This story was a real surprise to me. Utah is a very pro-business state. the local joke is Utah is government of the owners, for the owners, by the owners. What the owners want, the owners get. Since LDS Inc is one of the major (if not THE major) owners, they are perfectly happy with this arrangement.

If all of Utah is very conservative, this is true in spades for southern Utah. Smithfield meats had two piglets stolen from their Milford plant by activists who toured the plant, saw that there were two injured piglets that were almost certainly going to be left to die, and were taken by the activists and nursed back to health. The activists broke in and stole the piglets, Smithfield wanted to make an example of them.

Several of the people plea bargained down to guilty with no jail time. Two insisted on a jury trial and at least one (the author of the NYTimes article) represented himself.

The jury, much to my surprise, acquitted them.

From the article:
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By Wayne Hsiung
Wayne Hsiung is the co-founder of the animal rights network Direct Action Everywhere.
A jury in southern Utah let me walk free earlier this month after I took two injured piglets from a farm in the middle of the night that I had no permission to be on. The verdict, on felony burglary and misdemeanor theft charges that could have sent me and my co-defendant, Paul Darwin Picklesimer, to jail for more than five years, was a shock. After all, we had admitted to what we had done.

We’re animal rights activists. We believe the decision underscores an increasing unease among the public over the raising and killings of billions of animals on factory farms. Our rescue of the piglets took place during a clandestine three-month undercover operation I led into the world’s largest pork producer, Smithfield Foods. We focused on Smithfield’s Circle Four Farms in Milford, Utah, which raises over a million pigs for slaughter every year.

We sneaked into the farm one night in March 2017. Inside, we found and documented sick and underweight piglets. One of them could not walk properly or reach food because of an infected wound to her foot, according to a veterinarian who testified on our behalf. The other piglet’s face was covered in lesions and blood, and she struggled to nurse from a mother whose teats showed gruesome reproductive injuries, the veterinarian, who reviewed video of the piglets and spoke to caretakers, said in a report. Given their conditions, both piglets were likely to be killed and potentially tossed into a landfill outside of Circle Four Farms, in which millions of pounds of dead pigs and other waste are discarded every year. Nationally, an estimated 14 percent of piglets die before they’re weaned.

But that would not be the fate of these two. After removing the piglets, our team nursed them back to health. We named them Lily and Lizzie. Some four months later, we shared a video of our actions with The Times. (Smithfield claimed that the video appeared staged. It was not.) In August, F.B.I. agents descended on animal sanctuaries in Utah and Colorado with search warrants for the two pigs. At the Colorado shelter, government veterinarians cut off part of Lizzie’s ear for DNA testing. Not long after, my four co-defendants and I were indicted by state enforcement officials.

All this, despite the fact that a representative from the company testified at our trial that no one at the farm even noticed that the piglets were missing until a video appeared online. The piglets were, according to one of the prosecution’s own witnesses, worth at most $42.20 each.
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The jury deliberated for about eight hours. Many jurors, according to a juror who spoke to me after the trial, believed at the outset that what we did was unlawful and we needed to be punished. But two issues influenced their decision to acquit, the juror said. First, the jurors concluded that we lacked the intent to steal. We were there to document the conditions, and to rescue an animal only if we found one in need. Second, the jurors felt that the piglets at issue had no value to Smithfield. The jury thus concluded they could not be the objects of a theft.

The juror I spoke to also mentioned a third major factor that went beyond the legal issues: our appeal to conscience. During the closing statements in the trial, in which I represented myself, I told jurors that a not-guilty verdict would encourage corporations to treat animals under their care with more compassion and make governments more open to animal cruelty complaints.
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The corporation's narrative was that the injured piglets were like dented cans in a grocery store. You don't just get to pick up a dented can and walk out with it. The jurors apparently found comparing suffering and dying piglets to dented cans heartless. Imagine that.

Full article at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/18/opinion/animal-rights-factory-farming.html

I've been following this story. I hope this is a step toward better awareness of how animals are treated. It's abhorrent and getting worse in factory farming.

I'm surprised any progress or awareness about animal cruelty was made in Utah of all places. Maybe more people will demand the animals they eat have better living conditions.

Save the pigs, eat chicken.

Chicks don't suckle!

And pigs are closer to sentience than poultry, and some mormons.

True. I agree with that. Sadly chickens are treated horribly too.

This might be a good place to rag about the Bible telling people they have "dominion over animals." This is permission to do anything they want to animals. Imagine if the Bible said animals deserve as much respect and protection as we give fellow humans.

IMO, it's unfortunate that we shifted from thanking the animal sacrificed to thanking some God for giving us the animal to slaughter. It was the first shift away from facing the suffering of fellow animals for survival. Too many Humans don't have enough empathy or compassion.

I hate the design of life we have that requires life to kill other life to survive. It was one of the first reasons I dismissed the idea of a loving god.

all the wild-caught shrimp ~



in ziller's tacos ~



never suffered a inconvenience a day in they life ~



except for the brief moment ~



they were dropped into the boiling pot ~



brb ~



#delicious ~

That's not necessarily true, ziller. Cruel humans have figured out a way to make some shrimp suffer. I was surprised to learn about this recently:

From Wiki:
Eyestalk ablation is the removal of one (unilateral) or both (bilateral) eyestalks from a crustacean. It is routinely practiced on female shrimps (or female prawns) in almost every marine shrimp maturation or reproduction facility in the world, both research and commercial. The aim of ablation under these circumstances is to stimulate the female shrimp to develop mature ovaries and spawn...removal is often done without anesthesia and the impaired vision leads to more stress.


It seems impossible for this to be done on small shrimp or in large numbers, but no doubt humans will find better ways to exploit them. I'm still learning about this. I can't believe it would be time and cost effective to do. I always assumed that pescatarians caused less suffering than regular carnivore types but our practices in the ocean are making me wonder.

Would you like your eyestalks ripped off ziller? Surely you wouldn't mind if it made you into a taco faster.

I'm glad they were acquitted. Two piglets and they sued? Two dented cans, huh? That's disgusting.

I haven't heard many stories lately, but I don't watch Utah news anymore and I don't read Utah news on line.

I do know there had been quite a few horses that weren't being fed some years ago.

I can't stand going to the fair and watching them auction off the animals, having been through that myself. I wasn't a big lover of the lambs we raised (my brother's FFA project) as my sister and I had to do the showing and the selling as my dad noticed we got more money if we held the lamb during auctioning.

I remember watching a girl wash her cow off several times and then she was crying that last day. Okay, I NEVER HAD A CLUE. I was probably a whole 10 years old. My brother used to say good-bye to his lambs.

So I went to the Box Elder County Fair with my boyfriend a few years ago. Used to go with my dad every year as he was over the FFA. In talking to my younger sister, her boyfriend offered to buy her a lamb for the meat. She about lost it. Not a one of us ever eats lamb and I don't even buy lamb dog food. And here most of us are in our 60s and still don't eat lamb.

I think 4-H and FFA are a horrible way to teach children where animals are concerned.

That case put a good spotlight on animal cruelty.

The worm is turning. Liberal policies make it into Utah law at the dismay of the Brethren, and now this. More human decency, where will it end?

Factory farming is mostly cruel. The 4H kids at least treat their animals decently even if they end up in someone's freezer.

At this point, I would gladly "eat ze bugs" rather than support factory farms.

The animals are free!
The people are FREE!

Food isn't free
Until we free it

Better than to be it