Hollywood Actress And PETA Pressure DA's Office To File Criminal Charges In Massive Lake Elsinore Animal Abuse Case

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is leaning on the Riverside County District Attorney's Office to file charges against a Lake Elsinore animal breeder accused of widespread animal abuse, and the advocate has an actress on board who is spreading the word.

Actress Jenna Dewan Tatum has joined more than 30,000 people who have signed a petition from PETA calling for criminal charges to be filed against the owner and operators of Global Captive Breeders (GCB), which operated on 3rd Street in Lake Elsinore until is was closed in December.

In a letter sent Wednesday to Riverside County District Attorney Paul Zellerbach, Tatum calls for justice for the nearly 18,000 rats and mice and 600 reptiles who were found languishing in waste-filled cages, many of them starved, injured, gravely ill, and/or with no access to water, according to PETA spokeswoman Wendy Wegner.

The animals eventually had to be euthanized via lethal injection by licensed veterinarians, said Willa Bagwell, executive director for Wildomar-based Animal Friends of the Valleys.

The grim task of assessing, cataloguing and euthanizing the animals was carried out over the course of eight days after an initial investigation into alleged neglect and abuse began Dec. 7 at GBC, Bagwell said.

In her letter, Tatum, who is married to actor Channing Tatum, reaches out to Zellerbach.

"As an expectant mother, I was particularly heartbroken to see photos of ailing mother rats with open wounds on their bodies who stood guard protectively over their dead or dying babies," Tatum wrote. "I implore you … to take action and send the strong and compassionate message that cruelty to animals is taken seriously and will not be tolerated in Riverside County.”

Wegner said PETA's long-running investigation uncovered “routine, severe neglect at GCB, including scores of rats drowning on a near-daily basis because of a faulty watering system, rats dying of dehydration and eating each other alive in an effort to survive, mother rats confined to bins so short that they could not sit upright or even groom themselves or properly nurse their young, reptiles slowly wasting away over the course of weeks as a result of systemic deprivation, and more. PETA's investigator recorded employees killing rats by slamming them against walls, shelves, and other hard surfaces and shooting them with a BB gun.”

“The animals were too sick, too toxic, too critical to move,” Bagwell said of the decision to euthanize animals on site.

Global Captive Breeders owner Mitch Behm surrendered custody of the reptiles and rodents to Animal Friends of the Valleys on Dec. 15, authorizing the organization to end the animals’ suffering, confirmed then-City of Lake Elsinore spokesman Justin Carlson.