

“It’s not a whodunit, it’s really a whydunit,” Chris Carraway, Rosenberg’s lawyer, told KQED ahead of her trial’s opening in September. “Zoe believed that this conduct was permissible under the circumstances.”

The Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office alleged that Rosenberg, an organizer for animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere, visited Petaluma Poultry four times without authorization and tagged a dozen farm delivery vehicles with GPS trackers in the spring of 2023.

In June of that year, prosecutors said, she entered the farm in protective gear, examined crates of chickens on a truck bed, and placed four in a red bucket while about 50 DxE activists rallied outside. The incident was captured in video footage, viewed by KQED.

Rosenberg’s attorneys, Carraway and Kevin Little, have posited that her actions came after efforts to report mistreatment at Petaluma Poultry to local authorities.

Rosenberg said Tuesday that another DxE organizer, Carla Cabral, testified to how sick the birds were when Rosenberg removed them. Cabral cared for the four birds — renamed Poppy, Ivy, Aster and Azalea — immediately after they were taken, and told the jury their bodies were covered in wounds and scratches, had infected feet and one had a respiratory infection.

“They cannot, beyond a reasonable doubt, prove to the jurors that I had a criminal intent when I entered the slaughterhouse and to rescue these chickens,” Rosenberg told KQED. “This case is about what was in my heart and my desire to help Poppy, Ivy, Aster and Azalea.”

According to the Press Democrat, though, Rosenberg’s legal team was barred ahead of trial from using a “necessity defense,” or making the case that Rosenberg’s action was necessary to prevent imminent harm.

Her lawyers have also tried to downplay her involvement in the incident, relying on testimony from former DxE activist Raven Deerbrook, who was Rosenberg’s co-defendant before reaching a plea deal over the summer. Deerbrook told the jury that she had been investigating conditions and Petaluma Poultry prior to Rosenberg’s involvement, and spearheaded the series of break-ins that led to the chicken capture, the Press Democrat reported.

Deerbrook testified that she placed the GPS trackers, used bolt cutters to get through a fence and brought the buckets used to transport the chickens. She pleaded no contest to two misdemeanor charges in June.

But prosecutors have pointed to a long history of similar activism by Rosenberg. Deputy District Attorney Matt Hobson showed the jury photos of her pouring fake blood on the floor of a Safeway and posing in red-hued water in a fountain at UC Berkeley, holding a sign that said “UC Berkeley drop factory farms,” the Press Democrat reported.

Rosenberg was also previously arrested following a 2022 NBA playoff game, where she chained herself to a basketball hoop in protest of former Minnesota Timberwolves’ owner Glen Taylor. Direct Action Everywhere claimed responsibility for that protest as part of ongoing efforts to get Taylor to step down over his financial backing of an Iowa-based egg farm they say participated in animal cruelty.

“The ongoing prosecution is not about silencing speech — it is about holding accountable a pattern of calculated, unlawful activity,” a Petaluma Poultry spokesperson said in a statement.

In two recent criminal cases, juries agreed with attorneys’ arguments that activists were making “open rescues,” saving animals from suffering. Wayne Hsiung, DxE co-founder, was acquitted in a case involving the removal of two piglets from a Utah farm, and activists in Merced County were found not guilty after taking two chickens from a Foster Farms truck.

Whether this will work in Rosenberg’s case remains to be seen. Hsiung was sentenced to probation and 90 days in Sonoma County Jail in 2023 for felony conspiracy related to farm protests in Sonoma County in 2018 and 2019.

Farmers in Sonoma County have called Direct Action Everywhere “extremist” and alleged that their actions go beyond animal welfare.

“While we welcome open and honest discussion about the welfare of animals, we strongly oppose the extreme tactics used by [Direct Action Everywhere],” said Julie Katigan, the Chief Human Resources Officer at Petaluma Poultry’s corporate owner, Perdue Farms. “These are not the actions of an organization seeking constructive dialogue.”

Rosenberg is hopeful that the jury will at least find her not guilty of the two charges related to her intent to break the law, including the felony conspiracy charge.

“[Prosecutors] don’t really have an argument that I did not have the intent to help these birds, and they have largely failed to present any evidence disproving” that, she said.

The Sonoma County District Attorney’s office declined to comment Tuesday.

She has stood behind her actions, telling KQED in September that “there’s nothing that they [prosecutors or Petaluma Poultry] have done to me or could possibly do to me that would ever compare to the level of suffering that animals endure every second of their lives.”

When asked on the stand if she wants open rescue “to be something that happens everywhere,” she told prosecutors: “Yes.”

KQED’s Dana Cronin contributed to this report.