Magisterial District Court Judge Jayne Duncan agreed to dismiss the charge against the Esbenshade Farms operators as their summary trial began.

Esbenshade Farms chief executive officer H. Glenn Esbenshade and farm manager Jay Musser still face 34 summary counts of animal cruelty.

If convicted, the defendants face a potential penalty of $50 to $750 in fines and up to 90 days in jail on each count.

The charges were brought by the Humane Society’s police officer for Lancaster County, Johnna Seeton.

Duncan’s small courtroom on South Spruce Street in Elizabethtown was filled with about 35 people, including supporters of each side. The trial was continuing at press time.

At issue are the living conditions faced by the tens of thousands of caged layer hens on the Mount Joy farm.

The allegedly cruel circumstances were captured on a videotape shot by an undercover investigator with Compassion Over Killing, an animal-rights organization based in Washington, D.C.

The prosecution opened its case by calling Ian Duncan, chairman of the animal welfare department at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, to describe what he saw in the 19-minute video.

Duncan said “there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind” that the video showed trapped hens, including many that were dead for a long time, signifying that the bird cages “were not examined regularly.”

Charges against the two officials were filed in January, on the basis of the videotape shot the month before.

Animal rights groups said the case marked the first time animal cruelty charges had been lodged against an egg farm in Pennsylvania.

The case is the first in the nation in which cruelty is alleged to be part of the normal living conditions for hens, an animal rights official has said.

The central piece of evidence is the video made from Dec. 3 to 8.

The tape allegedly shows hens impaled on wires from cages, hens tangled in the wires and unable to reach food or water, and hens caged with decomposing carcasses of other birds.

Defense attorneys failed in April to get the footage excluded from the trial.

They maintained that undercover activist John Brothers, who shot the video while briefly working at the egg farm, violated constitutional search-and-seizure provisions.

Brothers, defense attorneys said, shot the video without permission and lied on his job application.

But the prosecution showed that Brothers took the video on his own, not as a government investigator, so the constitutionality issue was moot.

Brothers, a member of animal rights group Compassion Over Killing, showed the video to Humane Society officer Seeton. Seeton then used her county-sanctioned authority to file the charges.