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Exposed! Hell on Earth for Animals in
California
December 19,
2012 PETA
For more than
two months this year, a PETA investigator worked undercover to expose the
horrifying pattern of misery and neglect endured by thousands of animals at
Global Captive Breeders, LLC (GCB),
a Lake Elsinore, Calif., company that bred and sold reptiles and rats. Today, we
are revealing some of what our investigator documented at the facility, which
housed rats and reptiles, including snakes, monitor lizards, skinks, tokay
geckos, and sulcata tortoises. We found that some of the company's
workers—including its manager—neglected thousands of these animals and cruelly
killed countless others.
Just days ago, on December 12, law-enforcement officials entered GCB in response
to our investigator's evidence and mounted what became
the largest rescue of neglected rats in U.S.
history and the single largest seizure of animals ever in California.
In total, more than 600 reptiles and 18,000 rats were relinquished by the
facility's owner, Mitch Behm, and a criminal investigation is now underway.
The cruelty documented by PETA's investigator at GCB is typical of the filth,
crowding, deprivation, and stress that PETA's investigations of pet-trade
suppliers have documented over and over again. Most of the thousands of rats who
were kept at the facility were what the pet-trade industry refers to as "feeder"
animals—bred and sold to be fed to snakes and other captive carnivorous reptiles
who are kept as "pets." The rats were doomed to die terrifying, painful deaths
inside GCB's walls and were also born into and kept in filth and misery
throughout their entire dismal lives.
Workers at GCB routinely grabbed rats by their tails and slammed them into metal
posts, racks, tables, and walls when they decided to kill them. Some rats,
including newborns, were frozen alive. Others were bludgeoned or shot with a BB
gun. Tubs used for housing the animals flooded frequently, drowning countless
rats. Hundreds of animals were found dead in tubs, where they had been deprived
of the most basic necessities, such as drinking water, nutritious food,
moderately clean air, dry bedding, veterinary care, and even minimally humane
handling.
PETA's undercover investigator exposed that conditions for the hundreds of
reptiles confined to GCB were equally disturbing. Snakes, skinks, monitor
lizards, and other reptiles were essentially left to die—their deaths so
disregarded by staff members that their carcasses were left to rot in
maggot-strewn cases. GCB's owner even went so far as to tell facility workers
repeatedly not to care for reptiles since they weren't generating as much
revenue as the rat-breeding operation. Many reptiles were kept shelved in
lightless, opaque drawers so small that they could not move or eat normally and
were trapped with their own waste and without access to water. When PETA's
investigator told the manager that a debilitated blue-tongue skink needed care,
the manager threw his hands in the air and exclaimed,
"There is nothing I can do for him. ... [I]f he
dies, he dies. That's better than him living here, I guess."
As heartbreaking as it may be to read about such terrible cruelty and neglect
during this holiday season, I do hope that it will drive you to take the
following actions for animals right now:
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Sign our petition
urging that criminal charges against all appropriate parties be filed.
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Share
this new investigation with your friends and family
and urge them to help reptiles, rats, mice, and other animals exploited by
this ruthless, greed-driven business that inflicts so much unnecessary
misery and suffering on animals.
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