What is a Pig Worth?

What It Covers

Animal rights activist Wayne Chung, co-founder of Direct Action Everywhere, breaks into a Smithfield Foods pig farm in Utah in 2017, removes two sick piglets named Lily and Lizzie, and represents himself at trial — forcing a jury of locals in a pro-Smithfield county to confront the unanswerable legal question of what an animal's life is worth.

Key Questions Answered

• •Animal legal status framework: Legal scholars categorize animals into three distinct buckets: pure property with no protections, property with value tied to human benefit (pets, workhorses), and beings with approximate equality to humans (e.g., chimpanzees under testing bans). Understanding which category applies determines what legal protections an animal receives — and the same species can occupy multiple categories simultaneously depending on context.
• •The theft paradox: To defeat a theft charge, the stolen item must have "value." A veterinarian testified Lily required at least $315 in care against a market value of $42.20 — making her worth negative $272 to Smithfield. This negative-value argument could legally negate theft, but simultaneously denies the inherent worth that motivated the rescue in the first place.
• •Naming as legal strategy: Wayne assigned the piglets names — Lily and Lizzie — rather than farm identifiers like "Smithfield 245." Jurors reported remembering the names long after the trial. Legal researchers note that naming shifts conceptual framing from property to personhood, influencing how decision-makers perceive an animal's status without requiring any formal change in law.
• •Jury nullification through ambiguity: When jurors asked the judge to define "value," he returned the question to them. This judicial non-answer functionally gave jurors permission to apply moral reasoning alongside legal reasoning. After seven hours of deliberation, tears, and table-thumping, the jury acquitted on both burglary and theft — a unanimous verdict in a county where Smithfield is a major employer.
• •Strategic backfire and legal counter-response: The acquittal produced no binding legal precedent because only a guilty verdict could be appealed to create case law. Utah legislators subsequently passed a law explicitly blocking the "negative value" defense for taking sick animals. Prosecutors in other states now charge activists with trespass instead of theft to avoid triggering the same public value debate in court.