Las Vegas: An Indian-American animal rights activist briefly interrupted Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’s on-stage firechat when she rushed on stage and asked Bezos to do something about “chicken farms”.
Bezos was in middle of the discussion on Thursday during Amazon’s first-ever “re:MARS” meet in Las Vegas when 30-year-old Priya Sawhney of Berkeley, California, entered the keynote session, went up the stage and shouted: “You are the world’s richest man. You’re the President of Amazon and you can help the animals”.
Saying that she has been inside “Amazon’s chicken farms”, Sawhney yelled at Bezos to stop the abuses of animals in these facilities. The security guards quickly surrounded her and took her away as the packed house went silent.
Holding a single white rose and wearing a sort of conference badge, Sawhney was from Direct Action Everywhere (DXE), an international grassroots network of animal rights activists founded in 2013 in the San Francisco Bay Area. Once she was taken away by the security guards, Bezos turned to the moderator and said: “Do you have a response to that?”
According to media reports, Las Vegas police did not confirm if Sawhney was arrested. Amazon doesn’t directly own or operate chicken farms but it buys chicken meat from suppliers that have been previously targeted by the DXE activists.
-Nishant Arora
