Laura Passaglia, the Sonoma County Superior Court judge who presided over the trial, barred Hsiung from showing most evidence of animal cruelty, depriving him of the ability to show his motives for entering the farms.
I hate this but I think the judge is trying to keep the crimes seperate. The trial is not about what illegal things the farm was doing, it was a trial about this person breaking the law when they broke into the farm. I don’t know what the laws are exactly where this is but a lot of the time animals are owned which puts them in the category of property but with special protections. So the judge is looking at it from you broke into someone’s property to take video or whatever of someone treating their property poorly. I hate this because without doing this it’s incredibly hard to get evidence while going through the process legally. It’s usually setup in a way that gives ample opportunity for the offender to hide any wrong doing before inspection or other laws that hinder the animal rights people. If a police officer showed up without a warrant and walked in and collected evidence it probably couldn’t be used to prosecute them in court anyway so this is a bit like that. The judge might take the mitigating factors into consideration but the trial is still about them breaking into property illegally. The whole truth is primarily focused on the break in.
Also this is pure speculation and I’m talking out of my ass, so would need someone who actually knows something to varify
In California, where this happened, it actually does. Did you read the whole article?
DxE had obtained a legal opinion from Hadar Aviram, a professor at UC College of Law, San Francisco, saying that the activists had a valid defense for their actions because California law allows defendants to argue that they were providing aid to suffering animals out of necessity.
Furthermore, motivation is taken into consideration in many other cases across the US. For example, it is acceptable to break into someone's car to save a baby locked inside. It may even be acceptable to break into a car to save a dog. In which case, it should be acceptable to break into a poultry farm to save abused animals.
The judge here refused to even allow this defense to be considered. She also refused to allow an amicus brief from another legal expert. This was all apparently part of a coordinated plan to slip through an overall unjust conviction and put the leader of this campaign group in jail - the local county is heavily in bed with these farms.
So I stand by my assertion, she is a bitch, and furthermore I think she is grossly unprofessional and should be disrobed.
For those who aren't necessarily concerned about a factory farm environment, they may not consider these animals as "valuable" enough to care.
However, to appeal to those people on a different level, that is the food you eat. And the people producing it are being very very very very protective about how it is produced. They are doing something to your food that they don't want you to know about, and it certainly isn't good that they're trying to hide it.
Factory farming is a huge reason for disease outbreaks. Bird flu? Mad cow disease? Right here, folks. And they'll package up your food without a thought other than the money they make from it.
Are you okay with the animals you eat living in conditions that could expose you to health risks? I hope you would be outraged if a food company was potentially putting you at risk because of their concern over their profits.
Producing food is fucking hard work. I have a family farm where I raise my own beef and vegetables. It's not easy. I grew up hating it because while I was working the garden, the tobacco and feeding cattle, my friends were doing fuck all.
The human race is so disconnected from their food supply it's disgusting. People have no clue if someone took a dump beside their lettuce in the field or not. (This is how a lot of those vegetables get diseases when they do recalls.)
But, humans are lazy and want things easy. I wish everyone had to grow their own food for five years to see how difficult it is to feed your face, but it's never gonna happen. People want the benefit of farming without doing any of the work.
I was gonna raise beef and sell it, but I'd rather just feed my family. Despite growing up hating farming, I have a better appreciation for my food and we need that shit everyday.
I think this is important. Being disconnected allows for a more wasteful consumer mindset.
When milk goes bad in the fridge, ehh, spend $3 and get another jug. But, when that jar of goats milk goes bad, or the cheese doesn't work out from the goat in our backyard, it's a little more upsetting, that took a lot of work....
My view, and several friends and family members is that if you are unwilling to personally kill an animal to eat it, you shouldn't be eating meat. Some of these individuals are vegetarians, and others (myself included) are producing our own meat for our families as much as possible.
There's another aspect to it as well. My grandfather suffered from PTSD from working as a butcher almost his entire adult life - I've recently learned that it's a pretty common thing for people working in abattoirs.
If they don't care abuot the animals, they might (and that's a very iffy "might") care about the people.
I just want to point out that most butchers don't work on the kill line. I can see PTSD being common there, but it is definitely not common for retail butchers. Most retail butchers don't even see a carcass anymore.
Factory farming is a huge reason for disease outbreaks.
Yes
And they'll package up your food without a thought other than the money they make from it.
No. Most people want to do good, they don't want to hurt others. They don't care about the lives of the animals, but most farmers, factory farmers included would hate to know that they led to people getting mad cow disease.
Most people want to do good, they don’t want to hurt others
Ordinary people are not rich capitalists who can earn massive profits by cutting corners. That’s not just against animals either, think of the conditions human workers have been subjected to.
Most people want to do good, they don't want to hurt others.
That's very..... naïvely optimistic when it comes to big business.
I'm sure they'd be upset to know that they'd be losing money if a recall happens, but the vast majority of factory farms WILL cut corners dangerously close to make more money.
"Don't get caught" is the golden rule for the bottom line.
This has been true for a long time. Upton Sinclair, writing over 100 years ago about improving working conditions (for humans) ended up missing the mark and the end result was food quality regulations. Now, folks are trying to expose animal cruelty but end up getting stronger protections for corporations 🤡 we just can't seem to care about living things 🙁
It’s not illegal to “expose” animal cruelty in California, and no one has ever been charged with doing so. Animal cruelty is prosecuted all the time in California. The headline is stupid. The headline is wrong.
You an idiot. Read beyond the headline and you'll see that in California activists are being charged for being attention to deplorable conditions in animal farms yet the farms they exposed have no charges against them.
The first sentence literally contradicts the headline. Headline says you could get in trouble for "exposing animal cruelty" while the first sentence says an activist is being charged for "rescuing animals." They did more than just expose cruelty; they took it upon themselves to stop it and in doing so broke the law. That's what they are being charged for; not the exposure to the cruelty which is only being exposed because these activists are being arrested for trespassing and theft and it made the news.
It is weird just how secretive the slaughterhouses are.
I don't usually discuss this sort of thing very much with carnists IRL, because I tend to find their "arguments" and their positions rather tired and boring and in general completely irrational. The "but where do you get your protein?" type of questions or "I tried being a vegan/vegetarian but it didn't agree with me because of my special DNA due to my ancestry of northern Europeans or whatever" conspiracy theories are especially fun. It's usually the carnists that go out of their way to be activists about their choices, not me.
I'll usually answer direct questions and leave it at that. I find there is a certain type of carnist that get especially defensive (almost always men suffering from toxic masculinity) around the very presence of veg*ns and want to get into arguments, especially while eating.
But there have been times where I've asked why slaughterhouses have so much secrecy in some of these "conversations" where the carnist just won't drop the topic and I've noticed that gives them some pause. At least for a small glimmer of time. I think it is because these carnist activists are the ones with the most amount of guilt and they know that most (normal) people don't want to witness what goes on in slaughterhouses...
I was raised in an agriculture focused community and did the whole FFA thing in highschool. I've since moved to another state and am now living the life of a city slicker, so maybe I've just become out of touch, but back then none of the "how the sausage is made" stuff was hidden from us. Hell we had a whole field trip to tour a pair of meat processing plants (one for poultry, one for beef).
Have things changed over the last 5-10 years? Is my experience just an outlier?
Not necessarily the slaughtering part, but the living conditions that these animals are stuck in, sometimes for years, is barbaric. Imagine being in a cage where you can’t walk and you have to stand in your own shit for days on end.
The ethics of animal slaughter and how it’s done are almost a separate conversation imo. No living creature deserves to be tortured (and outright torture does occur, see Earthlings or Dominion for the details)
people don't want to witness what goes on in slaughterhouses
That's exactly why they're secretive. It's also true of many other industries and processes. There are a lot of things we benefit from that have unpleasant origins. When it comes to meat, you can make a relatively easy choice about it.
In my country it's not a secret how these places operate, I went to a slaughter house as a class trip back in high school + one of our relatives owns a massive chicken and cow farm. The animals' conditions are vastly different here than what I see from these terrifying documentaries.
Oh, right. I didn't even mention how the tired old Dad "jokes" get very boring, very fast. Especially when repeated nearly every time, by the same set of people, at almost every meal. That, or they nearly reflexively have to talk about how much they love meat, love to hunt, love to fish, love to grill, yadda yadda. No one brought up vegn anything mind you, it's just the mere presence of any vegn(s) that seems to cause this....shrug.
Seems like the next option is to arrange for mass arrests in a very public direct action. Massively overflow the jail in that judge's district with animal rights activists until they're forced to dismiss the cases.
direct action with the goal of filling jails has a long and very successful history, going back AT LEAST to the IWW Free Speech Fights. It also saw widespread success during the fight for Civil Rights.
work in a non food producing field that uses the same stringent requirements as food to table is suppose to have
one thing constantly cropping up in workroom discussions is the fact people will grab a competitors product with cheaper inferior questionable ingredients that comes from places not paying employees a proper wage unclean conditions the whole nine yards every time and price is not always the final deciding factor
this will take more than people standing up for animal rights (thanks and shout out to the ones on the front line) might be a whole change of culture that is needed before this issue could be addressed
Hsiung is now being held in jail at least until his sentencing hearing on November 30 (like many other people detained in Sonoma County, he’s only allowed to leave his cell for 30 minutes per day, DxE communications director Cassie King told me).
“A big feature of these trials has been the opportunity to expose the lawlessness of the industry and juxtapose that with the trivial infractions by people who are rescuing animals … When you aren’t able to make that contrast for the jury, it’s a lot harder to win.”
Theft charges have opened the door for activists to show evidence of the health and physical condition of the animals they took, to try to persuade jurors that they were so sick that they wouldn’t have made it to slaughter, making them worthless to their owners — a defense that proved successful in DxE’s recent trials in Utah and Merced, California.
The DA office’s involvement in the Farm Bureau event “was to provide the attendees with information about criminal law as it pertained to trespassing,” Sonoma County Assistant District Attorney Brian Staebell told Vox in an email.
One of DxE’s major goals in its trials has been to win the right to present a “necessity defense,” in which a defendant argues that they had no option but to commit a crime to prevent a greater evil from occurring, like breaking into a hot car to save a baby or dog inside.
For example, Passaglia placed a gag order on Hsiung, barring him from talking to media during the trial, which was condemned as unconstitutional by UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and by the ACLU of Northern California.
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As soon as you suggest people stop eating meat, suddenly they have no moral standing or their change won't make a difference. It's just sad. People will hide behind 'personal choice' as if it absolves them of supporting the industry and any wrong doing that comes as a consequence of it. You can't justify breeding an animal into existence for the sole purpose of killing and eating it when it is entirely unnecessary to do so. It's probably the biggest example of injustice in the modern world, next to slavery.
Extremist? Do you think they people who keep living creatures in 2x2 cages for their entire "lives" (if you can even call it that), pump them full of unnatural hormones, and harvest them for their meat are the normal, well-adjusted ones in this scenario? People wanting animals to be treated ethically are only extremists in a world that normalizes brutality
The same type of argument can also be made about Israel and Hamas. Yeah there is an enormous point to be made for the Palestinians, a point that should have been fixed like 60-80 decades ago, but that doesn't take away that Hamas is a horrible organization with horrible people that (as much as I hate death penalties) shoud all be lined up to a wall and shot to make the world a little better. Yes, same should be said about a number of Israeli politicians.
Please keep in mind that it's possible for both sides to be wrong, and that it's also possible to be part wrong and part right. Real life isn't that black and white.
For the sake of argument… if I hear you beating your dog, should I break down the door to stop it?
Yes, I could call 911, but by the time they arrive the sounds would stop and they’d have no probable cause. I could go in and steal the dog or even just record a video right now. What is the ethical thing to do?
Not really an apples to apples comparison (unfortunately). Cows have fewer rights than dogs.
You would be within your rights to do something about the dog scenario, and the law would support you. Cows, on the other hand, are seen as products or machines, so "doing the ethical thing" would be looked at as if you were trying to steal someone's car.
I agree that it's not right, but that's why these activists are arrested, instead of the animal owners.
Just like those criminals who knew it is against the law to sit in the front of the bus, or those who used whites only bathrooms? They did not fight for freedom but break the law?
Did you just compare black people fighting for civil rights and equality with animal freedom?
I suspect you were just point out that civil disobedience is a valid protest tactic, but I would recommend just saying that next time. Comparing people fighting for equality with animals fighting for freedom is ... Not great. At worst, it comes across as racist. At best, tone deaf.