Jeffrey Quick's Blog

Animal rights terrorists none too successful.

This week's Farm and Dairy had the story of the Wiles family's all-but-acquittal on cruelty to hogs. They got the son for tossing piglets too energetically, but the other charges were dismissed. A disgruntled former employee had narked to an activist organization who sent a spy in (without an Ohio PI licence) ....who appeared in court in disguise as he's spying on somebody else now. The big charge was that they hanged hogs, mostly because many of their employees were convicted felons barred from using firearms.

Joe Wiles was charged for euthanizing a hog with a shotgun.

Now...I pulled 3 homestead-butchering books off my shelf, and they were unanimous in recommenting a .22 shot in the head. But a shotgun slug would be faster and surer...and is the only legal way to kill deer in Ohio, so why not pigs?

Meanwhile, the non-farm pigs did more damage than they prevented:

Wiles expressed disgust with the way the November raid was handled. During the search, employees were in a "lock-down" situation for 10 hours, Wiles said, which made them unable to tend to the livestock and facilities.

Wiles said while authorities searched the property, he and employees couldn't move sows to farrowing pens and an unidentified number of sows delivered litters of piglets that were cannibalized.

"Everything died, died, died, just like that, and it didn't seem to matter to anyone," Wiles argued.

"When you come in here at 1 [p.m. for the raid] of course you won't see the work we've done all morning," he said, noting some hogs' feed pans would be empty at that time and that feces and urine would undoubtedly build up in pens during the 10 hours his employees weren't able to do their normal cleaning and feeding chores.

Meanwhile the idiot prosecutor didn't know what he was talking about:

Forchione mispronounced the word 'sow' as 'so' several times when referring to the hogs before one of his own witnesses corrected him, and also referred to the animals as having arms and hands.

In the same issue, a followup on another dud abuse case, this time against horses. The "animal rescue" was a rescue from the (cold) frying pan into the fire:

Beard and Swaney said together they visited all the horses in foster care approximately two to three weeks after they were seized, and did the same examinations on them at that time.

Both veterinarians agreed that while those who cared for the horses during the investigation had the best of intentions, "some of their facilities were not appropriate to house horses, let alone a Thoroughbred."

The vets also noted in their October reports that some of the horses seized were in good condition and should not have been taken.

And last...in Californistan, they use incendiaries instead of paper terrorism, but they're no more competent, fortunately for UCLA Professor Arther Rosenbaum.