Agribusiness exploits humans and animals alike – legal protections should be species-blind

By siloing human rights from animal welfare, our regulatory framework makes it harder to see what – or rather who – such cross-species harms have in common.

Dr Hugo Uys-Breytenbach is a legal theorist and postdoctoral fellow at the Research Chair in Gender, Transformation and World-making at the University of the Western Cape’s Faculty of Law. His work explores law’s relationship to human and nonhuman life, to think about animals, bodies and vulnerability. He also lectures in legal philosophy and gender law.

More than a year has passed since Don Pinnock and Lisakanya Venna’s exposé in Daily Maverick ( Inside Daybreak ) brought public attention to the harrowing treatment of human employees and animal livestock alike on the broiler farms of Daybreak Foods. Much has happened since: Daybreak was placed under business rescue, hundreds of workers were placed on unpaid leave and later marched to the Department of Employment and Labour in a desperate attempt to access TERS funds, and, by April 2026, nearly 1,900 employees had reportedly lost their jobs as the company struggled to survive (see Daybreak Collapse ). The Public Investment Corporation, which has invested about R1.7-billion in the company, is now seeking a strategic buyer for the troubled poultry producer.

Arguably, these developments have not displaced the central problem exposed by the original report. Indeed, it has merely further emphasised that Daybreak cannot be dismissed as an isolated episode of managerial failure or corporate misconduct, but must be understood as an ongoing pattern of gross abuse and neglect – thousands of chickens starved to the point of cannibalising one another, and hundreds of employees abandoned to job insecurity, withheld wages and imminent eviction. The story is certainly shocking and upsetting, yet it is neither new (see Laying Down the Facts research report) nor accidental. Rather, it is the inevitable and repeated outcome of unchecked agribusiness that regards all life – whether human or animal – as an exploitable and replaceable resource whose sole value is to maintain supply chains.

The grim details of life at Daybreak Foods do not merely bring to light the routine cruelty of industrial animal agriculture; after all, who among us does not, really, already know (or at least strongly suspect) what happens behind the fences of factory farms? Instead, what this article finally brings to light is a deeper and more concerning problem – namely, the inability of the current legal regulatory framework to clearly and accurately see the violence of routine agribusiness.

It is notable that the Daybreak Foods disaster is framed as a coincidence of two related yet distinct crises – on the one hand, that of unimaginable animal suffering stemming from human neglect and, on the other, that of complete disregard for dignified labour practices stemming from poor corporate governance. Indeed, this dual-track approach is also reflected in the relevant legal frameworks regulating these issues.