Family in Washington devastated after butchers accidentally kill domestic pigs

A Washington state family is devastated after a mobile butcher mistook their home for another address and slaughtered their pet pigs.

Betty and Patty, both two years old, were shot in their enclosure in Port Orchard while the family was away.

Owner Nathan Gray said he couldn’t contain his anger. “They were my wife’s and my children’s pets and, you know, they’re family.”

Police told the BBC that the matter had been referred to the Crown Prosecution Service.

Mr Gray and his wife Natalie said they returned home on May 1 to find their pets just slaughtered. Video surveillance at home alerted her to an unknown vehicle on her property.

Mr. Gray said that after he arrived, one of his employees came up to him and said, “Those guys shot your pigs.”

He said he found Patty and Betty lying in pools of blood. “They shot her. Just 16 feet from our neighbor’s fence.”

He said he confronted the butcher, who said his GPS was “broken”. “They asked me what I wanted to do with the pigs – if I wanted them processed.”

“They will be buried on this property like the rest of our animals.”

Ms Gray said her children were traumatised. “They were my babies,” she said of Betty and Patty. “And when you have kids and they don’t feel safe – when they feel hurt, I’m angry because they don’t feel safe.”

The pigs enjoyed chasing their daughters and playing in the mud and were expected to spend their entire lives on their farm in Gray Acres, the couple said.

The Grays now want to make sure something like this never happens again and hope to change the laws that regulate mobile slaughter.

“It seems like there are no guidelines. There’s nothing about firearms training from what I’ve read,” Mr. Gray said. He added that he would find it incredible if it were legal to go onto private property with a gun and kill an animal without the owner’s permission.

A lawyer for the couple, Adam Karp, told BBC News that “the law treats Betty and Patty no differently than if they were golden retrievers or Norwegian forest cats.”

Although legally classified as “livestock”, he said that intentionally causing harm to an animal without legal basis was a serious crime and that the butcher could be held civilly liable for the crime of cattle theft.

He added that he was hired by the couple to “explore criminal, civil and regulatory options to bring justice to Betty and Patty and ensure that such a horror never happens again.”

In 2002, mobile slaughter units were created in the USA. Each is accompanied by an official food safety inspector. They are intended to allow farmers and ranchers to have their animals slaughtered without having to travel long distances to access larger facilities.