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Dear John,
Animal fighting is a curse. It’s malice at work. It’s unjustifiable in any place where rational thought counts.
Our Animal Fighting Is the Pits campaign is designed to eradicate staged fights involving dogs or roosters with knives strapped to their legs.
Five years ago, with the 2018 Farm bill, we took a giant stride toward achieving our goal of an animal-fighting-free nation. We worked to extend the ban on staged animal fights to every inch of U.S. terrain. With a single Congressional act, we extended the national ban on cockfighting to apply to Puerto Rico, Guam, and all other U.S. territories.
We knew that fight was the end—of the beginning.
We knew the next crucial test of our work would be enforcement of the rule of law. To our great dismay, the federal government has conducted no enforcement actions on Guam or Puerto Rico even though we’ve given a roadmap to dismantling cockfighting pits and gamecock farms in the territories.
The good news is, our investigations and our sharing of that information with authorities has helped spur more animal fighting interdictions than ever before—in Alabama, Kentucky, Georgia, California, and Texas, at the Mexico border.
But the feds have been passive in Oklahoma, which is the nation’s “cockfighting capital,” just as they’ve been in Puerto Rico and Guam.
And in Oklahoma, the cockfighters became so brazen that they mounted an effort to decriminalize cockfighting under state law.
This year, we met them in battle in the state legislature and won, despite the cockfighters handing out tens of thousands of dollars to politicians.
We also identified to lawmakers and state police that their front group— the Oklahoma Gamefowl Commission—was just a bunch of cockfighters masquerading as criminal-justice reform advocates.
Today, I am happy to report to you that now our claims have been validated. This week, one of the leaders of the phony “Commission,” Chance Campo, was arrested by Carter County law enforcement in southeast Oklahoma. The headlines throughout the state are now telling the story.
NOT A CHANCE: OK Gamefowl Commission leader Chance Campo thought he could get away with animal fighting. He was wrong.
Now maybe other law enforcement will pay attention to our investigations that indicates that all of the “officers” and “district directors” of the Commission seem to be neck-deep in the enterprise of cockfighting. After all, who but a cockfighter would want to weaken an anti-cockfighting law?
But that’s not enough for us. Driven by the inadequacy of enforcement at the federal level, we’ve gone back to Congress to strengthen the federal law. We want to create more tools to enforce it. That’s the purpose of the FIGHT Act.
The FIGHT Act creates a private right of action against cockfighters. Citizens can sue dogfighters and cockfighters in civil court if law enforcement doesn’t act on credible information about illegal fighting activities.
The FIGHT Act also bans shipping fighting birds through the U.S. mail, and that’s significant because our investigations have uncovered a massive trade of animals transported by that means. FIGHT also bans gambling on on-line cockfights, which is a $10-billion-plus enterprise in the Philippines alone.
It was a major moment to ban animal fighting everywhere in the United States. And we are defending the federal law and state laws in the courts and in legislatures. But we are locked onto the task of enforcement and shutting down the pits, the gamecock farms, the pit bull yards, and all of the other cogs of animal fighting.
I hope you’ll write your federal lawmakers in support of the FIGHT Act.
And I also hope you’ll donate today to support our Animal Fighting Is the Pits campaign. If we cannot stop these forms of despicable and illegal cruelty, how can we address other structural problems such as factory farming, animal testing, the fur trade, and others?
We must finish off animal fighting. Will you commit to joining us in this task?
For the animals,
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Wayne Pacelle
President
Animal Wellness Action
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