A PETA worker is going to be tried for felony theft for stealing a foxhound. She says she was rescuing a stray. Except, well, she took a tracking collar off the dog, and also ignored the fact that the dog’s name and owner’s phone number were on the other collar.
Courtland, VA – An animal rights advocate who said she was rescuing a stray will be prosecuted on a felony theft charge for loading a deputy sheriff’s hunting dog into a van and driving away.
A judge on Tuesday allowed the case to proceed against Andrea Florence Benoit, 25, who contends she was worried about the dog’s welfare and only wanted to return it to its owner.
The Chesapeake woman picked up the fox hound while working in Southampton County for Norfolk’s People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Prosecutors dropped charges against another PETA worker in the van.
A motorist who saw the women pick up the dog called Southampton County Deputy Sheriff J.T. Cooke Jr., an animal control officer for the county. Cooke found the van a few minutes later and discovered his Walker hound in the back.
Cooke testified that he had let out several of his hounds the night before to chase foxes, and one failed to return. The dog carried dye markings of numbers on its side and “JT” on its hip and wore a neon yellow collar bearing Cooke’s name and cell phone number, the deputy said.
The animal also had been outfitted with an orange collar fitted with an antenna that could track the animal for three to four miles.
The tracking collar was found near the side of the road where the dog was picked up.
Oops. Apparently, though, she was following PETA policy. Yes, that’s right, PETA tells its workers to steal animals and not contact their owners directly.
The women were following PETA policy by not directly trying to contact the dog’s owner through the phone number on the other collar, Benoit’s lawyer, Stephen D. Benjamin, said. They intended to call their office so PETA could reach Cooke, he said.
While General District Judge Robert B. Edwards said he had no doubt that Benoit believed she was doing the right thing, “the right thing in this case was a felony.”
I like that judge. Of course, it’s going to be plea-bargained down to a misdemeanor, just as the case of the PETA workers taking animals from vets, killing them, and throwing them into a dumpster was.
It’s a good thing the police caught the PETA people first, or this man’s hound would’ve been killed and tossed in a local dumpster.
PETA routinely picks up animals from shelters, on the pretense of being able to find homes for them, and then quickly kills them and throws them out in whatever convenient trash receptacles are nearby. They often perform their killings in the van on the way home from the shelters.
See http://www.petakillsanimals.com for more than you ever wanted to know on the subject. And http://www.petakillsanimals.com/pressRelease_detail.cfm?id=202 for information on this specific case.
I got home late tonight and read this before I made dinner. I’d been planning on spaghetti but after reading this, it’s chicken…and the pieces are small, so I am hoping before it was killed the bird was a cute little chick.
Of course, these are the people who protested to Arafat when the Palis send a donkey loaded with explosives towards some Israelis. They were outraged…at the cruelty to the donkey. Cruelty to Jews apparently they can live with.
What I don’t get is why PETA even does things like that in the first place. What can their rationale possibly be? (That is, assuming that they are capable of thinking.)
This PETA “lady” needs to be prosecuted!!
We have “foxhounds” in the USA?
I am an animal lover, but that aside, people who do such crimes as this need to be prosecuted, if for no other reason than to serve as an example of what the law will do and to set a precedent for other perpetrators. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
“What can their rationale possibly be?”
The ends – convincing people that any form of domestication is cruel to animals – justify any means, including cruelty to the animals they claim to be defending.
It’s a fairly common motive among psychopaths; they express their own angst over the world’s tiny cruelties by committing intentionally exaggerated cruelties. So angry they become that the real world doesn’t provide them with comic-book villains they can defeat, that they try to force people into that role in their fantasy worlds, even if it means they must do more horrific things in the real world than anything that ever appeared in the pages of “Sandman.”