Don't Cancel Your Cable Yet

We know times are hard unless you were skeevy enough to have Madoff with a shit-ton of loot last year. Pay thru March, Tor(rent) up, or just boot off the neighbors for a few days. You must. not. miss. the HBO premiere of Death on a Factory Farm on March 16.

The Day Before Slaughter

'Twas the day before slaughter,
And throughout the dark shed
All of us shrieking,
All soon to be dead.

The snare on my snout,
And the one on my ear,
First sun on my face,
Now I'm screaming in fear.

My piglets! My babies!
So small and so frail.
They’ll be lost if I leave them,
Please don’t drag me from here.

I’ll walk if you let me,
Don’t hit me, please stop!
My body and spirit, now broken,
I drop.

They speak but in curses;
No kind words for me.
More beatings, then kicking;
In death, I’ll be free.

Day in and day out,
Just straight to their work,
More pain, then the blood,
Tails and testicles in one jerk.

If you still believe in Santa,
Or walls you can walk through,
PETA’s undercover elves have holiday video,
Shot especially for you!

Wrapped and ribboned
And tied up with a bow,
From Murphy Family Ventures, and Smithfield,
Now you know.

Their lives are this torture,
Kept far from your sight.
Happy Hogidays to all,
And to all a good-night.

Worst. Job. Ever.

What’s the worst assignment the guy with the worst job in science has ever had? "A guy had driven his truck into the waste lagoon and drowned. Not only was it full of urine and liquid pig feces, ..."

Fine bunch, these folks. Stellar in every way.

The Jury Is Out

Literally, for Wiles Farm defendants. All three charged individuals, owner Ken Wiles, his son Joe Wiles, and employee Dusty Stroud, waived their right to a jury trial and instead will appear before Judge Stuart Miller only in Wayne County Municipal Court on Tuesday, June 19, 9:00 AM.

Better off with 3–on-1 rather than 3–on-12? Couldn’t seat an acceptable jury? Pressed for time, or just going with the flow? Sometime after 9:00 AM on June 19—exactly how much time after we cannot speculate—we will see how precisely balanced those iconic scales really are and whether or not the origin of Lady Justice’s blindfold is indeed founded on the impartial treatment of parties or just the cartoonish cynicism of a 400–year-old pissed-off German artist.

Update 06-20: The verdict(s) are in. Ken Wiles, charged with two counts of animal cruelty: not guilty on both counts. Joe Wiles, charged with six counts of animal cruelty: guilty on one count, not guilty on four counts, one count dismissed. Dusty Stroud, charged with two counts of animal cruelty: not guilty on one count, one count dismissed. More as we get it.

Judge Stuart Miller may be in, but we're still out on the origins of dear Lady Justice's blindfold. One point, though, of which we are most assuredly and unwaveringly certain: there were fine legal minds in the courtroom -- yes, at least one, plus three-quarters of another. Mammalian anatomy and physiology -- specifically and particularly, swine anatomy and physiology, or even basic, undergraduate general physics -- not so much.

Calves, Chickens Dropped From AB 594

AB 594, formerly titled “Farm animals: confinement” was whittled down to “Pigs: tethering and confinement” yesterday. The amended version, still in the hands of the Agriculture Committee, removes protection from confinement for its clucking or mooing stakeholders. This version also limits confinement to the “seven-day period before the pig’s expected date of giving birth,” introduces a jail term for violation, and pushes the operative enforcement of the bill’s provisions ahead by two years. Compare and contrast: Florida, Arizona, Oregonia (it’s like Canadialand without the rampaging moose, hockey, or LAPD). J/k, we luv the Oregoniaonites, especially the Gov., who actually tried to eat with food stamps for a week.

Here’s some silliness that thankfully failed in Committee despite it’s various amending, and a fine analysis of why it should have done nothing more than fail. LYLAS over there at the AnimalBlawg.

c0demonkey is busy with this pipe-laying project, which we think … aggregating yet another aggregation of aggregators is way redundant. But that nunchuck-waving chimp swears it’ll be the primo-sourced, finely-filtered, JSON-outputted feed for farm animal related stuffs anywhere. Yeah, we’ll just see about that. For what we’re paying, we can’t complain or expect a whole helluva lot.

Cargill: Sow Crates Gotta Go

Update: We were had. So was everybody else who reported anything resembling "Cargill" and "phasing out crates."

The Pigsite (the Chron link was broken so we fixed it with a link to one of the pork industry's own getting PR-jacked, too).

“The decision is the latest example of a U.S. company putting greater emphasis on animal welfare.” Um … no.

Here’s a PowerPoint presentation that is part of Human/Animal Relationships: Biological and Philosophical Issues, current coursework in the University of Wisconsin’s Zoology department. If they’re right on schedule (and we know they are!), Agricultural Animals & Current Social Issues Part II is next Tuesday’s lecture. You can root up the info on the guest lecturer yourself, it’s too easy, and we’re not doing it for you.

There are a couple of very interesting slides in the presentation, like slides 25–26 for example:

“Selective photography” isn’t really the issue, is it? Animal density relative to housing floor space is. Both pens are dangerously overcrowded and injury-conducive irrespective of the camera angle, zoom level, or cropping.

Most interesting of all, though, is what we think might be a glimpse into the future of “group sow housing” for both Cargill and Smithfield sows:

Five or six to a pen, and way less than a minimum, safe distance for both animal introductions and individual resting areas.

Remember the “landmark decision regarding animal management” and how Smithfield CEO Larry Pope worked “with our customers, who have made their views known on the issue of gestation stalls.” Well, don’t backslap Larry or Cargill’s Dirk Jones, or HSUS, PETA, or anybody just yet over what is essentially an international trade issue. Nobody had megawatts of animal welfare go off in their head and nobody caved to consumer pressure that represents the buying power of the US pork chop market.

But, like deer in headlights, everybody did look long, hard, and just a few short years into the future to find the doors to the EU export market slamming shut. Bottom line: smart business people know who their real customers really are, and they aren’t you. Besides, you're veg by now anyway, right?

Update: June Trial Date for Wiles Farm Defendants

Wiles Farm owner Ken Wiles (middle), his son Joe Wiles (left), and employee Dusty Stroud (not pictured) have another 2-1/2 months to sort out their collective defense to 10 misdemeanor counts of animal cruelty. A jury trial for the trio is now scheduled to begin on June 19, 2007.

Rep. Mervyn Dymally, a senior member of the CA Legislature, former Lt. Governor, and member of the House Committee on Agriculture, has introduced a bill to amend the Health and Safety Code that would prohibit the keeping of any mammal or bird used for the production of food or fiber in conditions that do not allow "sufficient space for each animal to stand, lie down, get up, move his or her head freely, rest, turn around completely, and extend all limbs and wings without touching any part of the enclosure or other animals." Thirty-six years of "you can’t make us" on the part of CA industrial animal production interests is about enough, but $1000 a day in fines ain’t nowhere near enough. You’re encouraged to write in support of AB 594.

In totally unrelated geek news, we’re supposed to say something nice about c0demonkey’s efforts of late with regard to the overall look and feel of our various joints:

"Thanks!"

Screechy little twit Greybox'd the Pierce College Farm Property Map so it magically fades in ala beautifulness, and built us a Google Earth flyover of the known animal-holding areas, complete with groovy, red binocular icons. There may be some issues with our Greybox implementation if you’re using Firefox on MacOS (or so said Greybox/Orangoo Labs developer Amir S. when we finally got around to showing it off to him …), so if it doesn’t work for you, let us know. ‘m0nkey can’t really test on MacOS until the new toy arrives. So try the flyover. As far as we can tell, it works just dandy.

Tuesday Three-fer

Wiles Farm owner Ken Wiles, his son Joe Wiles, and Wiles Farm employee Dusty Stroud were arraigned this afternoon in Wayne County Municipal court on 10 misdemeanor counts of cruelty to animals. All defendants have entered pleas of not guilty and are free on their own recognizance. Defendant Joe Wiles, charged with six of the ten counts of animal cruelty including “mutilating and killing animals by hangings, using inappropriate gun shots ... depriving pigs of basic veterinary care, food, and water ... beating animals to death with hammers,” entered a not guilty plea on January 25th with a trail date set for March 14th.

“Striving for justice,” huh? In an unpublished opinion, CA’s 2nd Appellate has affirmed the trial court’s decision to deny Farm Sanctuary standing to sue CorcPork under the Business and Professions Code section of the Unfair Competition Law. As you may remember, the decision in the original case hinged upon the applicability of an amended version of Proposition 64. In a nutshell, Prop 64 + no person showing actual monetary or property damage = you can’t sue CorcPork. Unpublished opinions only hang around the web site for 60 days after they’ve been…put up there (we were gonna say “published” but that didn’t make any sense). Grab it from us if the drive-thru window is closed.

Neither down nor out, the ALDF/EBAA v. Clougherty Packing/Farmer John/CorcPork action, with plaintiffs alleging actual monetary damages, moves forward as Case Number SCV-240050 in the Superior Court of Sonoma County. Plaintiffs are represented by Evans & Page in San Francisco. We’ve got $ on this one.

We wonder—will CorcPorkers again allege that plaintiffs lack standing because CorcPork has been confining pigs in crates since 1989 and the statute of limitations has run out, and that Penal Code section 597t is “unconstitutionally vague,” and that even it if is constitutional, it doesn’t apply to them anyways? Somebody take a swat at those last two, puh-lease.

Smithfield says gestation crates will fade away

Over the next 10 years Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the US will phase out the use of gestation crates, restraint devices used in the pork industry to severely restrict the movement of pregnant gilts and sows, and which house them throughout their pregnancies of just under four months. Gestational housing of this type is the underpinning of “modern” pig farming that permits the concentration of tens of thousands of animals—and their waste products—in a single facility and a minor reduction in the number of newborn and infant piglets lost to accidental crushing or suffocation by their mother.

Two items notable by their absence from this announcement need a bit more clarification: the company’s release makes no mention of the phase-out of farrowing crates; gestation crates and farrowing crates are not the same thing. We’re saying it one more time for the back rows and balcony: gestation crates and farrowing crates are not the same thing.

While they both derive from the same perspective (production “efficiency”), serve the same physical function (severe restriction of animal movement), and may be identical in physical design (components and cubic feet), they do not serve the same operational function. Ask repeatedly and with insistence on a definitive answer and you’ll finally get that distinction out in the open.

Could a sow spend three months of her life in an unbedded, indoor-only, communal group pen then wind up back in the same crate she was in the year before the phase-out, spend three weeks there with her piglets, be removed to group housing for 21 days, re-artificially inseminated, and start the whole process over again? Yeah, but you’d have to account for the white space in the Smithfield release and statements to get to that scenario and it’s not one we’re making as a far-fetched assumption.

We find it more than a bit ironic that the company’s position today is this u-turn in both practical husbandry and operational philosophy “will not have a detrimental effect on our animals,” as the pork production industry has built its post-WWII mantra on the specious assertion of group and/or loose housing as antithetical to the health and safety of naturally competitive and rambunctious gilts and sows.

While we applaud this decision by one of the world's largest food conglomerates, we can’t help but wonder if this is a defensive position taken in reaction to the overwhelming groundswell of citizen initiative and backlash against the rationalization that putting a 500 lb. animal, comparatively a teenager, in a 7x2’ steel and concrete living space for the length of her life means more consumer purchasing power, thereby more consumer choice, hence more freedom.

Yes, freedom has a price. Yes, those who purchase the pork industry’s products have demonstrated time and dollar-again that they are willing to pay those few extra pennies per pound to let another creature take more than two steps forward or backward in life. Yes, it took hundreds of millions of lives wretchedly abused, tortured from birth to death, discarded and then forgotten, plus a few short years of in-house, purely science-based research, for the industry to arrive at the conclusion that a pig is still a pig, and they can make of her nothing more nor less.

Related entries.

Wiles Farm Prosecutor Files Charges

WKYC Evening News anchors acknowledge the worldwide reaction to their story in this follow-up report and interview with Special Prosecutor Frank Forchione. More than 30,000 viewers have seen the story that aired in November as a result of investigative efforts by the Humane Farming Association.

Owner Ken Wiles faces arraignment on two second-degree misdemeanor charges of animal cruelty later this month. His son, Joe Wiles, is charged with six misdemeanor counts and Wiles employee Dusty Stroud, previously seen mugging for the camera as a helpless sow is strangled by hanging, will face two counts as well. Jail time is a possibility if they are convicted, 150 90 days per misdemeanor, as well as fines of $750 per count and the mandatory surrender of the remaining animals housed at the facility.

Do the sentencing guidelines seem like paltry, cost-of-doing-business annoyances to you? We think so, too. Felony indictments and convictions for cruelty in industrial animal production facilities are far too few. The value of an innocent life, spared by the selfless acts of one brave person, is a price above rubies.

We’ll keep you apprised of developments in the Wiles Farm case as they unfold.

Inside Wiles Farm

HFA Takes Action Against Ohio Hog Factory

This is an abridged copy of the full 77–page complaint to Canton, Ohio criminal prosecutor Frank Forchione regarding conditions at Wiles Farm.

Beaten, bludgeoned to death, repeatedly shocked with an electric prod, strangled by hanging, starved, shot, drowned in their own urine and feces, cannibalized. The rescued animals we showed you yesterday survived in these unconscionable torture chambers for years.

These are the least graphic photos from the HFA petition we’re showing you here.

It’s our understanding that after the original airing of this investigation by WKYC reporter Bill Safos and the follow-up story that aired yesterday with Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the station has been swamped with calls and emails from horrified viewers around the country asking what people can do to help. We have a few suggestions:

• Make sure HFA has the resources they need to pursue this criminal case through the courts.


• Let Rep. Kucinich speak for YOU, these animals, and millions more like them once again. You don’t have to be a 10th District resident to say “enough is enough.”
  
  
• Thank WKYC for their commitment in bringing this investigation to you.

We're calling it early

Just in from our embedded reporter in Phoenix:

It's about 9:30pm here in Phoenix, the Arizonans for Humane Farms rally ended a little while ago, and with about 16% of precincts reporting, Proposition 204 is leading 60% in favor. Yes, Humane Farms supporter Sheriff Joe was at the rally and said he didn't get involved in campaigning for or against other ballot issues because he was "concerned about the pigs," and offered KTAR News 92.3 a sincere paraphrase of Gandhi's quote about judging the morality of a nation by the way it treats its animals.

Have fun, celebrate for the animals, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Lock 'em up, Joe

Sheriff Joe Arpaio may turn out to be AZ animals’ best badge-sporting friend. And he’s got your room ready and waiting in the Maricopa County Jail facilities if you’re bent on abusing and neglecting them, then leaving them to slowly die alone and in pain. Repeatedly.

“The horse was sick on the ground in deep pain for 36 hours,” Arpaio told CBS 5 News. "According to the employees that talked to our detectives, she said the horse is going to die anyway. We don't have $200 in our school budget, so just let him stay there and die.”

Can you imagine a Sheriff Joe in LA, Ventura, Riverside, Orange, and San Bernardino County—a sheriff who runs his own Animal Safe Hospice and cuffs animal abusers to the stainless steel sofa for the night? No citiation for the round-file, no tip-offs in advance of his own Animal Cruelty Investigative Unit jump-out, no negotiation. Just jail.

Can you imagine a Sheriff Joe in Kings, Merced, and Tulare County? We can. So for the next few days we’re outta here like last year for the final Prop 204 push before Election Day, and what an uphill battle it’ll be when you’re polling better than 70%. Back on Wednesday to drop in on a little get-together you might check out, too, if you

• are even mildly interested in getting habeas corpus and the First Amendment off life-support when it comes to animal protection, rights, or welfare advocacy,


• anticipate using the USPS to convince 10,001 people to forego spending $1 each on something animal-use industry related,


• are not cool with the whole stainless steel sofa thing.

Surgery, spare-rib-style

Don't let the Far Eastern location or the translation throw you off. "Porking" is apparently the nearest Taiwanese approximation of "baby pig," and you could paste this clip into any US commercial farrowing operation footage without a visible seam. Except for maybe the part where you got within a mile of the place without a court order taped to your bullet-proof vest, or when you had to switch from the handheld cam to the one that looks just like the face of your watch. But we digress...



When you reach the point in your education where you're introduced to appropriate anesthesia and analgesia agents for surgical sedation and pain relief in animals, remember: it's only unacceptable for AWA-approved species in defined circumstantial roles to actually feel the pain of a knife slicing off their testicles. And in case you were wondering how baby pig came to be, here are a few seconds of agribusiness innovation that'll take you all the way back to the gleam in baby daddy's eye.



Now we could supply you with an embedded (no pun intended) hands-free, electric version of the above, as well. But being as we keep this joint mostly R-rated, you'll have to hit up PornoTube for those money shots. Once again, don't let the location, the $1.89 set decoration budget, or the fact that this time all the participants are consenting, human adults throw you. After all, where do you think they got the equipment?

Turn that frown upside down

Late last evening PFW received our first request of the season to do what we do almost best: digging and rooting. Apparently, via judicious review of volumes of government wonk-ese and terabytes of published policy declarations, comes word that the USDA "frowns upon" surface water in pig wallows. Hmm...

We've read some bizarro position statements from the 4-letter acronym feds before, like 28-hour law transport loopholes and how hip-pocket, horse meat trade lobbyists can beat up your Congress, but wallow-water prohibition roused our interest enough to shift weight to the other white meat hoof.

Wipe the smile off Dr. McGlone’s face and let him know the USDA "frowns upon" the practices and conclusions of his research group. And for pete's sake, stop publishing those pig wallow management papers for all the young, impressionable world to see. It's just a fool-hardy attempt to glamorize blatant disregard of USDA policy with a lot of big words and statistics and stuff. Los Angeles Pierce College knows better, so don't fall for the pseudo-scientific ramblings of fringe elements in academia.

Spare a minute to let the USDA itself know that by partially funding SARE and ATTRA programs that condone managed wallows for pigs, it's disregarding its own directives and should cease inspecting facilities that process thousands of pounds of wallow-water tainted pork butts year after exponential growth year.

Now stop loitering in this heat and go back to class. PFW is sweatin’ like a pig out here.