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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
Are they going to prison for exposing animal cruelty, or is it just committing crimes in service of the goal of exposing animal cruelty? I bet I know which.
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.