PETA Outdoes Itself, Accused of Secretly Planting Employee in PetSmart

You can almost see it now, like something out of a Le Carré novel:

The spy comes into the den of the enemy, worn out after another night of grappling with his demons, turning anxiously beneath a worn comforter. He has too many rings under his eyes from too many empty bottles of Johnny Walker Black.

He walks into the dreary den of the enemy, makes small talk with the apparatchiks of evil. He goes through the motions day after day, waiting for the moment he can dart into the back office where the numbers he needs are kept.

There, he takes out his secret camera. He records the grim evidence that his superiors require: The amount of kibble being sold to the owners of the enslaved dogs and cats who come in here every day to buy feed for their detainees. He sneaks out quietly, makes more small talk with his fellow employees until their shift is over.

He leaves the PetSmart and goes to the PETA drop point.

The manila envelope with the film goes into the mailbox at the vegan co-op with a satisfying thunk. Our spy walks around the corner, making sure nobody sees him. There, he takes a pack of unfiltered Luckies out of his trenchcoat and lights one up.

As he lurks in the shadows, he thinks about something suitably existential.

I’m pretty sure that’s not how things went down, if just because no one uses film anymore and even hard-bitten spies vape nowadays, but apparently something not dissimilar was going on at PetSmart courtesy of PETA.

The pet superstore says an employee was paid by the animal rights group to spy on the company’s internal operations

“PetSmart had already filed a lawsuit against the employee, Jenna Jordan, for lying on her job application and proceeding to transmit secretly recorded audio and video to PETA,” The Washington Free Beacon reported. “The newly filed lawsuit, however, names both Jordan and PETA as the defendants.”

The lawsuit claims PETA was out to “smear” the company.

“Defendants’ unlawful conduct has included animal neglect and unlawful surveillance and the recording of private conversations in areas of PetSmart’s stores not accessible to the public — in breach of Jordan’s employment contracts with PetSmart and in violation of criminal law. The Defendants undertook these activities in furtherance of a campaign to smear PetSmart and its employees with false allegations of animal neglect and abuse,” the lawsuit states.

It was filed in Hillsborough County, Florida.

“When Jordan applied to work at PetSmart in March 2017, Jordan deliberately concealed from PetSmart that she was a PETA agent and operative with a clear and obvious conflict of interest preventing her from discharging her duties and honoring the common law and contractual duties that she owed to PetSmart as a PetSmart employee,” the suit continues.

The suit alleges that Jordan had begun to record her supervisor, identified as Justine Glassmoyer, on the day Jordan began working there.

“At PETA’s direction and acting as its agent, Jordan intercepted and recorded the conversations surreptitiously and without Ms. Glassmoyer’s consent,” the suit continues.

“At PETA’s direction and acting as its agent, Jordan then transmitted each of these recordings to PETA’s office in Norfolk, Virginia, in furtherance of PETA’s public smear campaign against PetSmart.”

The suit contends that Jordan neglected the animals under her charge and that “PETA deceptively edited the unlawfully recorded conversations and published the deceptively edited video as part of a promotional video intended to damage and discredit PetSmart.”

PETA’s covert operations have led, among other things, to a raid at a PetSmart in the Bellevue neighborhood of Nashville, Tennessee.

“PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) provided authorities with photos, video and information concerning sick and injured animals not receiving proper care. PETA said Nashville authorities acted fast as the raid was executed three days after submitting their findings,” WZTV-TV reported in March of last year.

“An eye-witness for PETA worked at the store as part of its investigation. PETA said a guinea pig at the Bellevue store suffered multiple illnesses that eventually spread to its heart, brain and elsewhere. PETA also said a mouse died after a month of suffering from an irritated eye and apparent respiratory infection.”

A previous suit filed against Jordan by PetSmart, according to WZTV, alleged she “secured employment at multiple stores and committed animal neglect, theft of confidential information, unlawfully surveilled private conversations, and filed false reports with law enforcement under false pretenses in three states.”

In the wake of the latest suit, which names PETA as a codefendant, the organization sought to point to the “successes” of the campaign.

“Ongoing litigation prevents PETA from discussing the specifics of this meritless lawsuit, which is a desperate attempt by PetSmart to distract consumers from the documented animal suffering at its stores and suppliers, which PETA has exposed time and time again,” PETA spokeswoman Cathy Cryar wrote in an email to the Free Beacon on Friday.

In a 2018 email, however, according to the Free Beacon, she wrote that the organization’s covert activities had yielded results.

“Our exposé — which also included stores in Tennessee and Arizona — prompted authorities to execute a search warrant, open a criminal investigation, and file cruelty charges against three store managers in Nashville,” she wrote, the Free Beacon reported.

So, remember when Project Veritas or the Center for Medical Progress were both pilloried for “edited footage” of really, truly bad things?

Here we have PETA running its own private GRU on PetSmart, apparently with paid covert employees at numerous locations — I somehow doubt Jordan is the group’s only secret agent — and what they’ve come up with is sick mice in Tennessee and concomitant charges.

Meanwhile, this is an organization which, just last year, sold a Halloween costume that showed Donald Trump Jr. being mauled by a leopard.

Apparently, PETA endorses violence against animals, so long as the animals are human.

PETA is an extreme group with extreme tactics. Its “investigation” of PetSmart has proved only that the people who are running the group are insane.

Nice work.