Why the Prosecution of Tracy Murphy Should Matter to Us All

In this email

• I’m in New York this week to represent Tracy Murphy, who is being prosecuted after taking two stray cows into her care. Check out the discussion below.

• This Saturday, April 15, we’re holding a Right to Rescue workshop in Buffalo, with Tracy, some of the #Porgreg12 defendants, and other important animal advocates. Here’s the event page.

• The jurors from the Foster Farms trial be joining us next weekend, from April 22-23, to discuss the historic victory in Merced. Don’t miss it!

• I was on the PETA podcast this week. Here’s the link on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify.

• I’ll be in Utah from April 25-27 to support Curtis Vollmar, who was charged for peacefully leafleting about factory farms in Beaver County, Utah. Stay tuned for more.

Why the Prosecution of Tracy Murphy Should Matter to Us All

In July 2022, Tracy Murphy came home from her usual trip to get coffee in the early morning, and she noticed two young cows wandering on her property. With a busy street just a few dozen feet away, she guided them into a fenced pasture to protect them (and drivers on the road) from an accident, then contacted animal control to report the two strays. In the summer heat, she gave them water and shade to cool off. She provided hay and pasture for them to graze. And after noticing diarrhea on the backside of one cow, she consulted with a veterinarian at Cornell to determine what might be wrong. 

Tracy did, in short, what many of us have done when encountering a stray or sick animal: she tried to help. What happened next, however, was something very few of us have encountered: her home was raided by officers searching for the cows, and Tracy was placed in jail.

It turns out that a state police officer, Scott Gregson, claimed the cows were his. Gregson and others in the community – a heavily agricultural county – were offended by a woman who was taking in cows as companions, rather than commodities to sell as meat. When he reached out to demand the cows be returned to their “proper” place – as livestock animals, and on his ranch – Tracy consulted with an attorney, who told her that she did not have to turn the cows over unless the officer provided (a) proof of ownership and (b) compensation for the costs she had incurred in their care. 

Officer Gregson provided neither of these two things. Instead, on August 2, 2022,  Tracy’s home was raided by a large throng of officers, all colleagues of Gregson’s. She was handcuffed, placed in leg shackles, and charged with felony grand larceny. And the two cows, whom Tracy had developed an intense bond with (“Willow wanted to be tough, and protect Ishamel,” Tracy says. “Ishamel was needy and felt he needed to be protected.”), were seized and sold for slaughter. 

Tracy’s case, however, is not just a single, isolated example of abuse of power in our criminal justice system. Indeed, her case is not even the only one in recent months in which the government has seized an animal from a loving caretaker and sent the poor creature to death. In Shasta County, California, a nine-year-old girl was threatened by law enforcement, and had her goat, Cedar, taken from her after she refused to have him killed. The girl had tearfully decided at a livestock auction that she loved Cedar alive more than she loved him dead. She broke her contract with the auction to sell him as meat, and instead brought him home. California state troopers drove over 10 hours and 500 miles to locate and seize the goat and send him to his death, ignoring the crying girl’s pleas. 

What these cases show is a deep corruption in our legal system: a flawed conception of animals that values them only as things to profit from, rather than as sentient beings to love. 

But they also show the solution to this corruption: standing for a different conception of animals – one based on compassion, rather than profit – even in the face of legal repression. By standing for this principle, private citizens can challenge our political system to see animals the way they are meant to be seen. 

Tracy has chosen to take that stand and will go to trial in the next few months. And I am flying out to New York to defend her this week, as an attorney, because I believe the people of Niagara County will support her. I believe this not just because Tracy’s actions were grounded in one of the most important moral principles of this nation’s history and culture: that we should value love more than profit. I believe it because a jury, even in a conservative and agricultural county, will see that the principle Tracy is standing for – the inherent worth of all sentient beings – is crucial to solving some of our planet’s most pressing crises.

Love Over Profit 

I am not a Christian, or particularly well-versed in the Christian faith. But there is one Christian story that I have heard many times, that offers one of the most important moral lessons of Western Civilization: love is greater than profit. It is the story of King Solomon and the disputed child. And here is my recollection of that tale:  

Two mothers in ancient Israel each give birth to a child. But one child immediately passes away. Whether due to mishap or malice, the caretakers of the two mothers are confused as to whose baby lived, and whose has died. The two mothers therefore end up in a vicious custody battle. Each claims the living baby is hers. The mothers trade scandalous allegations and rhetorical barbs. Their community is split. But there is scant evidence as to each of their claims, and the legal system is at a loss as to what to do.  

The dispute is brought to King Solomon. And, after a few moments of thought, he issues a ruling: 

“If neither of you will concede the baby is not yours, the child shall be cut in two, with each of you receiving one half.” 

The audience gasps, then sits in stunned silence. 

One mother speaks.

“I will never concede. The child is my right. Give him to me. But If you cannot give him to me, then let him be split in two.” 

Solomon nods and looks to the other mother. Her eyes fill with tears. 

“I concede, wise King. I concede. Give the child to the other mother. But please, above all, do not harm him. It matters not what the child gives to me. His life has inherent worth.” 

And the King makes his decision. 

“Do not cry, young mother. The child will go with you. You have proven to be the true mother. You have proven that with your love.” 

When I first heard of Tracy’s case, and the dispute between her and Officer Gregson, I immediately thought of the tale of Solomon and the two mothers. Solomon’s tale is a battle between profit and love. The first mother in the Solomonic tale did not love the child or value the child for his inherent worth. The child was a thing for her family to profit from (boys were valuable laborers at the time), and a source of status for his mom (mothers who gave birth to boys were highly lauded). The second mother, in contrast, did not care at all about the child’s instrumental value or profit. She loved him, and cherished his inherent worth, even if his labor and value would go to another family. 

King Solomon, and the ancient Jewish legal system, recognized that the latter was the more important conception of motherhood for the law to defend. Solomon refused to choose profit over love. 

But our legal system, in Tracy’s case, has lacked the wisdom of Solomon. As in Solomon’s case, the case of Tracy’s cows involves two competing claims. Gregson’s claim is based on profit. He sees the cows as a commodity that is rightfully his, and his aim was to sell them to make money for his business Tracy’s claim is based on love. She does not hope to profit from the animals; far from it, she spent not just money but blood, sweat, and tears into caring for them, despite the fact that they would never generate for her a financial return. Her criminal case, in short, will replicate the question King Solomon faced: should our legal system favor profit over love?

I believe the people of Niagara County will show the wisdom of Solomon. I believe this because the jurors of Niagara County, like most Americans, will see in their personal experiences why love is more important than profit. Indeed, human beings who lack love suffer far more than those who lack financial wealth. Loneliness is as dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Our legal system should reflect this. 

But even more importantly, I believe a jury will show the wisdom of Solomon because the principle Solomon stood for – that our legal system should defend every sentient being’s inherent worth – has become even more crucial two thousand years later. And it is not just animals, but all vulnerable beings, who suffer under a legal and political system that fails the Solomonic test.

Ironically, the person who most strongly predicted this was the same person responsible for our system’s corruption: the Nobel-Prize winning economist, Simon Kuznets. 

The Crisis of Instrumental Worth

The prosecution in Tracy’s case would like us to see the cows, and our relationship with them, as merely a question of profit or “instrumental” value. The cows matter to the extent they are securing some monetary gain, according to the prosecution’s theory, and not because they have any inherent worth. This is, in many ways, consistent with how law and policy have evolved over the last 100 years in this nation. Increasingly, not just animals, but all sentient beings (including human beings) are seen as valuable under the law only to the extent they are generating a financial return. And there is a reasonable argument that a man by the name of Simon Kuznets is to blame.

In 1937, in the wake of the greatest economic crisis in American history, Kuznets devised a single number to capture all the economic activity of a nation: Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP, by creating a simple and unified metric for a nation’s income from all sources, was seen as a major breakthrough, and Kuznets presented his findings to the United States Congress as a potential cure to the ills of the Great Depression. If we could only measure all the economic activity of the nation, it was thought, we could see the signs of a potential economic crisis before it happened – and prevent enormous human suffering.

But Kuznets warned at the time that an obsessive focus on economic activity, over other social goals such as health or happiness, was as dangerous as ignoring the economic data entirely. “The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income,” he wrote. A country with huge amounts of GDP  – but with a sick, unhappy, or exploited population – was not one that could be morally justified. And if our government focused only on GDP for its own sake, that might very well be the world it creates: a wealthy but miserable society. 

Kuznets’ warning, however, was ignored. For decades, state, federal, and local governments have been prioritizing economic returns over all else. And modern America is now a country with unprecedented wealth – but equally unprecedented increases in human suffering. I have written in the past on this blog about the recent nationwide decline in trust and social connection, the disturbing increase in anxiety and mental health problems, and the even more disturbing increase in deaths of despair (including a 150% increase in drug overdose deaths in the last 10 years). There is a fundamental “alignment problem” in modern government: our government is acting to defend profit, even when it comes at the cost of human or animal suffering. Its objectives are misaligned with the things that matter most. 

Tracy’s case is a demonstration of this problem. A sound legal and political system would not value a person’s relationship with her cows only on the basis of a potential monetary return. There is immense value in our love for animals, and in our recognition of their inherent worth, regardless of whether these relationships generate any profit. Failing to recognize this is a fundamental moral failing of our legal system. It’s misaligned with the things we actually care about as human beings, as anyone who has an animal companion will understand. 

But the problem is even worse than that. Because the failure of our system to recognize the inherent value of sentient beings is setting our entire civilization down the path of collapse. We burn endless amounts of oil, generating huge returns for fossil fuel companies but threatening to cause a collapse of the planet’s biosphere. We develop and sell dangerous prescription drugs, like opiates, that make billions for pharmaceutical companies – but send hundreds of thousands of people to deaths of despair. And, more recently, we build increasingly powerful artificial intelligence, without recognizing that a super powerful intelligence that fails to recognize the inherent worth of sentient life could cause unprecedented disruption or devastation. (Imagine a form of Chat GPT-4, for example, that is focused on extracting every dollar through deception and manipulation, no matter the consequences for living human beings. We might not be far from that dystopian fate.) 

Tracy’s case, in short, is not just about defending one woman, and her love for two cows. Her case is about providing an antidote to the problem Kuznets himself identified nearly 100 years ago. We must value sentient beings for their inherent worth, and not just because of their ability to generate some instrumental and monetary return. As our society faces unprecedented inequality and instability, more people are seeing this truth. And I believe, at the close of our trial, the jurors in Tracy’s case will see it too – and stand for love over profit, and for the inherent worth of all sentient beings.