Chapter 1: What incident sparked Wayne Hsiung's legal troubles?
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Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser, joined by producer Sindhu Jnanasambandan. Hey, Latif. And what do you got? Okay, so this one, it starts when this guy, Jay Menard, 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.
Uh-huh.
And, you know, we're both Buddhist, so we're interested in, like— 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 Chung. 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's there. That's your dog. His dog was there. Oliver, come here, buddy.
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Chapter 2: How did Wayne Hsiung's childhood influence his activism?
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, like a monkey in a cage. Oh, wow. Like, with a chain around his neck.
Mm.
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 were, 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 me 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-founds this group called Direct Action Everywhere.
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Chapter 3: What was the significance of the 2017 pig farm break-in?
No kidding. But he wanted the fight. Okay. So the trial begins with prosecution. They argue basically, this is simple. Wayne broke into the farm.
Took two piglets.
You know, there's really no question about it. We have it on video. Then... It's Wayne's turn. And he says it's true. I did it. Curious strategy for 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? Why can't he play the video? Yeah, well, like the prosecution argues that showing it would bias the jury against the farm. You can already hear the screams of the wild 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 crates to 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 not on trial, Mr. Schoen, 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 a legal complaint on their behalf. Right. But if Wayne gets arrested doing one of these rescues— Trusting ourselves in the position of the animal.
Then his thought is, I can put Smithfield on trial through, you know, having him come after me.
By putting myself on trial.
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Chapter 4: What unusual defense did Wayne use during his trial?
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 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 it.
They compared the piglets to a dented can? Oh, the runt piglets are dented cans. Exactly. And, like, you can't just take a dented can from a store. I've got to rescue that can, put it 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 acquit me because I did the right thing. These piglets deserve to be saved.
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. 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.
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Chapter 5: How did the jury perceive the value of the piglets?
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.
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. Mittens and liners and 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.
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Chapter 6: What were the legal implications of Wayne's argument in court?
I did kind of a double take. I was like, oh, we've 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 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 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, 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 those two piglets' names. Hmm. And according to Justin, who actually interviewed all the jurors himself for his own research.
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