Several years ago, a French animal activist rescued a two-month old piglet, saving him from a future that almost certainly involved pork chops and bacon. She raised the pig for more than two years, but then she moved to a new home and didn’t have enough space for her four-hooved friend. Rather than surrender the pig to a shelter, or abandon him entirely, she was able to place him with a friend, who signed a contract promising that she’d treat the animal well and—this is important—promising not to kill him for food.But according to The Local, that woman must have had her fingers crossed when she signed those papers, because she turned that pig into more than 200 pounds of pâté. The woman, who was not named, was charged with breach of trust and “complicity in the slaughter of an animal outside slaughterhouse conditions,” and given a three-month suspended prison sentence and a €500 ($563) fine for killing and canning the pig.The woman did not attend her hearing, and she declined an attorney, but she did attempt to explain herself to police officers. Le Telegramme says that she told the cops that the pig was too big for his pen, and had escaped from his enclosure more than once. Rather than, you know, building him a bigger, better pen, she called her ex-husband, who said he’d have the pig killed. (Her ex told a slightly different story, insisting that she’d always wanted to eat the pig, and that she never mentioned the adoption contract she’d signed.)
When officers went to the woman’s home, they found an empty pen and 110 kilos (242 pounds) of canned pork—and cops presumably had to explain all of this to the pig’s original owner.This is the saddest pig story since, um, those firefighters ate the pigs that they’d rescued from a burning barn. In February 2017, firefighters from the Pewsey Fire Station in southwest England saved two sows and 18 piglets from a blaze at a nearby farm. Six months later, the farm manager delivered sausages made from those same pigs to the fire station. “I gave those animals the best quality of life I could ever give until the time they go to slaughter and they go into the food chain," Rachel Rivers told the BBC. “You do feel sad at the end of it […] but to bring them down for [the firefighters] was a good way of saying 'thank you'."The fire station posted a picture of the sausages being grilled, writing that they were enjoying “the fruits of their labours”—and a day later, that post had been replaced with an apology for “causing offense to some.”I mean, just my opinion here and no judgement on the meat-eating, but maybe don’t cook an animal you’ve either just rescued or one that you’ve specifically promised that you wouldn’t eat. This is literally why supermarkets and specialty retailers and Seamless exist, yeah?
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