As individuals participating in the open rescue of animals increasingly adopt strategies of civil disobedience and “voluntary prosecution,” courts are pressed to adjudicate the definition of intent itself within an anthropocentric legal structure that excludes animals from moral and juridical standing. These cases reveal the limits of existing legal categories including an animal’s right not to be harmed and the necessity defense, while also inviting a speculative alternative. Drawing upon the process-relational metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, I argue that a personal experience of moral injury grounded in relational becoming can offer new pathways for understanding the deep motivation of open rescue and how those actions might be meaningfully defended within, or against, the law.

Considering Open Rescue

On October 9, 2025 in courtroom nine of the Sonoma County courthouse in northern California, 23-year old college student Zoe Rosenberg was found guilty on all counts related to her open rescue of chickens from Petaluma Poultry slaughterhouse, a subsidiary of the industrial meat giant Perdue Poultry. After an eight-week court case over the removal of four chickens valued at less than $30, Rosenberg was convicted of felony conspiracy and three misdemeanors, including trespassing with the intent to disrupt a lawful business. Although she was facing 4.5 years of incarceration, Rosenberg was sentenced to 90 days confinement; she served 14 days in jail with the remainder under house arrest; she is the third animal activist to serve jail time for open rescue.^[1]

Open rescue is a direct action of rescuing animals experiencing pain and suffering. This often includes openly walking into facilities related to agricultural, breeding, laboratory, or slaughterhouses without hiding one’s identity, removing injured animals, filming the process and sharing that footage widely. Although open rescue has historical precedent going back about four decades years in Western nations, as well as into global antiquity^[2]—the highest profile U.S. open rescue trials began in 2023 with both acquittals and convictions.^[3] The rise of what some activists call “voluntary prosecution” draws on civil disobedience and other nonviolent campaigns for women’s suffrage, civil rights, anti-war, and other movements to redress politically and socially-normalized harms.^[4] Such voluntary prosecutions continue to produce creative strategies in pro-animal law and also among the industrial animal lobby, often in state-specific “ag-gag” laws that evolve their own strategic attack on open rescue. Early cases, for example, charged activists with the theft of living “property”; recent cases charge forms of criminal trespass, conspiracy, and domestic bio-terrorism,^[5] ramping up the punitive stakes considerably. 

The Anthropocentric Frame of Law in Determining Intent

Rosenberg’s lead attorney Chris Caraway argued to the jury, this case is “not a whodunit; It’s a whydunit,” affirming that Rosenberg’s intent was the only truly disputed aspect of the case.^[6] The defense’s aim was to answer the judge’s question regarding why Rosenberg “believed what she believed and intended what she intended” when she removed the chickens from the transport truck minutes before they would be shackled on the kill line.^[7]

In some previous cases, animal rescuers have successfully used the “necessity defense”—supported with an Amicus brief from Harvard Law professor Kristen Stilt—permitting an illegal action taken in an emergency situation to prevent serious bodily harm to oneself or someone else, where no other legal option was available, and the action did not create more danger than what was avoided.^[8] Stilt argued that the “someone else” extends “to an animal, including an agricultural animal, because animals are sentient beings who can feel pain and suffer bodily harm.”^[9] Stilt support this conclusion by referencing three California-specific laws that affirm animal sentiency:  

1. Vehicle Confinement Law (CA Penal Code Section 597.7): no civil liability for property or trespass if rescuing an animal trapped in a hot car
2. Good Samaritan Laws (CA Health and Safety Code 1799.102 2):  legal protection for individuals acting in good faith to provide aid during emergencies
3.  Impounded Animal Law (Cal. Penal Code § 597e): no civil liability for entering into an animal shelter to give aid to an animal who has been without food or water for more than 12 hours.

These state-level legislative decisions are more robust from U.S. federal protections for animals, which are some of the weakest among developed nations. Only the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act applies to farmed animals and it does not cover animals killed in religious slaughter such as Halal or Kosher, nor does it apply to birds, which constitutes the most consumed category of flesh in the U.S. 

To date, none of the many attempts to secure U.S. constitutional and statutory “standing” for nonhuman animals in a court—through legal “personhood” or other strategies (from 1991 to the present^[10])—have been successful^[11]. Likewise, the necessity defense was excluded in Rosenberg’s case based on the judge’s decision that it does not apply to nonhuman animals. The State, reflecting Big Ag sentiment, aimed to show that Rosenberg’s actions were a fanatical public stunt expressive of an extreme vegan ideology and a related desire to end meat consumption in total, as evidenced by her role in previous protests, direct actions, blog posts, and alignment with the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere,^[12] leading to her inevitable felony conspiracy and criminal trespass charges. The Defense aimed to show that Rosenberg’s belief was that there were egregious instances of criminal animal abuse that had gone unaddressed by law enforcement which justified her personal action, and that of others. 

Could a Metaphysics of Moral Injury Sidestep Speciesist Legal Exclusions? 

A metaphysics of moral injury proposes an alternative path for animal rescuers and/or defendants in open rescue cases to describe deeply held beliefs that may sidestep certain static legal limits related to an autonomous, isolated subject, the excluded “animal,” and the concept of justification as mere logical decision. My aim is to explore whether defense strategies that integrate arguments of moral injury may open doors for animal rescue cases by allowing for new conceptions of (1) the self-as-social, (2) animals as contributors to social formation which (3) many jurors affirm through their own experience with animals, even when animals lack legal personhood or standing, and (4) that the industrial use of animals for profit—when its inherent brutality is witnessed or understood—is a profound form of moral injury to a social self shaped by relations, including through animal others.

Moral Injury

“Moral injury” is a term adopted by researchers in the U.S. Veterans Administration (VA) in the 1990s to describe a phenomenon experienced by Vietnam War veterans that exceeded the diagnostic framework for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Sometimes explained as an emotional or spiritual “wound,” Moral injury describes a unique form of psychological distress that results from perpetrating (acts of commission), failing to prevent (acts of omission) or witnessing acts that violate one’s deeply held core beliefs. 

Moral injury has special relevance to animal rescue defenses since deeply held beliefs—especially in forms of justification or justified true belief—are often permitted in legal defenses for animal rescuers in some form. The “metaphysics of moral injury” that I will put forth—drawing on the Process-relational metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead—exceeds any simple notion of belief as correct proposition and instead enters into the felt truth of reality that is, in fact, relationally constituted in each moment toward greater or lesser modes of social flourishing. 

A Relational Metaphysics Beyond Dead Matter, Isolated Subjectivity, and Linguistic Propositions

 Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was an English Mathematician, noted for co-authoring the three-volume set Principia Mathematica with his student Bertrand Russell, considered one of the twentieth century’s most important works in mathematical logic. Starting around 1910, Whitehead began turning his attention from mathematics to philosophy of science, and then to metaphysics, eventually being invited to explore these ideas at Harvard at the age of 63, where he taught for 14 years before retiring. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of Western philosophy.  

Whitehead called his view a “philosophy of organism” which later scholars called “process studies” or “process-relational philosophy.” This view of a dynamic universe well beyond human subjectivity is not new in the history of thought; it has antecedents in Plato and Heraclitus, Henri Bergson, William James, among others, including indigenous views, Asian traditions, feminist and ecological perspectives, but his work is often not taught in mainstream philosophy, because as Belgian chemist Isabelle Stengers, claims, Whitehead’s work, “demands, with utter discretion, that its readers accept the adventure of the questions that will separate them from every consensus.”^[13] His landmark text, Process and Reality (hereafter PR)^[14] is an extremely challenging, but also life-giving, textual companion offering three relevant claims for reconsidering moral injury. 

1. No Dead Mechanistic Matter; Only Creative, Responsive Events

Modern science and philosophy continue to perpetuate a view that “nature” is either composed of separate bits of matter bumping around in space due to mechanistic laws, or explained through Descartes’ hard dualism between thinking things (res cogitans) such as humans, or material things extended in space (res extensa) such as everything else, or Hume’s “sensationalist” account that all knowledge comes through perceiving the world through the five senses, negating other important subtle forms of causal efficacy. Whitehead critiqued these “bifurcations” in nature because they produced several false oppositions of mind and matter, human and nature, and perceiving subject and passive object. Many of these dichotomies are presumed in law. 

Whitehead suggests that what is really real in the universe is not fixed substances of static being, but rather processive events of becoming, that he calls “actual occasions,” referring to “the final real things of which the world is made up”; he continues, “There is no going behind actual [occasions] to find anything more real” (PR 18). Is it possible that the law can account for these final real actual occasions making up the evolving event of the universe? Whitehead understands the actual occasion as a creative instance of unification, or “concrescence,” between existent data and future possibilities; the becoming occasion does not merely repeat the past, but feels, or “prehends,” existing data and possible potentials, in a unique “subjective aim” toward novel, non-deterministic, actuality (PR 19). This instance of creative becoming does not happen within space-time, Whitehead makes clear—as argued by earlier materialist views of space as a container in which atomistic things float around in metered succession; rather, every event produces the “extensive continuum” of space-time through its becoming concrescence (PR 66ff). What strategies can help the law account for such becomings?

Organisms consist of many coordinated actual occasions and are called “societies of occasions,” or more simply, “nexus,” or nexūs, plural (PR 20ff). You and me, cats and pigs, flowers and cells, rocks and raindrops are all societies. To emphasize the importance of this aspect of process philosophy, Stenger argues, according to Whithead, “it is always societies that we study” in the forms of physical objects with some temporal endurance.^[15]

As the defendant, for example, Zoe Rosenberg is such a society, as is the judge, each juror, each attorney, each chicken taken, and (I think) the organism of law as a whole. Importantly, while consciousness or cognition can emerge from complex becoming, those capacities are not essential in the process of concrescence, which pervades the entire universe (PR 52–53). Instead, the primary activity of existence is nonconscious feeling, or “prehension,” both of given data and possible potentials, toward wider modes of “contrast,” (PR 29, 114) explored in Whitehead’s unique concept of Beauty, of which each event can be more or less inclusive of intense, multiplicitous, data and potentials.^[16]

• No Isolated Subjectivity, but Relational Becomings

For the Process perspective, reality is nothing but actual occasions, sometimes in coordinated nexūs—including oneself asa nexus organism—prehending diverse data and possible potentials in a novel becoming that adds its unique determination to the whole. As Whitehead says, “The many become one, and are increased by one” (PR 32). This means that any existence-as-such is constituted through the subtle perception of many other occasions; to that end, Whitehead clarifies, “there is nothing that floats into the world from nowhere” (PR 244).

The notion of a social self has been well argued in social sciences and political philosophy. Judith Butler, for example, affirms the sociality masked within substantive language that must be acknowledged to interrupt political violence. Butler writes in Precarious Life, “It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there, especially if the attachment to ‘you’ is part of what composes who ‘I’ am . . . ”^[17]

What is less explored is a thorough-going metaphysical account that both coheres with the best science of the entangled arising of novel life, while preserving responsive, relational subjectivity without fixed or isolated substance throughout the universe. The “I” who affirms in the court prior to giving testimony is already thrown, as Heidegger might say, into a wild multiplicity of intensive becomings-as-onself. 

• Exchanging Linguistic Propositions for “Propositions for Feeling”

Whitehead aimed to expand the kinds of knowledge that can be explored, first by claiming that “Every actual entity has the capacity for knowledge” (PR 161), and second, that the “range and intensity” of knowledge varies widely:

We infer in those occasions, as known from our present standpoint, a surprising variation in the range and intensity of our realized knowledge. We sleep; we are half awake; we are aware of our perceptions, but are devoid of generalities in thought; we are vividly absorbed within a small region of abstract thought while oblivious to the world around; we are attending to our emotions—some torrent of passion—to them and to nothing else; we are morbidly discursive in the width of our attention; and finally we sink back into temporary obliviousness, sleeping or stunned (PR 161).

If we can affirm such wide ranges of knowledge in our own varied modes of becoming—most of which lack any conscious will or awareness—how much further must the concept of knowledge stretch within a world composed of innumerable perceptive becomings. 

Whitehead’s concept of proposition emerges in this wide perceptive context where Whitehead asserts that propositions “are not primarily for belief, but for feeling at the physical level of unconsciousness. They constitute a source of the origination of feeling which is not tied down to mere datum” (PR 186). In short, propositions are a hybrid feeling of what is possible from what exists; an imaginative possibility of how the future could develop differently.

Of course, a proposition can rise to an intellectual judgment, but is first and foremost “a lure for feeling” (PR 87) that awaits any emergent subject to feel it and (possibly) act upon it. In one explanatory example, many people in a town may know there is an empty lot near the town center, but only one enterprising community member prehends the proposition “a new park on that corner.”^[18] At the moment, the proposition of a possible park may be false, but this is far less important than the proposition as a lure for feeling that may give rise to an individual sharing their idea with others, gathering neighbor input, and working with the city council to make the imagined park into a reality. Propositions are important because they “pave the way for the advance into novelty.”^[19] Feeling something anew can produce the future differently.

Conclusion

My aim has been to consider alternate ways that open animal rescue cases could sidestep persistent legal exclusions of animals without requiring personhood or the necessity defense, by articulating a profound moral injury to one’s social self that literally, materially, and vulnerably arises through relations, including relations with and through animal others.

Finally, I suggest that the metaphysics of moral injury can be more feasibly joined into religious commitments and language—whether sacred, scientific or secular—that could be more fully integrated within defense narratives. At present in the U.S., veganism or other ethical practices have failed the legal test of sincerely held beliefs. ^[20] These ethical practices, however, need not be the sole foundation. Rather those practices can be understood as emergent responses to a moral injury that occurs when one witnesses or understand the destruction of other relational existents as a destruction of one’s own becoming and of propositional future to come.

^[1] In 2023, Wayne Hsiung, a lawyer and founder of Direct Action Everywhere, was sentenced to 90-days for rescuing chickens and ducks in Sonoma County, California; he served 38 days. In 2006, filmmaker and activist Adam Durand was sentenced to six months in jail for his exposé of “cage-free” eggs at a Wegman’s subsidiary farm in upstate New York; he served 35 days.

^[2] Patty Mark of Australia is often credited with the modern origins of open rescue in the 1980s. However, examples of intervention on behalf of animals can be found in secular and religious traditions of Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Chinese philosophies, Judaism, Pythagoreans, Neoplatonists, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, many global ecofeminist and indigenous traditions, among others.

^[3] See fn 1.

^[4] Justin Marceau, Wayne Hsuing, and Steffen Seitz, “Voluntary Prosecution and the Case of Animal Rescue,” Harvard Law Review 137.4 (2024): 213–36, https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/137-Harv.-L.-Rev.-F.-213.pdf. 

^[5] “Animal Partisan Obtains Records Revealing FBI Interest in Using Weapons of Mass Destruction Laws Against Animal Rights Activists,” Vermont Law & Graduate School, July 31, 2024, https://www.vermontlaw.edu/news-and-events/animal-partisan-obtains-records.

^[6] Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, “She Took Chickens from a Slaughterhouse. Was it a Rescue or a Crime?” The Guardian, October 24, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/24/chicken-rescue-factory-farm

^[7] Judge Kenneth Gnoss, courtroom comments September 15, 2025.

^[8] “Harvard Professor Submits Brief Declaring Necessity Defense Applies to Rescue of Animals,” Animal Law and Policy Program, Harvard Law School, August 331, 2023, https://animal.law.harvard.edu/news-article/the-rescue-of-animals/.

^[9] Kristen Stilt, “Notice of Motion and Motion for Leave to File Amicus Curiae Brief in Support of Defendant Wayne Hsuing ‘s Motion to Compel and In Limine; Memorandum of Points and Authorities,” Superior Court of California, August 30, 2023, https://animal.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/DxE-Amicus-Brief.pdf.

^[10] Douglas O. Linder, “Animal Rights (Personhood) Trials: A Chronology,” UMKC School of Law, n.d., https://famous-trials.com/animalrights/2593-animal-rights-personhood-trials-a-chronology.

^[11] Tony Leyh, Standing Aside for Animals: Disentangling the Strategy and Goals of Animal Welfare Litigation, The University of Chicago Law Review Online 2021, https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/online-archive/standing-aside-animals-disentangling-strategy-and-goals-animal-welfare-litigation.

^[12] Jennifer Shike, “Jury Rejects ‘Rescue’ Defense: DxE Extremist Zoe Rosenbergy Found Guilty in Chicken Heist,” Pork Business, October 30, 2025, https://www.porkbusiness.com/news/industry/jury-rejects-rescue-defense-dxe-extremist-zoe-rosenberg-found-guilty-chicken-heist.

^[13] Isabelle Stengers, Thinking With Whitehead: A Free & Wild Creation of Concepts (Harvard University Press 2011), 7.

^[14] Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosomology, Corrected edition. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (The Free Press 1978).

^[15] Stengers, 325.

^[16] Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (The Free Press 1933), 252ff; see also Brian G. Henning, The Ethics of Creativity: Beauty, Morality, and Nature in a Processive Cosmos (University of Pittsburgh Press 2005)

^[17] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (Verso 2006), 22.

^[18] This altered example is derived from an original in Donald W. Sherburne, ed. A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality (Macmillan Publishing 1966), 240. Related to the topic of open rescue of animals, whereas many people may see a chicken as an inert machine soon to be disassembled into a bucket of wings, maybe only one person sees a responsive and perceptive teacher. This “lure for feeling” is the propositional seed of novel becoming.

^[19] Sherburne, A Key, 240. 

^[20] See Friedman v. Southern California Permanente Medical Group, 102 Cal. App. 4th 39 (2002) as holding that employee’s veganism is not a religious belief.