(Radio Iowa) – A spokesman for the trade group called Fur Commission U-S-A reports someone illegally entered a mink farm in southwest Iowa near Woodbine Monday night. Spokesman Challis Hobbs says a farmer, his son and grandson raise more than one-thousand mink and found the perimeter fence torn down.  )”That’s what they woke up to, and they woke up to a lot of the pens had been opened and like the housing, so like the nest box like where it’s warm and stuff where the mink stay, the people who came in, they destroyed those,” he says. Hobbs says around half of the mink stayed around and they’ve been working to find the others as they are domesticated and don’t do well in the wild.

“What we see time and time again is like within 24 to 48 hours, if the farmer can’t recover them, the majority of them die. The ones that don’t, they kind of get loose and they’re desperate and they’re carnivorous. So they’re killing anything and everything they can to eat,” he says. Hobbs says they might survive for awhile eating any birds or chickens they can find, but they often die or are hit on the roadway and killed. Hobbs says there have been some recent attacks on fur farms in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and they are not just vandals. “Everyone who’s been caught doing this has been activists. It’s very organized, it’s organized crime really is,” Hobbs says. “Like for example the ones in Pennsylvania, they showed up and they had. They had a whole a whole pamphlet of like what to do, not to get caught. Like turn off your cell phone and what to do if you get caught. What to say and don’t turn on your other basically activist friends, extremist activist friends who are doing the same thing.”

He says local law enforcement and the F-B-I are investigating the Woodbine case. “These crimes do fall under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. Because the government does see this as domestic terrorism because they’re intentionally going on these farms and trying to basically shut them down and put these put these farming families out of business,” Hobbs says.

Hobbs says two people were caught in the Pennsylvania and they face multiple charges. Hobbs says the animals cost around 45 dollars each, but it can cost the farmer much more in losing animals for breeding.