Radiolab - What is a Pig Worth?

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

In 2017, Wayne Hsiung and a crew of animal rights activists from Direct Action Everywhere broke into a Utah pig farm run by Smithfield Foods, one of the largest pork distributors in the world. They were there to capture video of what they say were thousands of mistreated and abused animals kept in tiny metal cages barely bigger than their bodies. As they were leaving, they took two sick piglets out with them. Prosecutors in Utah charged Wayne with burglary and theft. What came next was the court battle that he wanted all along. During his trial, Wayne made a truly bizarre argument that forced the jury, and all of us, to stare straight at our complicated, sometimes uncomfortable relationship with animals. This week on the show, we grapple with the impossible question at the center of it: What is the value of a piglet?  Special thanks to Kim Nederveen Pieterse, Nathan Peereboom, Jo Eidman, Sam Kozloff, Rachel Gross, Alex Allaux, and Joan Schaffner.  EPISODE CREDITS:  Reported by - Sindhu Gnanasambandan and Jae Minard Produced by - Sindhu Gnanasambandan with help from - Pat Walters with mixing help from - Jeremy Bloom Fact-checking by - Diane A. Kelly and Edited by  - Alex Neason and Pat Walters EPISODE CITATIONS: Articles -  A Rabbit, is a rabbit, is a rabbit… Not under the Law (https://zpr.io/ezUPRE36VZVk) by Schaffner, J. E. in The Global Journal of Animal Law Animal Rights Activists Are Acquitted in Smithfield Piglet Case (https://zpr.io/ayaV9gDneNsw) by Andrew Jacobs in The New York Times Meet the Activists Risking Prison to Film VR in Factory Farms (https://zpr.io/HEXdpf5Q7VAB)  by Andy Greenberg in Wired Audio -  VR Puts Viewers Inside the Grisly Reality of Factory Farms (https://zpr.io/pMHq5RVkzUM3) a 2-part podcast by Wired Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y.

C. See? Yeah. Hey, this is Radio Lab. I'm Latif Nassar. joined by producer Sindunianas Sambandan. Hey, Latif. And what do you got?

Okay, so this one, it starts when this guy, Jay Minard, 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. 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. Huh. 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 Shung. 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. Oh.

Good boy, Oliver. You're so happy. This little mutt. He's from China. And once Oliver settled down, Wayne started telling us about, oddly enough, his childhood dog. So 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 mud. Every time when I came home from school, she literally jumps up and down, out of control. Vivian 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. But when I was, I believe, nine years old, 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 of something like a wild 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. Right.

It's like that except. Like, there's every kind of animal. One of the things we saw was like a monkey in a cage. Oh, wow. Like with a chain around his neck. But then, like, I heard barking from the back of the restaurant. He, like, turns around. And I saw a little black dog.

You know, probably like 30 or 40 pounds, just huddled in a cage. Oh, man. Yeah, and remember, he's like a nine-year-old kid. I remember just feeling like someone was killing my dog. I grabbed my dad's legs and just started 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 are, son, this is just what 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 guai 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 the next 30 plus years of my life. So 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's 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-foundes this group called Direct Action Everywhere. Folks, we were about to march into a massive factory font with 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 violent 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.

So Wayne's standing in this kind of scrubby desert field at Twilight with four other guys. Paul's going to manning the camera. The rest of you're 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. Our naming objective today is exposure to show the world what's actually happening behind these closed doors. So you're all ready to go? You ready to go?

Let's do this. Then the video cuts to night. All right, folks, we're going to have to Head in a Circle 4. 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. Isle 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 faces covered in blood, and she's down on the ground. And this time, they take two of the piglets out with them. And, you know, after the video got up, 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. Like 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. Welcome. We're on record in the matter of state versus playing shun. 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. And he told us that he was feeling pretty nervous. Because you're waiting for these people 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. Smithfield is one of the biggest employers in the area. Oof, not great odds. Yeah, I mean, a lawyer he talked to had begged him to take a plea.

She described the situation as hopeless. No kidding. But he wanted the fight. Okay. So the trial begins with prosecution. The facts in this case will show. They argue basically, this is simple.

Entered an unauthorized dairy owned by Smithfield farms. Wayne broke into the farm. Without permission of the owners removing two of the pit. Took two piglets. Skilling. You know, there's really no question about it.

They actually filmed themselves doing it. We have it on video. Then... Then... 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 going to tell you exactly what we did on the night of question.

And he says it's true. I did remove two pigments from Smithfield Foods on the night of March 7, 2017. I did it. Curious strategy for a... 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, 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. Like, I want you to show the jury what happened.

Why can't he play the video? Yeah, well, like, the prosecution are, that showing it would bias the jury against the farm. You can already hear the screams of the other 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. It's 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 threats 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 on trial, Mr. Scheng, 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.

Huh. Because 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 person. the animal. Then his thought is I can put Smithfield on trial through, you know, having him come back to me. Yeah. I see. So even though they rule that he cannot show the video.

Mr. Topper, my name is Wayne Chung. I'm the defendant in counsel. 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. Whenever he starts questioning a witness. Mr. Topping, you testified that you viewed a video of intrudence and farms. You see him kind of sneaking in. But you had 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 that's my field.

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, the prosecution objects. I'm sustaining the objection. And then...

You said previously that you cannot see the piglets inside because the gnolling is complaining closed. Right? Wayne tries again. They did agree. Your Honor. I think the line of question. We're going down as leading us toward our management practice.

The prosecution objects again. But then I'll ask you just about a gestation warrant. But Wayne does the same thing again. There are thousands of dead pulplets at Smithfield foods in any given in one time. Yeah. Another objection. And animals at Smithfield do have injuries or disease. they are often discarded, correct?

Wayne just keeps doing this. And picklets have are discarded into dumpsters. Presumably, these picklets are not sold for me, correct? I'm just trying to establish... It's sustained... I don't want you mentioning that again. Wayne's obviously getting nowhere. Yon, I'm just trying to establish...

I just 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.

Oh, 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 close 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 games. day and go watch football. Utah's playing UCLA this weekend. So that's kind of my focus was not, 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 a very serious foot injury.

He starts to focus on these two particular piglets that he took, which he names, Lily and Lizzie. Okay. the point that she was approximately one-fourth of normal socks. Objection, Your Honor. He's still talking about the conditions of the animals. Prosecution objects, like always.

This is about the individual piglet of the room now. But this time, the judge allows it. 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. 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 diary was explosive. He calls a veterinarian to the stand.

Sherston 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. That would cost a minimum of $315 to give her the caravage seed you do. And when you compare that to the monetary value of the piglet to the farm, what would be the value of the 10 to 12 pound piglet?

Which another vet had testified was about $40. $42 and $0.20. 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. But 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. This is video footage of Lizzie the piglet shortly after the first arm. 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 is the video show?

It shows Lizely's blood-covered face. And, you know, the prosecution objects, like always. You know, the blood on the piglet's face. That could have come from the mother. And 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. But 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. Okay, well, look, this is my concern. I'm not sure it's appropriate to show this out. We shouldn't see the mom. So how about you just like print out a still shot and then cut out the piglet?

That's what I would allow to go to the jury. This is so weird. I was just sitting at the defense table with a pair of scissors, cutting out eight little paper piglets. It 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. I 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 that 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. You know, the prosecution says... Imagine the use of the word rescue in some other contexts. The piglets did have value to the farms. Like even if they were sick, you can't just take them. you were in the groceries and you saw a can with denser. They compared the piglets to a dented can.

Uh, dend... Oh, the runt piglets are dented can. Exactly. And like, you can't just take a dented can from a store. Right. Okay. But in Wayne's closing argument, after all this talk about economic value

and 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 die animals, to defend the right of all citizens to aid dying and sick and end uproredoms,

companies will be a little more compassionate to the creatures under their stewardship. Governments will be a little more open to animal cruelty confluence. And maybe, just maybe, a baby pig like Lily, You 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? I was the unsure. I wasn't sure what I was going to do and whose side I was on. Okay. And since this is 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, if. 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. 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, theft requires proving that the thing that was taken has, quote, quote, value. Was it monetary value or just value? Just 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. Yeah. What? Yeah, it's a paradox.

Like the logic 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 asked the judge.

You know, we went and we talked to the bailiff and we said, hey, we've 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? Is 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 a 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 we 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 Welcome back. This is Radio Lab. 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. A 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. 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. It'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. 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 three big buckets.

This three-part framework. Three ways of thinking about these questions. The first is... They are property. They are just ours to use. 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. And so far as we benefit. Basically, animals are property that mean something to us. Think 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. Okay. 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-timore.

testing bans on chimpanzees. We're providing protection for them because we think it's the right thing to do for them. Yeah, 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 a prey animal. You know, something you hunt for sport. A rabbit can be an animal.

A biomedical 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. Mitten's and liners, 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 you just twist it off. A rabbit cuts across all these categories. And 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. Pronouns becomes this whole thing. Yes. Right. Right. Right. This is funny because it's like the other pronoun battle that you're not paying into it to. Yeah. Yeah. Which seems silly, but like it gets to this question of like what category are they, you know, are they something or someone? Right. 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. Yeah, I mean, 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. Wow. 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. The 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.

Somebody 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 go, well, they're not using it? You know, what if I had a paper clip 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 the pigs to Smithfield. Is there any value to a dead pig list?

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. You 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, 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. So 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 problem, to come up with a unanimous decision.

The court clerk called me. On the phone? Yeah. So, you know, there's a verdict. You should come in. Judge calls the jury in. When the jury walked into kind of the jury seating area, and they walked in, you know, two single-fod 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 looked kind of avoiding. Oh, boy. The defendant's present. I asked the jury four-person to identify them. The four-person raised their hand. The judge asks them if they had come to a unanimous decision. Yes.

The man says, yes. Man, they've reached a verdict. Let's get ready. Wayne stands up. Clerk reads the verdicts and I'll ask that the people in the core room to remain silent. And the clerk starts to read. State of Utah versus Wayne Hanson. Police number 181, 5.00-061. With the jurors in the above case,

find the defendant Wayne Hanson as well as count two. First burglary? Not guilty? Yeah. And then theft. 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'm now so curious what these jurors said happen behind the scenes. Well, actually, one of the jurors we spoke to, she kind of had this, like, this thought, this, like, metaphor that really, like, 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, and 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. So 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.

Huh. 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. She 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 the... those two piglets names. Hmm. And according to Justin, who actually interviewed all the jurors himself for his own research. I mean, I think there were some moral polls 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. Wow. That's not the answer I expected. You were going to say? 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. Oh, funny. He was too successful too early. Yeah. And what actually ended up happening is that state law.

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 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, okay, well, that was a disaster. They don't want to go through that again. Let's stop charging these activists with theft. And, you know, maybe just charge them with trespass. So 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, they're 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're like, no, we still want this trial. Everything about this guy's story and these legal cases is feels upside down, you know? But 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. You're on the jury forced to confront it. And that's exactly what happened to the jurors in this case.

And 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. 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. I'm curious, have you guys talked at all about, like, eating pork or, like, the sort of like the pigs, like that, that element of. it? Has that come up? Initially, like when we very first kind of got together, we talked about it, and I think most people still do eat meat. You know, I used to have a habit of, I 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.

But 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? 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.

Maybe despite the fact that there's not really legal precedence in this case, and there's this 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

is people who have never thought about animals in 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. going to be this incremental process that's going to be hard sometimes just like with a 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 this episode was reported by sindunian

samanen and jay minard and produced by sindunianna saman then with help from pat walters who's edited by alex nissen and pat walters and fact checked by diane a kelly special thanks to Kim Naderfane Peterson, Nathan Pierboom, Joe Idman, Sam Koslov, Rachel Gross, and Alex Iyo. Wait, 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. Anyway, 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. Yeah, and I just have this image stuck in my head of Lily and Lizzie, these two giant pigs with, like, paper white skin laying in the shade of a tree on this farm so they don't get sunburned. Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from the Bay Area, California, and here are the staff credits.

Radio Lab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Letif Nasser. Soron Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandbach is our executive director. our managing editors Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez,

Sindhu Naina Sambandan, Matt Kielty, Mona Morgauker, Alex Nissen, Sarah Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Anisa Vita, Arian Wack,

Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santis. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angelie Mercado, and Sophie Samayi. Hey, Radio Lab, Michael, Tacoma, Washington. Leadership support for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.