Welcome to the Animal Law Podcast. I am so excited about this episode. Once again, we are

joined by Asher Smith, who is, of course, the director of litigation at the Pita Foundation.

And I invited Asher on because I had heard about this case about the main lobster fest.

You might have heard about it and, of course, Peter's litigation regarding it.

But then he also caught me up on what's going on in a case we talked about on episode 94 involving the University of Washington.

And there have been some crazy and crazy good developments in that case.

So we want to get caught up on that too. So we're going to do both. So we have a lot to talk about.

So buckle up and welcome Asher.

All right. Thanks for having me again.

It's a thrill. I can't wait to hear about both of these cases. Just a quick reminder before we get to that.

Rising anxieties comes out on Tuesdays, the hand report Port on Thursdays, and the long-form interview,

including this one on Fridays. Bonus for Flock Members comes out on Monday. We're a podcast

and we're on YouTube. Please subscribe and hit like wherever you listen. Thanks. And okay,

let's get started with lobsters.

And as always, let's start off with some facts.

Can you just pretty much tell us about the Maine Lobster Fest?

Yeah, sure.

So Maine Lobster Festival is an enormous attraction that takes place in Rockland, Maine.

And what they do is they literally steam 16,000 lobsters alive on public park land in a device that they refer to as the world's largest lobster cooker. It's actually up all year

long. And what our lawsuit does is it argues that for reasons I can get into, that actually does violate Maine cruelty to animal law.

Yeah, I really want to start with the cruelty to animal law, though, of course, since you're not the DA, but you can't directly just go into court about the cruelty law.

And you have found some really creative ways of highlighting Maine's really interesting cruelty law.

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