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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.
What a bitch.
What part of "the whole truth" does that judge not fucking understand?
The part where she either:
A. Is literally being paid to look the other way
or
B. Doesn’t want anything to come to light that could affect her way of life
Or any combination of those
Or she’s just a bitch
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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
California law is supposed to allow a necessity defense, the fact is they knew the farms were abusing animals (they had undercover people find employment with them and see first hand, which is legal and not trespassing) and they found the same abuse on the day.
You're definitely allowed to break into a car to rescue a baby. You might also be allowed to break into a hot car to save a dog, in which case you should also be allowed to break into a poultry farm to save abused animals.
They didn't deny they broke in, but said there was good reason. The judge refused to allow the reason to be heard, and furthermore refused to file briefs from legal experts. What's more, the prosecutors declined to proceed with the various theft charges, instead opting for a misdemeanor trespassing charge and suping that up with a felony conspiracy charge. Making a felony out of a misdemeanor and not allowing the defense to be heard points to a coordinated attempt targeted solely at the leader of this campaign group.
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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.
You should care.
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.
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You should care.
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.
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You're more than likely to go to prison for messing with the rich's revenue streams.
painfully true
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 🙁
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There's a bit of difference between "exposing animal cruelty" and stealing livestock.
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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.
was convicted of two counts of misdemeanor trespass and one count of felony conspiracy to trespass last week
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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.
The headline is wrong. The headline is stupid.
Message board hypocrisy, a concerto in three movements:
-
Moderato: In which the villain claims someone who hasn't read or understood the article is an idiot.
-
Adagio cantabile: the friendly townspeople read the article and lo! The villain himself did not understand the article!
-
Allegro scherzando: where it is revealed to all that, by their own criteria, the villain actually called themselves an idiot. Bravo!
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...
Are slaughter houses secretive?
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?
I think they’re referring to this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag
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)
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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.
There's no way this can backfire.
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.
For profit prison companies:
Rubbing their hands together like an oldschool nintendo villain
Just sub the title for “Wealthy people or corporations are far less likely to be punished than someone whistleblowing that makes them look bad.”
Generically apply that our legal system.
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
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this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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