An animal rights activist has been issued a trespass warning after she stormed the floor of an NBA basketball game Tuesday night and attempted to superglue herself to the court.
Alicia Santurio attempted her protest during the second quarter of the Minnesota Timberwolves and Los Angeles Clippers matchup.
She made her way onto the court of the Target Center in Minneapolis and attempted to superglue her hand to the floor underneath one of the baskets.
Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), a group that fights for the rights of animals, took responsibility for the stunt, saying Santurio was one of their operatives and explained she glued herself to the court in protest of an alleged mass killing of more than five million chickens at a facility owned by Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor.
“The mass killing happened at Rembrandt Enterprises, an Iowa factory egg farm owned by billionaire Glen Taylor, who also owns the Minnesota Timberwolves,” DxE said in a press release.
The group alleges the birds were killed when ventilation was shut off inside their enclosure following an outbreak of “highly pathogenic avian influenza.”
While glued to the floor, Santurio wore a shirt that said, “GLEN TAYLOR ROASTS ANIMALS ALIVE.”
Santurio was quickly pulled up from the floor and escorted off the court.
A DxE spokesperson told the Washington Examiner that she experienced some torn skin and required stitches after she was pulled up from the court.
Santurio, who flew from California to Minnesota to pull off her protest, told Sporting News that she’s stoked to be dubbed the so-called #GlueGirl on social media and doesn’t mind that people are poking fun at her.
“This is an issue no one talks about and now it has a lot of attention on it,” Santurio told the website. “We have to get our message out there and the jokes help propel it.”
She also said it was “pretty easy” to make her way onto the court.
“There were security guards, ushers and police all around but I just walked down the aisle, turned and kept walking onto the court. I was shocked how easy it was to glue my hand down and stay there.”
In all, gameplay was interrupted for only a couple of minutes, and Santurio was asked to leave the game and not return to the Target Center for a year.
It’s the second time DxE has orchestrated a superglue protest in the past week. On April 6, activist Carla Cabral glued her left hand to a table, disrupting a hearing of the Assembly Agriculture Committee in Sacramento, Calif.
Cabral told KTLA News that she wanted to signal to lawmakers her group’s displeasure that they were not voting on a bill that proposed a moratorium on new factory farms.
Lawmakers at the hearing ended up moving to another room to finish their hearing, while paramedics used WD-40 to free Cabral’s hand.
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