---
title: "Agribusiness exploits humans and animals alike – legal protections should be species-blind"
description: "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."
type: "OpinionNewsArticle"
publisher: "Daily Maverick"
site: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za"
section: "Maverick Earth"
author: "Hugo Uys-Breytenbach"
author_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/hugo-uys-breytenbach/"
canonical_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2026-08-17-agribusiness-exploits-humans-and-animals-alike-legal-protections-should-be-species-blind/"
published: "2026-08-17T23:01:08"
updated: "2026-08-17T23:38:41"
lang: "en-ZA"
word_count: 1319
---

# 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.

By Hugo Uys-Breytenbach · Published 18 August 2026, 01:01 SAST · Updated 18 August 2026, 01:38 SAST

## Content

![Signpost-Opinion](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/ToEp388PygKxbVnnboBpUQ3buys=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/label-Opinion.jpg)

More than a year has passed since Don Pinnock and Lisakanya Venna’s exposé in Daily Maverick ([Inside Daybreak](https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-05-07-inside-daybreak-hunger-silence-bullets-and-betrayal-at-delmas-chicken-farms/)) 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](https://www.foodformzansi.co.za/daybreak-collapse-leaves-nearly-1900-workers-jobless/)). 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](https://www.animallawreform.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Laying-Down-The-Facts-Report-V3.pdf) 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.

### The diagnosis

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. Animal welfare – specifically, that of chickens used for agricultural poultry purposes – is regulated by a nebulous series of statutes, regulations and policy documents, the most notable of which are the Animal Protections Act of 1962, the Poultry Regulations under the Meat Safety Act of 2000 and the Poultry Sector Master Plan. (It is also worth noting that of these, only the first is expressly concerned with the welfare of chickens, rather than human-centred concerns such as food quality and sustainable economic development.) In contradistinction, employee welfare is regulated by a separate set of statutes and regulations, most notably the Labour Relations Act of 1995 and the Basic Conditions of Employment Act of 1997.

Now, while admittedly some separation is to be expected (specific legal instruments are needed to address specific regulatory issues), the current dual approach separates animal welfare and employee welfare to such an extent that the law cannot grasp the full scope of the harm suffered at factory farms such as Daybreak Foods. Agribusiness does not exploit chickens instead of people, nor people instead of chickens; it exploits both. And yet still, it does not just exploit both simultaneously yet separately, but does so systematically – that is, as parts of a single, integrated process.

What Pinnock and Venna’s piece gestures towards is that these are not two distinct spheres of suffering and exploitation – one human, one animal – where occasionally one might bleed over, cause or affect the other. There is no priority to either of the exploitative practices at Daybreak Foods. In fact, there is no “either”, no distinction – there is only one unified process of exploitation, an agribusiness supply chain that approaches all life with the sole purpose of extracting maximum value for minimum cost, irrespective of its impacts on human employees and/or animal livestock. This is an integrated, wilful, single system; a systemic culture of for-profit exploitation. And yet our legal framework continues to divide this exploitation, and thereby treat the resultant sufferings as two separate problems.

Again, one might object, is some separation not to be expected, if only for pragmatic purposes? Sure, we might concede this point. Yet, we cannot afford to lose sight of the fact that this separation – whatever its rationale – is not neutral, but part of the very problem. That the law regards, and therefore regulates, these as two separate problems is to treat merely the symptoms (animal suffering and labour exploitation), and not their common underlying cause: the commodification of life.

In the eyes of agribusinesses such as Daybreak Foods, both chickens (as livestock) and workers (as employees) are impersonal units of input. What matters is not the life and experience of these individuals, but their productivity, efficiency and cost – precisely that which renders them anonymous, replaceable and exploitable. This is not merely a failure of ethics, of regulatory enforcement or of corporate governance. It is a deeply rooted strategy of furthering control, minimising costs and maximising profits. It is a corporate strategy which works, in no small part, because the law has been slow to catch up.

### A prognosis?

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. There are legal avenues to address this, but it requires a different starting point. Instead of focusing on employee labour violations and livestock animal abuse as distinct (if related) problems, regulators should focus on industrial agriculture as a singular site of systemic harm. Multistakeholder inspections should include labour, environmental and animal welfare concerns as part of a single audit process. Licensing regimes could make corporate responsibility for both human and non-human wellbeing a condition of operation. And greater transparency must be pursued both by requiring stringent reporting on human and animal protections alike, and by ensuring robust whistleblower protections for workers who speak out and are often the only witnesses to both human and animal suffering.

More fundamentally, however, we must reframe our very understanding of “harm” itself. This would mean rethinking our own assumed position as “human beings”, beginning to see ourselves as fellow animals who co-inhabit this one Earth, and recognising that suffering – whether human or animal – is not just a matter of individual pain, but of structural disregard for life itself.

It is somewhat concerning, then, that even the NSPCA itself ascribes the Daybreak disaster to a “culmination of financial collapse, managerial disarray and regulatory failure” (see [Inside Daybreak](https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-05-07-inside-daybreak-hunger-silence-bullets-and-betrayal-at-delmas-chicken-farms/)). Instead, though one might grant that it was the result of “regulatory failure”, we must refuse to exceptionalise this case by understanding the “failure” in question, finally, not merely as a failure of regulatory execution or enforcement, but as a more fundamental failure of regulatory design or conceptualisation. We do not need more stringent animal welfare and/or labour regulations. What we need, rather, is focused and targeted regulation of the agribusiness sector itself in order to address, together and at once, the protection of all life and the advancement of dignified conditions across species lines.

Ultimately, to frame the events that transpired at Daybreak Farms as a sad but exceptional event is both disingenuous and inaccurate. Suffering, whether that of human employees or animal beings, is not an unfortunate side-effect of industrial agriculture that we might yet regulate away; it is the enabling logic that makes industrial agriculture as we know it both possible and profitable. It is our duty, then, as fellow animals, to finally put protection above profit. **DM**