Don’t Cancel Your Cable Yet

We know times are hard unless you were skeevy enough to have Madoff with a shit-ton of loot last year. Pay thru March, Tor(rent) up, or just boot off the neighbors for a few days. You must. not. miss. the HBO premiere of Death on a Factory Farm on March 16.

Update on AB 594

The latest activity on AB 594 — formerly titled “Pigs: tethering and confinement”– gives pigs the heave-ho in favor of Medi-Cal coverage of programs to help people quit smoking. We’d rather have seen Medi-Cal cover meat/dairy/egg-quit programs, but alas, such is politics. Perhaps the sponsor came to realize that this issue is really one of enforcement of existing CA law, or that a proposed HSUS co-sponsored 2008 ballot initiative to ban gestation crates, veal crates, and battery cages has a far better chance of passage. Get your nominations in on which big-name ballot supporter will be the CA hole card.

Why we need a ballot initiative to further define what is already a punishable offense begs the same question as why we needed an amendment to the Health and Safety Code to do the same thing. But once you actually get in a courtroom on a farm animal cruelty-related matter, you wise-up pretty fast and start initiating even faster. Break in your new non-leather walking shoes and no smoking on the job.

The Jury Is Out

Literally, for Wiles Farm defendants. All three charged individuals, owner Ken Wiles, his son Joe Wiles, and employee Dusty Stroud, waived their right to a jury trial and instead will appear before Judge Stuart Miller only in Wayne County Municipal Court on Tuesday, June 19, 9:00 AM.

Better off with 3–on-1 rather than 3–on-12? Couldn’t seat an acceptable jury? Pressed for time, or just going with the flow? Sometime after 9:00 AM on June 19—exactly how much time after we cannot speculate—we will see how precisely balanced those iconic scales really are and whether or not the origin of Lady Justice’s blindfold is indeed founded on the impartial treatment of parties or just the cartoonish cynicism of a 400–year-old pissed-off German artist.

Update 06-20: The verdict(s) are in. Ken Wiles, charged with two counts of animal cruelty: not guilty on both counts. Joe Wiles, charged with six counts of animal cruelty: guilty on one count, not guilty on four counts, one count dismissed. Dusty Stroud, charged with two counts of animal cruelty: not guilty on one count, one count dismissed. More as we get it.

Judge Stuart Miller may be in, but we’re still out on the origins of dear Lady Justice’s blindfold. One point, though, of which we are most assuredly and unwaveringly certain: there were fine legal minds in the courtroom — yes, at least one, plus three-quarters of another. Mammalian anatomy and physiology — specifically and particularly, swine anatomy and physiology, or even basic, undergraduate general physics — not so much.

Calves, Chickens Dropped From AB 594

AB 594, formerly titled “Farm animals: confinement” was whittled down to “Pigs: tethering and confinement” yesterday. The amended version, still in the hands of the Agriculture Committee, removes protection from confinement for its clucking or mooing stakeholders. This version also limits confinement to the “seven-day period before the pig’s expected date of giving birth,” introduces a jail term for violation, and pushes the operative enforcement of the bill’s provisions ahead by two years. Compare and contrast: Florida, Arizona, Oregonia (it’s like Canadialand without the rampaging moose, hockey, or LAPD). J/k, we luv the Oregoniaonites, especially the Gov., who actually tried to eat with food stamps for a week.

Here’s some silliness that thankfully failed in Committee despite it’s various amending, and a fine analysis of why it should have done nothing more than fail. LYLAS over there at the AnimalBlawg.

c0demonkey is busy with this pipe-laying project, which we think … aggregating yet another aggregation of aggregators is way redundant. But that nunchuck-waving chimp swears it’ll be the primo-sourced, finely-filtered, JSON-outputted feed for farm animal related stuffs anywhere. Yeah, we’ll just see about that. For what we’re paying, we can’t complain or expect a whole helluva lot.

“Food Defamation” Bill Comes to CA

AB 698 (Strickland, R-Thousand Oaks) would allow “a producer of a perishable agricultural product, as defined, who suffers actual damages as a result of another person’s disparagement of the producer’s product to recover those actual damages if certain facts are found to be true.”

Because so-called “false reports of contamination regarding agricultural products” hurt you and you “cannot assess which reports of contamination are reliable.” IOW, you’re too stupid to figure out that

• animal agribusiness manure run-off made spinach kill people,
• feral swine, as biological vectors in a human disease-transmission algorithm, wouldn’t have left enough spinach leaves behind to bother harvesting,
• pigs don’t waste time on spinach when vineyard grapes are a just trot away.

Didn’t we go over this already?

Yep, we did. Just checking.