A witness says an undercover activist at Fair Oaks Farms told farm workers to abuse animals in order to get footage for his investigation.
That’s what the Newton County prosecutor overseeing the case told media outlets.
Officials with the Animal Recovery Mission or ARM call the claim “laughable.”
ARM founder Richard Couto says there’s no way that ARM’s investigator could have convinced experienced farm workers to abuse animals on his first day posing as a entry-level employee.
“It was very obvious that what they were doing — and was obvious in our video — that what
they were doing was systematic. It was being done there well, well before the ARM undercover
investigator was hired there,” Couto says.
Couto says it was unprofessional for the prosecutor to relay information about the witness to the public during an ongoing police investigation.
He also says though ARM gave the video to the police before it released it to the public, the Newton County Sheriff’s Office hasn’t taken activists’ statements in the case.
The Newton County Prosecutor was not available for comment.
