Every Wednesday, in a Dumpster behind a Piggly Wiggly in northeastern North Carolina, a fresh load of dead cats and dogs appeared.

The stakeout and the ensuing arrests only deepened the mystery. The people caught dumping garbage bags full of euthanized animals were employees of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, one of the largest and most radical animal rights groups in the world.

This is the group that fights for the rights of rats and frogs. The group that throws blood on women in furs, compares the killing of animals for food to the Holocaust and opposes animal research -- even when it leads to lifesaving medical advances.

Today, more than a year and a half after their arrest, the two PETA workers are to go on trial in Hertford County, in one of the state's poorest and most rural regions. Adria J. Hinkle, of Norfolk, Va., and Andrew B. Cook, of Virginia Beach, Va., are charged with 21 counts each of animal cruelty, a felony that can carry jail time, along with charges of littering and obtaining property by false pretenses.

The trial is expected to last more than a week and will be watched by people all over the country. Court TV is making a bid to televise it.

Many hope the trial will answer the question that has become a chorus among animal lovers: Why would PETA kill animals, many of them healthy, and dump their bodies like trash?

"Considering how extreme PETA tends to be, isn't the fact that they're euthanizing animals and throwing them in a Dumpster, isn't that bizarre? Contradictory?" said JoAnn Jones, head of a volunteer animal adoption group in Hertford County.

Jones said she plans to attend the trial because "I want to know the truth."

PETA's choice

Officials with PETA say the truth is simple. The group, based in Norfolk, began working in several northeastern North Carolina counties in the 1990s.

Phil Hirschkop, a lawyer for PETA, said the group got complaints about horrible conditions in animal shelters. Emaciated dogs unable to move, lying in their own filth. Animals suffering through long, terrifying deaths in gas chambers. Animals being killed with a drug that caused their internal organs to seize up while they were still conscious.

PETA, a well-funded organization that raises more than $25 million a year from 1.6 million members and supporters, started sending workers to Bertie, Northampton and Hertford counties.

PETA employees would clean and renovate shelters, hand out free doghouses to the poor, and take sick animals to the vet. They set up programs that allowed residents to get their animals spayed or neutered at no cost. And they began handling euthanizations at the shelters, Hirschkop said.

They used the same method that veterinarians use: an injection of sodium pentobarbitol that kills the animal almost instantly.

"PETA's choice is to allow those animals to be shot or gassed in a very cruel manner, or to euthanize them themselves and at least do it humanely," Hirschkop said.

By 2005, the PETA people were picking up so many animals that they didn't have room in their small van to carry them back to Norfolk alive. So Hinkle took them from the shelters one by one and euthanized them in the van, Hirschkop said.

He says the only crime Hinkle and Cook committed was throwing the animals in a trash bin, an act for which PETA President Ingrid Newkirk has apologized and offered to pay.

Hirschkop said the pair dumped the animals because they had other stops to make and the animals often started to smell before they got back to Norfolk, where PETA has facilities for cremating animals.

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