After all, I was going to take two injured piglets off a farm and then turn them into a landfill, and I’ll be gone again in the next day
A jury in southern Utah allowed me to walk free earlier this month, after I took two injured piglets from a farm in the middle of the night and did not have permission to be there. 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 admitting what we did, that was all we had done.
We sneaked onto the farm one night. 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 piglets had their faces covered with blood and the mother had bloody teats that were too graphic for a vet to read. 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.
Their larger goal is to establish a “right” to rescue animals that face inhumane treatment in agriculture. In the context of factory farming, the way chickens are treated in the Foster Farms video would be considered blatant cruel. Many would also consider it cruel to stand by while someone else handled animals this way. Wayne Hsiung, a co- founder of DxE, told me that if someone was in my neighborhood watching me boil birds alive, they would call it monstrous behavior.
Shouldn’t the same be true of animals we’re going to eat? Don’t we have a moral obligation to do whatever we can to save animals from inhumane factory-farming facilities, or, at the very least, to not punish people who do try to help?
vegan and animal rights activists deserve a lot of respect and honor, because they are right about the big issues: that industrial-scale animal farming is an incomprehensible practice many of us attempt. It’s culturally and politically verboten.