Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor in chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

And I am joined this evening by two guests. First, I am joined by Matt Johnson. He is an investigator and press coordinator with direct action everywhere.

Hello, Matt.

Hey, Nathan. So happy to be on here.

Yeah, thrilled to finally meet you face to face. And also here with Wayne Chung. He is one of the co-founders of Direct Action Everywhere and also one of the co-founders of the Century Initiative. Wayne, welcome to Cote Affairs.

It's feeling good to be free, Nathan. Oh, well, this is the thing, is that we are very lucky to get to speak to Wayne today because there was a very good chance that I would not have gotten to interview him,

because this week could have been his first week of a long stretch of incarceration.

If you haven't seen the news, Wayne was one of two defendants just acquitted in a landmark trial in a Utah courtroom over the theft of two piglets, which is,

we're going to talk all about exactly what happened, but this is already being billed as a

major event in animal law because it looked pretty hairy for a while there.

And Wayne has been aggressively pursued by Utah prosecutors and even the federal government at one point.

So I think we should introduce our listeners and subsequently our readers

to exactly what happened. So perhaps you can give to the unfamiliar with this case, the basic

facts of why you ended up pursued.

Yeah, I'll try to give you the three-minute version, but I've been an animal advocate for now, well over 20 years, but ever since I graduated from law school in 2006 and taught

at Northwest, and I had a particular concern about transparency in the food system and a

particular consumer fraud. I visited a slaughterhouse

with the first time in 2007. There's a local, humanely raised, small-scale slaughterhouse, and I found

awfully dreary, horrifying conditions. And around the time I visited a slot house for the first time,

there was a very major multinational corporation called Smithfield Food that was making what was supposed to be a historic announcement.

In January 2007, they said, we're going to phase out these things called gestation crates.

And gestation crates are two foot by seven foot, so 14 square feet total metal cages where a

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