The Murcia Court has overturned the ruling of a criminal court that acquitted the two brothers who owned the macro-pig farm whose conditions were revealed by the La Sexta programme ‘Salvados’ in 2018. The ruling considered that it had not been proven during the trial that the accused “deliberately omitted essential care for the health and life” of the animals, nor that they “intentionally prolonged their suffering”, but now, the higher court has ruled that the judge did not make “a rational and complete assessment” of the testimonies and evidence presented during the trial and orders the hearing to be repeated with another court.
In February 2018, Jordi Évole’s programme offered a report that included shocking images of the conditions in which pigs were raised in a macro-farm in the Murcian town of Totana, which mainly supplied the El Pozo meat company. This company then announced that it was stopping working with the aforementioned farm. Igualdad Animal reported the events and a local court opened a case that was later archived and reopened by an appeal from the animal rights foundation.
The Igualdad Animal Foundation requested that the Carrasco brothers be sentenced to one year in prison for 14 counts of animal abuse and that the businessmen be banned from participating in businesses related to pigs 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 accused because, among other arguments, she limited the images broadcast to the farm’s lazaretto – the infirmary – and that the pigs that the programme showed with malformations were 14 of the 1,800 that the farm had.
Igualdad Animal appealed the ruling and now Section 3 of the Provincial Court of Murcia has ruled that the trial and sentence are null and void and that the hearing must be repeated. The acquittal handed down by the judge, 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 the personal evidence”, according to the ruling to which elDiario.es has had access.
Two days after the broadcast of the program ‘Salvados’, a technician from the Health Department of the Region of Murcia inspected the farm and issued an incriminating report for the owners. However, the judge insisted that the animals “did not present injuries but multiple pathological processes”, whether infectious-contagious, congenital malformations, arthropathies, tumors or voluminous abscesses and large inguinal-scrotal hernias, according to three expert reports. It would be these diseases, she added, that would cause the shocking images offered by the program.
The Provincial Court corrected the judge’s decision with the following argument: “If the fourteen pigs that were in poor condition, with serious deformities, broken legs, abscesses, swellings, malformations, etc. were unrecoverable, as stated by all the experts who have intervened in the procedure (…) the solution could not be to relegate them to the lazaretto, unnecessarily prolonging their suffering.”
And he added: “They should have been killed months or weeks earlier, according to the expert report by Mr. Alberola García, the sentence not addressing whether this unnecessarily prolonged the suffering of the animals, stating in the expert report that ‘their simple isolation will not make a hernia heal’.
In the trial, Igualdad Animal defended the situation of overcrowding of the pigs, who could not move or lie down, and that the hygiene conditions were “deplorable.” The appeal stressed that the deformities caused by hernias in the pigs were evidence of “irreversible” diseases that caused them “unnecessary and prolonged suffering,” when they should have been operated on or sacrificed.
The controversy over macro farms
In the midst of controversy over the manipulation of statements by the then Minister of Consumption, Alberto Garzón, in which he criticized the intensive farming of macro-pig farms and the poor quality of the meat they produce, the Provincial Court of Murcia already reversed in February 2022 the dismissal of the case against the brothers who own the facility that had been ordered by the investigating court.
The head of the organisation that brought the complaint, Igualdad Animal, who had managed to gain access to the premises and who was found credible by the judges of the second instance, included statements such as the following: “The pigs had wounds, cannibalism, deformities, abnormal excrement, giant hernias…” Javier Moreno said that the Carrasco Brothers’ farm was “the worst thing he had ever seen” in his life.
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