The Murcia court has annulled the sentence of the criminal court that had acquitted the two brothers who owned the large pig farm whose conditions had been revealed by the program “Salvados” of La Sexta in 2018. The judgment considered that it had not been accredited during the judgment that the defendants “deliberately failed to take care of the health and life” of the animals, nor that they “intentionally prolonged their suffering”, but now the higher court judges that the magistrate did not “intentionally prolong their suffering” in a rational and complete manner “of the testimonies and evidence presented during the trial and orders that the hearing be repeated in another court.
In February 2018, Jordi Évole’s programme featured a report with shocking images of the conditions in which pigs were raised on a macro-farm in the Murcian town of Totana, which mainly supplied the meat company El Pozo. The company then announced that it was stopping working with the aforementioned farm. Animal Equality reported the events and a local court opened a file that was later archived and reopened by an appeal from the Animal Rights Foundation.
The Animal Equality Foundation requested that the Carrasco brothers be sentenced to one year in prison for 14 crimes of animal abuse and that the businessmen be banned from participating in pig-related activities for three years. The prosecution, for its part, requested that they be sentenced to 18 months in prison for a single but continuous crime of animal abuse. The judge decided to acquit the defendant because, among other arguments, she had limited the images broadcast to the lazaretto – the infirmary – of the farm and that the pigs that the program showed with malformations were 14 of the 1,800 that the farm had.
Animal Equality has appealed the decision and now Section 3 of the Provincial Court of Murcia decides that the trial and sentence are null and void and that the hearing must be repeated. The acquittal issued by the magistrate, the court states, “is based on a simple and a priori ‘compensatory’ operation of contradictory testimonies and not on a reasonable and complete assessment of personal evidence,” according to the judgment that elDiario has access to.
Two days after the broadcast of the program “Salvados”, a technician from the Department of Health of the Region of Murcia inspected the farm and delivered a report incriminating the owners. However, the judge insisted that the animals “did not present injuries but rather multiple pathological processes”, whether infectious-contagious malformations, congenital malformations, arthropathies, tumors or large abscesses, and large inguino-scrotal hernias, according to three expert reports. It would be these diseases, he added, that would be at the origin of the shocking images offered by the program.
The Provincial Court corrected the judge’s judgment with the following argument: “If the fourteen pigs that were in poor condition, with serious deformations, broken legs, abscesses, swellings, malformations, etc. “They were beyond repair, as all the experts who participated in the proceedings affirmed (…) the solution could not be to relegate them to the lazaretto, prolonging their suffering unnecessarily.”
And he adds: “They should have been killed months or weeks earlier, as explained in Mr. Alberola García’s expert report, not to mention the penalty if this unnecessarily prolonged the animals’ suffering, as he explains in his report: “it’s simple.” Isolation is not going to cure a hernia.
Animal Equality argued at trial that the pigs were overcrowded, unable to move or lie down, and that the hygiene conditions were “deplorable.” The appeal argued that the pigs’ hernial deformities were “irreversible” diseases that caused them “unnecessary and prolonged suffering,” when they should have been operated on or sacrificed.
The macrofarm controversy
In the midst of the controversy over the manipulation of statements by the then Minister of Consumer Affairs, Alberto Garzón, in which he criticized the intensive farming of pig farms and the poor quality of the meat they produce, the Provincial Court of Murcia has already annulled in February 2022 the file of the trial against the brothers who own the establishment that the investigating court had ordered.
The head of the plaintiff organization, Animal Equality, who had managed to gain access to the premises and to whom the second instance judges gave credibility, included statements such as the following: “The pigs had injuries, cannibalism, deformations, unusual feces, giant hernias…” Javier Moreno assured that the Carrasco Brothers farm was “the worst thing he had seen” in his life.
