What is a Pig Worth?

17:40Looked like something from a second grade art class. And I just thought to myself, this is just stranger than fiction.

17:47Robert Krulwich:Whoa. And when the jury got these little cutout 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 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.

18:29But 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 context. The piglets did have value to the farms. Like, even if they were sick, you can't just take them. Suppose you were in the grocery store and you saw a can with dents in them. They compared the piglets to a dented can.

18:54Robert Krulwich:Ah, dented, oh, the runt piglets are dented cans. Exactly. And like, you can't just take a dented can from a store. I better rescue that can put in my purse, take it out of the store. 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 equip me because I did the right thing. These piglets deserve to be saved. If you defend our right to give aid to dying animals, to defend the right of all citizens to aid dying and sick and injunanimous, companies will be a little more compassionate to the creatures under their stewardship.

19:38Governments will be a little more open to animal cruelty complaints. And maybe, just maybe, a baby pig like Lily 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.

19:56Robert Krulwich: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 it's 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...

20:31Robert Krulwich: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. Huh. 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, like theft requires proving that the thing that was taken has, quote, value.

21:14Was it monetary value or just value?

21:17Robert Krulwich: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. Flips. Yeah.

21:57Robert Krulwich: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, OK, well, maybe we just ask the judge. You know, we went and we talked to the bailiff and we said, hey, we've got a question. Can we 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.

22:34They're asked to come back and they're handed a paper that has the response. From the judge. From the judge. And what that paper says is.

22:42Robert Krulwich: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.

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24:43Robert Krulwich:Welcome back. This is Radiolab. 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?

25:20I 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. But 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?

25:54Like what even are they? That's a big question. That is the big question.

25:59Robert Krulwich: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. Uh-huh. And the first is. They are property. They are just ours to use. Like, 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 insofar as we benefit.

26:42Robert Krulwich:Basically, animals are property that means 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. 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 testing bans on chimpanzees. We're providing protection for them because we think it's the right thing to do for them.

27:20Yeah, 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. Biomedical research with rabbits is behind the development of most prescription drugs.

27:57Who'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. Mittens and liners, hats.

28:09Robert Krulwich: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 attention to.

28:53Robert Krulwich: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.

29:27The court says, look, this dog was a family member.

29:30Robert Krulwich: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.

30:04Robert Krulwich: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 and go, well, they're not using it.

30:35You know, what if I had a paperclip 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 of the pigs to Smithfield.

30:43Robert Krulwich:Is there any value to a dead piglet? 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.

31:18Just 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, and 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 pro... to come up with a unanimous decision.

31:56The court clerk called me. On the phone? Yeah, well, he said, you know, there's a verdict. You should come in.

32:09The judge calls the jury in. When the jury walked into kind of the jury seating area, and they walked in, you know, two single-filed 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 avoidant. Oh, boy.

32:39Robert Krulwich:The foreperson raised their hand. The judge asks them if they had come to a unanimous decision. The man says yes. Man, they've reached a verdict. Let's get ready. Wayne stands up.

33:01Robert Krulwich:And the clerk starts to read.

33:17First burglary.

33:18Robert Krulwich: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 happened behind the scenes. Well, actually, one of the jurors we spoke to, she kind of had this thought, this metaphor that really helped her 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.

34:11And 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?

34:30Robert Krulwich: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, 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. 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.

35:16She 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.

35:43Robert Krulwich:I don't remember a lot of things from that trial, but I remember those two piglets' names. And according to Justin, who actually interviewed all the jurors himself for his own research. I mean, I think there were some moral pulls 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.

36:30Robert Krulwich: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 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. Whoa. 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.

37:07Let's stop charging these activists with theft and, you know, maybe just charge them with trespass so we don't get into this whole like value debate.

37:15Robert Krulwich: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 ducking 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 were like, no, we still want this trial. Everything about this guy's story in these legal cases 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.

37:52Robert Krulwich:Right. You know, 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, right? 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.

38:27We've actually got to be pretty good friends.

38:33I'm curious, have you guys talked at all about like eating pork or like the sort of like the pigs, like 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.

39:14The 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? And we actually found a place north of us here up in Parowan.

39:35Robert Krulwich: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.

39:55Maybe despite the fact that, like, there's not really legal precedence in this case and there's 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 and the law and their status, when they are confronted with these issues, they do overwhelmingly say, huh, that's interesting.

40:41And 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. It's going to be this incremental process that's going to be hard. Sometimes, just like with the 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.

41:16Robert Krulwich:This episode was reported by Sindhu Nyanasambandan and Jay Menard and produced by Sindhu Nyanasambandan with help from Pat Walters. It was edited by Alex Neeson and Pat Walters and fact-checked by Diane A. Kelly. Special thanks to Kim Naderfane-Petersa, Nathan Pierboom, Joe Eidman, Sam Kozlov, Rachel Gross, and Alex Ayo. 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.

41:57Robert Krulwich: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 like two giant pigs with like paper white skin laying in the shade of a tree on this farm so they don't get sunburned.

42:52Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from the Bay Area, California, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soran Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes With help from Gabby Santas Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Anjali Mercado, and Sophie Semay. Hey, Radiolab. Michael, Tacoma, Washington. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

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