Animal Rights Activists Rescued Two Piglets From Slaughter. They Wanted to Get Caught.

Liberating the pigs from a Smithfield facility was just the first step in Wayne Hsiung and Paul Darwin Picklesimer’s grand plan. Now they want their legal case to start a sea change in animal rights.

...Years later, Picklesimer faces charges of trespassing, theft, and burglary as part of criminal proceedings in three states. In each case, Picklesimer and other animal activists broke into farm and animal testing facilities, where they recorded the prevailing conditions and “rescued” the animals therein. Total penalties span nearly $332,000 in restitution debt and potentially decades in prison.

In the most widely publicized case, Picklesimer and other activists, including Wayne Hsiung, co-founder of animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE, entered Circle Four Farms, a massive Utah pig facility owned by Smithfield Foods, in 2017. The activists filmed the pigs’ conditions, whisked two piglets away to safety, and sent the footage to the news media. With Smithfield’s backing, Utah prosecutors filed felony charges.

Several other activists have since taken plea deals that prevent them from publicly disparaging the company. But Picklesimer and Hsiung have declined similar offers. Instead, they’re pressing for a trial they hope will go down as a pivotal moment in the history of the animal rights movement. They seek to convince a jury that the moral urgency of saving the piglets at Circle Four Farms justified the alleged crimes, establishing a landmark legal precedent that incorporates a factory farm animal’s suffering into the law’s moral calculus. Whether they will be permitted to make this argument at all will be determined by a Utah judge, following a major pretrial hearing set to take place Thursday.

The protracted case is one of several involving DxE activists, whose tactics testing the frontiers of the law distinguish the group in an animal rights movement that has recently been inclined to work squarely within the legal system.

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If you have any interest in the animal rights movement and its efforts to affect your industry and local communities, then you should take the time to read this.