What is a Pig Worth?

Introduction

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Meeting Wayne Chung

1:22Okay, so this one, it starts when this guy, Jay Menard, joined my meditation group. Okay. We're also both journalists. And so, you know, one day we started talking about the kinds of stories we are drawn to. Uh-huh. And, you know, we're both Buddhist. So we're interested in, like, impermanence, interconnection, and suffering, you know, death. And why death and suffering? Like, why is that a Buddhist? Well, I mean, like, the idea is that when you look at the things that scare you, there's actually a chance for kind of like a deeper truth to show itself.

1:59Huh. Anyway, it was like this whole conversation. And then at some point, we realized in our own attempts to find this kind of story, we've actually both been tracking the same guy. What, really? Hey, how are you all? Hi, Wayne. This guy, Wayne Chung. Okay. Nice to see you. Nice to see you. So that's Jay. We actually ended up calling Wayne up together. Great. He was in California at the time. Oliver. Oliver's there. That's your dog. His dog was there. Oliver, come here, buddy. Good boy, Oliver. You're so happy.

2:30This little mutt. He's from China. And once Oliver settled down, Wayne started telling us about, oddly enough, his childhood dog.

Wayne's Childhood

2:38So I was not a very popular kid, not a very well-adjusted kid. I was fat. I was an immigrant. Did not have any social skills. I didn't speak English that well. So Wayne grew up in this like small little town in Indiana as one of the only Chinese kids. Okay. Had a lot of trouble in the friend department. Uh-huh. But his family did have this dog. And this dog was just the love of my life. Her name was Vivian. This like black Labrador mutt. Every time when I came home from school, she literally jumps up and down out of control.

3:10Vivian would cherish my every moment. Like she would cherish every part of me and didn't care about how fat I was, you know, how dorky I was. She just loved me.

Trip to China

3:20But when I was, I believe, nine years old, we went back to China for the first time. Like they were taking a family trip? Okay. My main kind of recollection from that trip was, relatively early on, we were in southern China, and we went to this restaurant. They're called, I think they're called, the translation is something like a wild earth restaurant. Earth restaurant? It's like a vegan restaurant or something like that? No, the opposite. Oh. It's like, you know, when you go to the seafood restaurant where all the animals are, like, alive in these, like, aquariums and you can pick what you want?

3:52Right. It's like that, except, like, there's every kind of animal.

4:00One of the things we saw was, like, like a monkey in a cage. Oh, wow. Like, with a chain around his neck. Hmm.

4:24Oh, man.

4:37started weeping uncontrollably and I kept asking him, dad, we have to stop them. We have to stop them. We have to help. And I still remember the words he told me, which were, son, this is just

Realization

4:51what they're taught. And there's nothing for us to do. In Chinese culture, you do what you're taught. There's this Chinese term, guai, that every kid in Chinese culture wants to be guai. And all the parents. Everybody thought I was like the most quiet kid because whatever the adults told me to do, I'd always do it. I was a very, very compliant child. And this is the first time I realized not everything that I'm taught is right. And that sense of distrust ended up being very important to

5:23the next 30 plus years of my life.

Wayne's Activism

5:30So Wayne grows up, goes off to college, reads Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, becomes a vegan, goes on to law school, becomes a law professor. Wow. But it wasn't until years later that he finally stopped following the rules and started figuring out how to do the thing that he had wanted to do all those years ago in that restaurant in China. Let me show you a photo of what's happening inside this farm. Our activists were in this farm as recently as a couple days ago. He co-found this group called Direct Action Everywhere.

6:01Folks, we are about to march into a massive factory farm the heart of darkness and hell. Among other things, they break into factory farms and videotape everything to show people what the farm is like inside. The only way to make this act, this violence stop, is for people to take direct action. And, you know, they've done this like dozens of times. Like, their videos have gotten thousands of views. And in 2017, one of their videos gets published by the New York Times. So Circle Four is a farm that processes and kills 1.2 million pigs every year.

6:35So Wayne's standing in this kind of scrubby desert field at twilight with four other guys. Paul's going to be managing the camera. The rest of you are going to help me with logistics and supplies. And just over the hill behind them is this enormous pig farm owned by Smithfield Foods, one of the largest pork producers in the world.

The Trial

6:52Our naming objective today is exposure, to show the world what's actually happening behind these closed doors. So you're all ready to go? Yeah. You ready to go? Let's do this.

7:05Then the video cuts to night. Alright folks, we're going to head into circle four. This is the heart of evil. They flip their headlamps on and go in. This facility is massive. Even just this one barn, you can see down here. Aisle after aisle after aisle. So they're walking around, filming things. And eventually, they come across a litter of piglets. And this little piglet in the corner, here's her face is covered in blood, And blood, and she's down on the ground. And this time, they take two of the piglets out with them.

7:35And, you know, after the video got published in the New York Times, Smithfield issued a statement saying they'd commissioned this third-party audit of the farm that found no evidence of animal mistreatment. And they accused Wayne of editing the video to make the farm look bad. They also called the cops, and Wayne got charged with multiple felonies. Two counts of burglary and one count of felony theft. Each of which could lead to years in prison. Yeah. And so Wayne eventually heads to trial. And it's there that he does something we really didn't expect.

8:07Like something sort of the opposite of what we thought someone like him would do. Yeah, this weird legal maneuver that forces the jury and really all of us to look at this thing we don't normally want to look at. this messy, kind of impossible question about our relationship with animals.

8:33Welcome. We're on record in the matter of state versus plain shung. The trial begins on October 3rd, 2022, in western Utah. We're in this Cherrywood courtroom. The state is prepared to go forward. On one side, you have the prosecution, a man and a woman, both attorneys for the state. And then on the defense, Wayne. Oh, he's representing himself. Yeah. Huh.

9:03And he told us that he was feeling pretty nervous. Because you're waiting for these people who are going to decide your fate to come in. I'll rise for the jury. The jury files into their seats, eight people, men and women, all locals, of course. And this is like a 75% Trump County. Like, Smithfield is one of the biggest employers in the area. Oof, not great odds. Yeah, I mean, a lawyer he talked to had, like, begged him to take a plea. She described the situation as hopeless.

9:34No kidding. But he wanted the fight. Okay.

9:41Ladies and gentlemen, the jury. So the trial begins with prosecution. The facts in this case will show. They argue basically. But among other things. This is simple. Enter an unauthorized area owned by Smithfield Farms. Wayne broke into the farm. Without permission of the owners removing two of the pigs. Took two piglets. Stilling. You know, there's really no question about it. They actually filmed themselves doing it. We have it on video. Then posted the video online.

10:12Then... Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's Wayne's turn. Against the advice of pretty much all the attorneys I've talked to, I'm gonna tell you exactly what we did on the night of question. And he says it's true. I did remove two piglets from Smithfield Foods on the 9th of March 7th, 2017. I did it.

10:32Curious strategy for a defense attorney. Exactly. Well, you know, Wayne says, for better or worse... We weren't trying to hide what we had done. Like, in fact, he's like... The video should just be playing for it. Play the video. And the prosecution is basically like, We have an order from the court that we would not talk about animal welfare. No, no, no, no, we're not showing the video. And Wayne's like, no, come on, I want you to show the jury what happened. Why can't he play the video?

11:04Yeah, well, the prosecution argues that showing it would bias the jury against the farm. You can already hear the screams of the more pigs inside. And when you watch it, They're suffering, and we're going to try and expose what's actually happening inside. You can understand why.

11:29It this dark endless building filled with hundreds and hundreds of pigs in row on row of steel cages not much larger than their bodies These mother pigs are desperate to get out of the crates. They're smashing their heads up against these crests to the point that they have swelling on their faces, cuts on their faces. And the prosecution was like, that's not what this is about. The judge said over and over again, Smithfield's not on trial, Mr. Sean, you are. But like, you know, like the whole reason Wayne showed up in court and admitted what he did is that he can't actually put Smithfield on trial.

12:07Because an animal doesn't have rights like a person. You can't file legal complaint on their behalf. Right. But if Wayne gets arrested doing one of these rescues. Trusting ourselves in the position of the animal. Then his thought is I can put Smithfield on trial through, you know, having him come after me. By putting myself on trial. Yeah. I see. So even though they rule that he cannot show the video... Mr. Topping, my name is Wayne Chung. I'm the defendant in council. In this case, I'm going to ask you a few questions to follow up on what Mr. Christensen asked you. Is that all right? No problem.

12:37Thank you. Whenever he starts questioning a witness... Mr. Topping, you testified that you viewed a video of an intrusion to the farm. You see him kind of sneaking in... But you have no knowledge of this intrusion prior to that video? ...and little details about the conditions of the farm. That's probably because there are lots of piglets in Smithfield. Basically trying to get them to just In fact, there are thousands of pigs even at a single farm like yours, correct? Describe what was in the video. It's also true that among those thousands of pigs, many of those piglets end up dying before they reach slaughter, correct? Object at this point. But when he does that,

13:08the prosecution objects. I'm sustaining the objection.

13:15And then... You said previously that you cannot see the piglets inside because the building is completely closed. Wayne tries again. I think the line of question we're going down is leading us toward our management practice. The prosecution objects again. I'll ask you just about the gestation. But Wayne does the same thing again. There are thousands of dead piglets at Smithfield Foods and any given at one time. Another objection. And... If animals at Smithfield do have injuries or disease, they are often discarded, correct? Wayne just keeps doing this.

13:47And piglets that are discarded into dumpsters. Presumably, these picklets are not sold for me, correct? I mean, this is a... I'm just trying to establish... It's sustained. I don't want you mentioning that again. Wayne's obviously getting nowhere. I'm just trying to establish... I have sustained the objection. He's pissing off the judge. I thought Wayne was a little cocky. And not just the judge. He's either, you know, really full of himself, hopelessly outmatched, or both. You know, we talked to a few of the jurors.

14:17Oh, wow, amazing. Yeah, yeah. And they said at this point, it didn't even seem like Wayne was acting like a real lawyer. He's an activist. People closed down freeways just to get their point out there. I actually think that does a disservice, at least to me. You know, they felt that he was kind of using this trial to grandstand. I wasn't particularly happy about being tied up for a week. And most of them, they just wanted to get this over with. We need to be out of here by Saturday for game day. And go watch football. Utah's playing UCLA this weekend.

14:49So that's kind of my focus was just getting done through this. Whatever we can do to speed this along, we're going to do it. Oh, man. Yeah. So, you know, Wayne's strategy to make this about Smithfield, like, it's really not working. But then... The first piglet, Lily, was suffering from very serious foot injury. He starts to focus on these two particular piglets that he took, which he names, Lily and Lizzie. Okay. She was starving to the point that she was approximately one-fourth the normal socks. Objection, you writer.

15:20He's still talking about the conditions of the animals. Prosecution objects like always. This is about the individual piglet who's ruined now, so the value is ruined. But this time, the judge allows it. This is a piglet who had wounds all over the place. Huh, why? Yeah, because Wayne is being charged with theft, right? Right. And in order for him to be convicted of theft, the law says the thing he took has to be worth something. Huh. So at the very least, he has to be able to talk about the objects he took. Sure, yeah, that makes sense.

15:51Um, so then... Tell us about these two individual pigs and the condition. Wayne starts to make this case that, you know, these piglets, they're malnourished. Like, they're really sick. It shows the diarrhea was explosive. He calls a veterinarian to the stand. Shersten Rosenberg. Who argues... I don't think she had more than a 5% chance of surviving. The piglets probably weren't going to make it without the attention of a vet, which, you know, isn't cheap. It would cost a minimum of $315 to give her the carrot patch to be a good. And when you compare that to the monetary value of the piglet to the farm,

16:25What would be the value of a 10 to 12 pound piglet? which another vet had testified was about $40. $42.20. If you do the math, these piglets would have been worth negative $272. Whoa, huh. So the money to rehabilitate them was more than the money that they were worth at the time. Exactly. Which Wayne argued would mean he didn't technically commit theft. Huh. Wow. What a weird move. It's like he clearly values the piglet because he broke into the farm to save it.

16:58But then now he's in court arguing that it actually has no value, less than no value, just so he won't get in trouble. Yeah. But like, it's more complicated than that. Okay. So like at one level, yes, he's saying that they don't have value, like a dollar value. But at the same time, he's also saying that they kind of have this different kind of value, like as living beings who can suffer. I'm going to move now to exhibit three. And in particular, he's arguing like the farm, they don't see the pigs this way.

17:30This is video footage of Lizzie the Piglet shortly after her first farm. Like, you can really see this happening in this one moment where Wayne is trying to introduce this clip of one of the piglets. And what does the video show? It shows Leslie's blood-covered face. And, you know, the prosecution objects, like always. You know what I mean? The stint objects. Saying, like, you know, the blood on the piglet's face, that could have come from the mother. It's not really about her. But the health of the piglet clearly depends on its relationship with the mom. So, I don't know. Right, you can't actually separate these things.

18:01but the judge is doing everything he can to try to do that. Like at one point he watches the video, like when the jury's not in the room, and he's like, okay, well... We shouldn't see the mom. So how about you just like print out a still shot and then cut out the piglet?

18:28This is so weird. I was just sitting at the defense table with a pair of scissors, cutting out eight little paper piglets. Oh, my God. Looked like something from a second grade art class. And I just thought to myself, this is just stranger than fiction. Whoa. And when the jury got these little cut out pictures. Hey, you group of adults who are all over the age of 30, we're not going to let you see this because it could be too upsetting and it could be too biasing. And I just, you know, it pissed me off.

19:00I remember holding this paper in my hands, looking at it as Wayne's describing it. I thought, why did you have to cut the paper? They told us at this point, they started to think, like, what is it you don't want us to see here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's when I started to question, wait a minute. If this is so clear cut, you should be able to lay out all the facts and let us make an educated decision. But before they could make any decision, we got the closing arguments. I think it's clear that the pigs were stolen.

19:31You know, the prosecution says, Imagine the use of the word rescue in some other context. The piglets did have value to the farms. Like, even if they were sick, you can't just take them. You were in the grocery store, and you saw a can with dents in them. They compared the piglets to a dented can. Oh, the runt piglets are dented cans. Exactly. And like you can't just take a dented can from a store. I've got to rescue that can put in my purse, take it out of the store. Okay. But in Wayne's closing argument, after all this talk about economic value

20:05and these piglets being technically worth less than nothing, Wayne kind of just leaves that behind entirely and says, you know, you should just acquit me because I did the right thing. These piglets deserve to be saved. If you defend our right to give aid to dying animals, to defend the right of all citizens to aid dying and sick and injured animals, companies will be a little more compassionate to the creatures under their stewardship. Governments will be a little more open to animal cruelty complains.

20:38And maybe, just maybe, a baby pig like Lily won't have to starve to death on the floor of a factory farm. The trial comes to a close. And after that, it's in the hands of the jury. So if we're thinking about this almost like 12 angry men in the room, where were people's positions? The room was split about 50-50. There was one that was not guilty. Two that were pretty sure they were guilty. And then there was this mix in the middle of unsure. And where were you in that?

21:09I was the unsure. I wasn't sure what I was going to do and whose side I was on. Okay. And since it's a criminal case, they need a unanimous vote. Right. Okay, let's do this. Okay, so they first decide they're going to tackle the burglary charge. And the technical definition of burglary, they're told, is... You're in a place that you're not supposed to be with the intent to take something of value. And, you know, they'd actually seen that part of the video where Wayne is, like, outside the farm giving his team instructions. And he says...

21:41If... If... If we find an animal in need, we'll do what we have to do. If. If. And this if, they argue, like it frees him from intent. Huh. We unanimously agreed you couldn't charge them with the burglary. So, burglary, done. Next, they have theft. He did take the thing. He took the thing. Yeah. But remember, like, theft requires proving that the thing that was taken has, quote, value. Was it monetary value or just value?

22:13Just value. So yeah, they just said it has to have value. And you have to keep in mind here, there's two types of value in the room. There's the economic value, which if you took this argument that it was zero or even negative, would get him off the hook. Correct. But also this other kind of value, like the inherent value of a living thing, a being. And Wayne obviously believes in this. It's what motivated him to take the piglets in the first place. And if the piglets have that kind of value, then the law says he should be guilty.

22:48Mm-hmm. Yeah. What? Yeah, it's a paradox. Like the logic flips. Flips. Yeah. Right. Bizarre. It's a conundrum. The question becomes, like, what kind of value are we talking about here? Right. And so they're like, okay, well, maybe we just ask the judge. You know we went and we talked to the bailiff and we said hey we got a question Can we go give this to the judge for them to talk about And so our question was who determines the value of the pig to whom Is it to Smithfield Is it to Wayne Is it us Is it the free trade market?

23:19Is it the New York Stock Exchange? Value to whom? And... We actually asked if we could all go outside into that locked parking lot that we had all been driving into all week and just get some fresh air while they deliberated. They're asked to come back and they're handed a paper that has the response and... From the judge. From the judge. And what that paper says is, it's for you to decide. Oh, they're missing that game. Yeah, yeah. And like this to me is like sort of crazy. It's like, how is there no answer to this question?

23:54We will watch the jury try to find one and try to find some answers ourselves right after we take a very quick break. We'll be right back.

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Jury Deliberation

25:55Welcome back. This is Radiolab. Animal rights activist Wayne Shung is still on trial for theft. And the jury has asked the judge to clarify what it means for piglets to have quote unquote value so they can help make their decision. And in response, the judge has basically shrugged. Yeah, we actually ran the situation by Justin Marceau, and I'm a law professor at the University of Denver. Kristen, still at Harvard Law School.

26:27A couple animal law professors. It's kind of crazy to me that there isn't a clear definition. Value seems like such a vague term. Well, yeah. I mean, yes and no, right? I mean, it rarely comes up. Justin, he told us, like, basically with any other object. The value is set. The value is fixed. We know how much your car is worth. We could figure out how much your printer is worth. We could figure out how much your computer is worth. But when you ask that same question about animals. Our intuition tells us that an animal is nothing like a couch. It's nothing like a car.

26:57It's not even really like a family heirloom. It gets weird. Like, that's a strange scenario. Because this value question, like, it quickly gets us to this much bigger question. What is an animal in the law? Like, what even are they? That's a big question. That is the big question. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like it. It's a great question. And how you answer this question is about value, sure. but also about whether they deserve protection or, like, have rights. Okay. So legal scholars have actually come up with...

27:29Three big buckets.

27:32This three-part framework. Three ways of thinking about these questions. Uh-huh. And the first is... They are property. They are just ours to use. Like, just think about how we farm animals that we eat. This is just, like... Just stuff? Yeah, yeah. They just exist to do what you want to them. Category two is... A view in which we may still see animals as property, but we value them insofar as we benefit. Basically, animals are property that means something to us.

28:02Think of a pet or a workhorse, and therefore we protect them. Laws passed in that vein would be done to help animals, but the ultimate beneficiary is humans. And then the third approach is that animals, well, they have some approximate equality to humans. Approximate. And this one they told us is harder to find. An example could maybe be animal testing bans on chimpanzees. We're providing protection for them because we think it's the right thing to do for them.

28:36Yeah. So anyway, it's a helpful framework. But the problem is like any certain type of animal can actually like fit into more than one bucket What is that? This is a rabbit The rabbit Like consider a rabbit I feel deeply connected to rabbits A rabbit can be a pet Okay And in that category they kind of have like the highest level of protections Like you have to feed them, you have to like keep them warm But also A rabbit can be Ooh, messed him up A prey animal You know, something you hunt for sport

29:07A rabbit can be an animal New medical research with rabbits is behind the development of most prescription drugs. Who's tested upon in the lab. These lab rabbits, they actually have more protections than the ones that are raised, almost like in a factory farm for fur. Mittens and liners and hats. You're just going to need a few ingredients. You'll obviously need some rabbit. Or for food. I'm going to cut the rabbit. And just twist it off. A rabbit cuts across all these categories.

29:37And it's just context here. Context is the thing that slots the rabbit into one or another of these categories. Right, right. Like, we kill rabbits all the time for food or fur. But let's say somebody kills your pet rabbit. That could be a felony. Wow. This was a pet with a name. That changed sort of the protections that it had. It? She had.

30:00Pronouns becomes this whole thing. Yes. Right, right, right. This is funny because it's like the other pronoun battle that you're not paying attention to. Yeah, yeah, which seems silly, but it gets to this question of what category are they? Are they something or someone? Right, right. And it's not just rabbits. Like, take dogs. Okay. Like, if your dog gets run over, you get whatever you bought the dog for. Like, you know, like the $50 adoption fee. Oh, wow, that's cold. On the other hand... When you die, you can leave your dog or cat all of your money.

30:35Yeah, it's pretty wild. And you can really see the court struggling with this contradiction. Like there was this one case where a dog was run over in front of his owner. The court says, look, this dog was a family member. And the family got to sue for emotional distress. And then there was this other case in Texas where they ruled, yeah, the dog is property. And then they literally say, not like a toaster. Okay. And this confusion about what animals are, like what they deserve from us in the law, like all of that, like that is what the jury was thrown into when the judge left it up to them to decide what the value of the piglets were.

31:11The value of the pig meant something different to different people. The conversation was all over the place. And they were bouncing around these categories too. Like on the one hand. There were some pretty impassioned arguments about, you know, the inherent value of life. There was this religious view in the room. Let's just say they have a soul. Also like... Always had dogs, cats, fish, hamsters, kind of you name it growing up. They were my best friends. I just love them. Love animals. You know, it was a group of people that cared about animals. But also some of them had strong feelings about property.

31:42Somebody brought up like an example of if I have a rust bucket of a lawnmower sitting in my backyard, can somebody just come in and take it and go, oh, they're not using it. You know, what if I had a paperclip in my hand? Would it have value to me and someone else would throw it away? Which sparked a lot of conversation about the value that pigs to Smithfield. Is there any value to a dead piglet? You know, are they put into fertilizer? Are they put into feed? Wow, they are really going all over the place here. Yeah. Everything someone was saying about value made sense. But you put all those legitimate thoughts together, they conflicted.

32:17You know, and we had been deliberating for seven hours at this point. I'd heard just about every argument. I'd been running through my head. I had jumped that fence a couple times myself. It was very, very emotional. There was tears. There was some table thumping. So we took a break, and we all went out and walked around. Just had a minute to get out of the situation and allow the mind to just kind of calm a little bit. And I went up to the one gentleman, and I says, I'm not sure we're going to get this resolved. And he says, well, I want you to go talk to the one gal that agrees with you and see if you guys would even budge.

32:52So I went over and talked to this guy. I said, I really think we owe it to everybody, to us as jurors, to the defendants, to the pro... to come up with a unanimous decision.

33:12The court clerk called me. On the phone? Yeah, well, he said, you know, there's a verdict. You should come in.

33:22counsel the jury just informed the day of the judge calls the jury in when the jury walked into kind of the jury seating area and they walked in you know two single file lines got into these two rows eight jurors i was like on the side of the table so i could look straight at them they didn't really give me eye contact and they they look kind of avoidant oh boy the defendants The foreperson raised their hand.

34:00The judge asks them if they had come to a unanimous decision. The man says yes. Yeah, they've reached a verdict. Let's get ready.

34:10Wayne stands up.

34:17And the clerk starts to read. State of Utah versus Wayne Hanson's Young. Police number 181-500-061. With the jurors in the above case, find the defendant Wayne Hanson's Young as follows. Count two. First burglary. Not guilty. Yeah. And then theft. Theft. Not guilty. Wait, what? Not guilty? Whoa Both not guilty I did kind of a double take I was like oh we won Wow Huh And wow I now so curious what these jurors said happened behind the scenes

34:55Well, actually, one of the jurors we spoke to, she kind of had this thought, this metaphor that really helped her kind of come to her decision. And apparently helped a lot of the jurors in the room. I just visually saw this pig just sitting in a box. And I thought, okay, who's holding this box and what value does this pig have? And I started voicing this analogy out loud. And I said, so, and I mentioned this juror's name.

35:27And I says, if you're holding this pig, this pig has huge amounts of value to you. I said, if I'm holding this pig, it has value to me. It's a living, breathing animal. It has a conscience. It's alive. And I said, what if we put it in the hands of Smithfield Farms? Does this pig have value? But wouldn't that logic just like either you can say it had value to him. So it is a crime or it didn't have value to Smithfield, who he took it from.

35:59So no, no value there, not a crime. Like basically this logic just lets the jury vote for whoever they want to vote for. Right. I mean, some of the jurors we spoke to didn't see it that way. I did it by the books. I did what was legally presented to me on a document that was agreed upon by all parties. They felt like they were following the letter of the law. But at the same time, this other juror we talked to, not having an answer to the question of value, gave me the instructions of it's okay to make that moral decision.

36:32She said she did feel like there was space for her to do what she felt was right. And, you know, this is part of what Wayne was trying to do, like to make it a moral decision. Like even just giving them names, Lily and Lizzie, which, by the way, even the prosecution at one point started using. Once you start seeing people referring to them by the name, then kind of conceptually you're recognizing that there's something more than, you know, Smithfield 245. Like one of the jurors told us. I don't remember a lot of things from that trial, but I remember those two piglets' names.

37:04And according to Justin, who actually interviewed all the jurors himself for his own research. I mean, I think there were some moral pulls there. But they were still looking for a legalistic, you know, kind of hook to land on. Both these ways of thinking were in the room. Like they both played a part. Okay. So, okay. Now just zooming out. What did this case change after everything? Well, in a legal sense, not much, really.

37:35Wow. That's not the answer I expected you were going to say. So, yeah. I mean, so the best they could have hoped for was that actually there would be a guilty verdict and they could bring it to an appeals court. And within an appeals court, you know, it could change case law.

37:52But this is funny. He was too successful too early. Yeah. And what actually ended up happening is that state legislators after this case passed this law that said, you know, you can't use the animals being sick and therefore worthless as a defense. Whoa. For taking them. So that actually backfired. God. Legally in Utah, it does sort of seem that way. Yeah. And like the other thing that seems to have come out of this is that companies and like prosecutors are they're like, OK, well, that was a disaster. They don't want to go through that again.

38:24Let's stop charging these activists with theft and, you know, maybe just charge them with trespass so that we don't get into this whole value debate. Right. Because otherwise we're drawing attention to the thing that we don't want to draw attention to. Like, it's like they're just avoiding their duck in the fight. Totally. Like, there was this whole other case in Wisconsin where two weeks before the trial was supposed to start, they dropped the charges. And he and his team actually wrote it and they were like, no, we still want this trial. Everything about this guy's story in these legal cases feels upside down, you know?

38:55But if you think about it, it makes sense. Wayne actually needs the courts. He needs this platform to force people to really sit in the confusion and grapple with these questions. Right. You know, like one of the things Justin told us is... Often, people can just turn away. If you're uncomfortable with something, you just look away or you have an explanation. But these cases don't allow that, right? You're on the jury, forced to confront it. And that's exactly what happened to the jurors in this case.

39:25And going through that, it bonded them. We all had each other's phone numbers, and we thought, man, it would be nice just to get together and talk outside of here. So I invited everybody over to the house. house. You know, they would get together over dinners. One of the jurors brought over his pizza oven. We've actually got to be pretty good friends.

39:49I'm curious, have you guys talked at all about like, like eating pork or like the sort of like the pigs, like that element of it? Has that come up?

40:03Initially, like when we very first kind of got together, we talked about it and And I think most people still do eat meat. You know, I used to have a habit of I'd jog on Saturdays and kind of my thing was I'd come home and cook up some bacon. My daughter said, well, you can't do that anymore. You can't eat bacon anymore. I'm like, all right, that's true. And so it did. It kind of changed. But you do. It's hard after years and years of being in a certain way to completely change. The fact of the matter is, no matter what all these activists do and everything, protein, meat from animals is going to be used by a good portion of the public.

40:39But can it be done in a way that's humane? They were on a farm. They're not in these processed facilities where they're in a cage. Where can we find that? And we actually found a place north of us here up in Parowan. I'm not going to lie. if I see like a nice dollar slice of pepperoni or something. It still is appealing to me, but it's just not something that I've gone back to.

41:10Maybe despite the fact that there's not really legal precedence in this case and there's law from Utah, Justin, he told us, like, this case points at this shift in the way we see and therefore, like the law, will see animals. Increasingly, science and sort of our own human understanding of animals is making it clear that animals, you know, are not property. And, you know, that's part of the reason that I enjoy talking to these jurors and have spent so many hours doing so from different cases,

41:44is people who have never thought about animals and the law and their status, when they are confronted with these issues, they do overwhelmingly say, huh, that's interesting. And whether they acquit or convict, it wasn't easy for them and it wasn't obvious. And that's sort of how I see animal law going. It's going to be this incremental process that's going to be hard. Sometimes just like with the jurors, it's going to be tearful. But fundamentally, all of the field of animal law is about asking people to answer this question for themselves.

42:40Alex Neeson and Pat Walters and fact check by Diane A. Kelly. Special thanks to Kim Naderfein Petersa, Nathan Pierboom, Joe Eidman, Sam Kozlov, Rachel Gross, and Alex Ayo.

42:54Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What happened to the piglets? Lily and Lizzie. Yeah. So after Wayne took them from the farm, he brought them to this like sanctuary where they were nursed back to health. And kind of bizarrely, some months after the trial, the jurors, they actually went to go visit them like Justin invited them to do that. Interesting. Last time we had seen them, I mean, you know, teeny tiny little piglets like a mango. Little teeny thing. We were just amazed to see these massive animals. Wow.

43:24Anyway, the thing that really stood out that they said was this one little detail about how they looked. Their skin is so white. They're white. It's just this feature of this breed that's really common in big farms. But what that meant for them is that they basically couldn't go in the sun without getting sunburned. Huh. Yeah, and I just have this image stuck in my head of Lily and Lizzie, these like two giant pigs with like paper white skin laying in the shade of a tree on this farm so they don't get sunburned.

44:08Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from the Bay Area, California, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Sauron Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nainasambandan, Matt Keelty, Mona Mudgauker, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Natalia Ramirez,

44:43Rebecca Rand, Anissa Vitsa, Arian Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santus. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Anjali Mercado, and Sophie Keep coming. Go to Westminster!

45:21Thank you.

45:51Thank you.

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