About fifty farmers gathered this Wednesday at the door of the judicial buildings in Lleida to support the national coordinator of Unió de Pagesos, Joan Caball, the president of Asaja in Lleida, Pere Roqué, from Asaja-Lleida, the president of the Federation of Agrarian Cooperatives, Ramon Sarroca and the president of JARC, Joan Carles Massot, summoned to testify in the investigative court number 4 that investigates the complaint of PACMA for an alleged crime of animal abuse during the demonstrations that were called between February and March of the year past against the rabbit plague.
Pacma denounced the organizers of the Pagesos or Conills Platform protests in March 2023, in which live rabbits were thrown against the doors of the Delegation of the Climate Action Department of the Generalitat of Catalonia. According to the entity, some animals died then, and others were seriously injured after being beaten and trampled.
The representatives of the organizations have only responded to their lawyers’ questions, arguing that no entity promoted the release of rabbits and have availed themselves of their right not to answer the prosecution’s questions. His lawyers plan to request that the case be archived.
Pacma, according to its vice president, Cristina García and its lawyer, Marta Muntada, will request new procedures to identify, with names and surnames, the people who launched the rabbits and who appear in videos and photographs.
In statements to the media, Joan Caball, from UP and Pere Roqué, from Asaja-Lleida. Caball has defended that the events under investigation cannot be attributed to the entities.
Ramon Boleda, of Pagesos o Conills, has considered that the accusations are “totally unfounded”.
“It is true that we exhibited the rabbits, but it has been said that we tortured them or that we wanted to harm them in a premeditated way, it is a lie,” he explained.
“The idea was to release the rabbits in the gardens of La Seu Vella to see if Acció Climática reacted more quickly than the pests in our fields, but things got messy and someone said that we should throw them into the Territorial Services. Some “The animals were thrown in and then out, but at no time were any rabbits tortured. They were recovered and taken to the University of Lleida to be studied. None of them died.”
A spokesperson for the Pagesos or Conills platform has read a manifesto in which she assures that farmers are the first to take care of nature and their animals and that they have been doing so since before animal rights activists appeared.
“We only demand a balance, to avoid pests that destroy our crops, plants and farmers also have the right to live,” reads the manifesto.
“Although a very small part of society thinks that the rural world is full of unga ungas and cowboys of the American West, considered the evolutionary stage prior to Homo sapiens, we are civilized people,” the manifesto argues.
The document concludes that they have proven to be civilized people in the last year, with more than ten tractor units without any notable incident.
