Obstruction charge stayed against Ontario pig activist Anita Krajnc

TORONTO – An Ontario woman recently found not guilty of mischief after giving water to pigs headed to slaughter has scored another legal victory in a separate case involving pigs.
Charges of obstructing police and breach of recognizance against Anita Krajnc were stayed, according to Ontario’s Ministry of the Attorney General, which didn’t provide a reason for the development.
Those charges were laid after Krajnc crossed a police line last fall to get closer to an overturned truck full of pigs in Burlington, Ont.“I have mixed feelings,” Krajnc said Thursday of the outcome of the case.
“My perspective is always: what is best for the pigs? I don’t want the pigs who died at the rollover crash to ever be forgotten. I would have gone to jail for those pigs.”
On Oct. 5, Krajnc raced out to an intersection where the transport truck full of pigs had crashed, killing 60 pigs. The remaining 100 pigs were marched to a nearby slaughterhouse.
Krajnc said she went past the police tape set up in the area to get a closer view of what happened and to record the pigs’ suffering.
Video of the scene shows her being dragged away by police and then placed in handcuffs. She said she went limp on purpose and wasn’t hurt in the incident.
“I was in a different mental state that day,” Krajnc said. “When I first got there, some pigs were outside the truck, just walking around. There’s nothing like seeing pigs walking on the sidewalk and eating grass after you’ve done years of weekly vigils at a site. It was hard to comprehend that vision.”
As she surveyed the bloody scene, it was the noise that got to her, she said.
“I can’t tell you how difficult it was for me to hear the pigs screaming. And I wanted to bear witness and take video of as much as I could, so I went past the tape. Twice, I went past, twice.”
She said she plans to hold a vigil every October to honour the pigs’ memory.
Earlier this month, in a separate case, Krajnc was acquitted of a mischief charge laid after she gave water to pigs on a truck headed to an abattoir.
In that case, a judge ruled that Krajnc didn’t break the law since she didn’t harm the animals or prevent them from being slaughtered when she dumped liquid from a water bottle into a truck carrying pigs as the vehicle approached a Burlington slaughterhouse in June 2015.
The judge said, however, that Krajnc may have been motivated in part by the prospect of drawing attention to her cause.
“The fact that Ms. Krajnc gave water to a pig received little attention initially,” Justice David Harris said in his ruling. “Conversely, the act of prosecuting Ms. Krajnc has probably led to enough bad publicity for the pork industry that it might be said that the prosecution actually accomplished what they accused Ms. Krajnc of trying to do.”