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Animal Rights Activists Are Acquitted in Smithfield Piglet Case [1]

['Andrew Jacobs', 'More About Andrew Jacobs']

Date: 2022-10-08

As a matter of dollars and cents, the removal of two piglets from a sprawling farm in rural Utah was not a huge loss for its owner, Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer.

But several weeks after a group of animal rights activists posted a video online of their nighttime incursion into the Circle Four Farms in Beaver County, local and federal law enforcement officials began a multistate investigation. F.B.I. agents raided animal sanctuaries in Utah and Colorado, and at one of them, government veterinarians sliced off part of a piglet’s ear in their search for DNA evidence of the crime.

The authorities never recovered the stolen piglets, and the federal government declined to press charges. But prosecutors in Utah pursued felony burglary and theft charges against the activists, who faced prison sentences if convicted.

On Saturday, a jury acquitted two of the activists on the charges, a somewhat unexpected verdict in a part of rural Utah whose economy is largely tied to the fortunes of agricultural giants like Smithfield.

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/science/animals-rights-piglets-smithfield.html

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