Open rescue
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals rescued several monkeys in 1981 from a lab in Silver Spring, Maryland and sparked discussion in The Washington Post.
[4] In 1999, Patty Mark of the ALV presented open rescue at United Poultry Concern's Direct Action for Animals Conference.
[7] In the United States, open rescue became less common and came to a halt for ten years in the mid-2000s until Direct Action Everywhere released an investigation of a "Certified Humane" cage-free Whole Foods egg supplier in January 2015.
[9] Direct Action Everywhere's open rescues in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere have put pressure on several Whole Foods suppliers.
[11] DxE centers its investigations around "humanewashing", or the alleged attempt by animal food companies to falsely market products as humane.
[13] Currently, openrescue.org, a network for organisations practising open rescue, lists 18 different open rescue organisations, with varying level of activity, in five different countries on three continents – Australia and New Zealand (Oceania), Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic and Sweden (Europe) and United States (North America).
It is sad that we are the ones considered criminals in this society, and not the egg industry which has in fact violated the Swedish Animal Protection Act for over fifteen years.
That the law intended to protect the animals is widely ignored while crimes against the right of ownership are seen as serious offences.Similarly, Räddningstjänsten writes in a comment to the legal proceedings that followed the action (translated from Swedish) "We acted and saved 120 individuals from unnecessary suffering and certain premature death.
According to The Intercept's Natasha Lennard, this is one of the legacies of the Green Scare, when the government, at the behest of pharmaceutical and agricultural corporations, aggressively prosecuted animal rights activists as so-called "eco-terrorists".
According to this, open rescue would allegedly require more money, as the resulting convictions following the actions means that fines have to be paid and damages have to be compensated.
If our system of governance is looked at from an interspecies perspective, it is something to be likened to apartheid rather than a full democracy, with humans taking the place of whites.
