(US) PETA trial opens in animal deaths

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PETA trial opens in animal deaths

Two charged with felony cruelty; group says euthanasia was humane

Kristin Collins

(Raleigh) News & Observer

Jan. 22, 2007

 

It began as a bizarre small-town crime.

 

Every Wednesday, in a Dumpster behind a Piggly Wiggly in northeastern North

Carolina, a fresh load of dead cats and dogs appeared.

 

The stakeout and the ensuing arrests only deepened the mystery. The people

caught dumping garbage bags full of euthanized animals were employees of People

for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, one of the largest and most radical animal

rights groups in the world.

 

This is the group that fights for the rights of rats and frogs. The group that

throws blood on women in furs, compares the killing of animals for food to the

Holocaust and opposes animal research -- even when it leads to lifesaving

medical advances.

 

Today, more than a year and a half after their arrest, the two PETA workers are

to go on trial in Hertford County, in one of the state's poorest and most rural

regions. Adria J. Hinkle, of Norfolk, Va., and Andrew B. Cook, of Virginia

Beach, Va., are charged with 21 counts each of animal cruelty, a felony that can

carry jail time, along with charges of littering and obtaining property by false

pretenses.

 

The trial is expected to last more than a week and will be watched by people all

over the country. Court TV is making a bid to televise it.

 

Many hope the trial will answer the question that has become a chorus among

animal lovers: Why would PETA kill animals, many of them healthy, and dump their

bodies like trash?

 

" Considering how extreme PETA tends to be, isn't the fact that they're

euthanizing animals and throwing them in a Dumpster, isn't that bizarre?

Contradictory? " said JoAnn Jones, head of a volunteer animal adoption group in

Hertford County.

 

Jones said she plans to attend the trial because " I want to know the truth. "

 

PETA's choice

 

Officials with PETA say the truth is simple. The group, based in Norfolk, began

working in several northeastern North Carolina counties in the 1990s.

 

Phil Hirschkop, a lawyer for PETA, said the group got complaints about horrible

conditions in animal shelters. Emaciated dogs unable to move, lying in their own

filth. Animals suffering through long, terrifying deaths in gas chambers.

Animals being killed with a drug that caused their internal organs to seize up

while they were still conscious.

 

PETA, a well-funded organization that raises more than $25 million a year from

1.6 million members and supporters, started sending workers to Bertie,

Northampton and Hertford counties.

 

PETA employees would clean and renovate shelters, hand out free doghouses to the

poor, and take sick animals to the vet. They set up programs that allowed

residents to get their animals spayed or neutered at no cost. And they began

handling euthanizations at the shelters, Hirschkop said.

 

They used the same method that veterinarians use: an injection of sodium

pentobarbitol that kills the animal almost instantly.

 

" PETA's choice is to allow those animals to be shot or gassed in a very cruel

manner, or to euthanize them themselves and at least do it humanely, " Hirschkop

said.

 

By 2005, the PETA people were picking up so many animals that they didn't have

room in their small van to carry them back to Norfolk alive. So Hinkle took them

from the shelters one by one and euthanized them in the van, Hirschkop said.

 

He says the only crime Hinkle and Cook committed was throwing the animals in a

trash bin, an act for which PETA President Ingrid Newkirk has apologized and

offered to pay.

 

Hirschkop said the pair dumped the animals because they had other stops to make

and the animals often started to smell before they got back to Norfolk, where

PETA has facilities for cremating animals.

 

" They never should have done it, " he said. " But this is not the crime of the

century. "

 

Hirschkop says that in a region where county officials neglect animal shelters

and private landowners routinely shoot or poison stray animals, the sudden

concern about animal welfare is disingenuous. He says he believes law

enforcement officials have pursued the case because they don't like what PETA

stands for, and he says the prosecution has become a matter of politics rather

than justice.

 

Valerie Asbell, the district attorney for Hertford, Bertie and Northampton

counties, is prosecuting the case. Officials in her office declined to comment.

 

A different version

 

County officials and veterinarians in the three counties, however, disagree with

PETA's story. They say PETA promised to try and find homes for the animals they

took and to euthanize only as a last resort.

 

Hertford County veterinarian Patrick Proctor told reporters at the time of the

arrests that three of the cats in the Dumpster were a healthy mother and kittens

that he turned over to PETA on the promise that they would be adopted. His

allegations resulted in three charges of obtaining property by false pretenses.

Proctor did not return calls from The News & Observer.

 

Officials in the three counties also say they believed the animals PETA took had

at least a chance at finding homes.

 

" The verbal agreement was, if they felt like the animals could possibly be

adopted, they would, " said Sue Gay, the head of Northampton County animal

control. " We thought at least some of them were being adopted. "

 

But some also admit that they didn't have the time to worry about what PETA was

doing with the legions of stray animals that were stretching the counties' scant

resources.

 

" All I knew was they came in, they said they had X amount of animals and they

were carrying them to Virginia, and I didn't question them, " said Charles Jones,

who is head of animal control in Hertford County. Jones is also the fire marshal

and the head of emergency medical services and emergency management.

 

The three counties no longer give animals to PETA. But the town of Windsor, in

Bertie County, still turns over all its stray animals to the group.

 

Even after the arrests, Town Administrator Allen Castelloe said he has never

checked into what PETA does with the town's animals.

 

Hirschkop said PETA never promised county officials that it would find homes for

animals. PETA doesn't have an adoption facility, he said, and there are simply

too many strays in the region to find homes for them all.

 

Animal advocates say PETA was needlessly killing animals. They say that, with a

little work, PETA could have found homes for at least some stray animals.

 

JoAnn Jones, the Hertford County animal advocate, started working in the county

shelter in July. Since then, she said, her volunteer group has adopted out 175

animals. She said they call on their network of animal-loving friends, place ads

on the Internet and, sometimes, send animals to other states.

 

" We have a lot of dogs that are sleeping in beds, riding in cars and living the

good life, " Jones said.

 

Cheryl Powell, a veterinarian in Bertie County, said that before PETA moved in,

she was finding homes for many of the adoptable animals that came through the

Bertie shelter. Once PETA came, she said, the group no longer wanted her help.

 

Powell said PETA workers told her they were taking animals to a farm where they

would try to adopt them out. But she said she began to suspect that the van they

drove was too small to get all those animals back to Virginia, and when they

came asking whether she had stray animals, she never turned any over.

 

" They lied, " Powell said. " I know they never told me that they were taking

animals and euthanizing them on a wholesale plan. "

 

The deception, Powell said, stings as much as the animals' deaths.

 

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