Cockfighting and Dogfighting Create an Enormous
Body Count of Animals. The Human Toll is Surging, Too

Congress must hear from us to understand the urgency of the border crisis with animal fighting

Dear friend,

I consider passing the FIGHT Act, H.R. 2742/S. 1529, in Congress as urgent a priority as we have at Animal Wellness Action.

We know the suffering is acute and the death toll staggering when it comes to dogfighting and cockfighting.

• Dogs placed in a pit, succumbing to blood loss, or perhaps suffocation when an animal with the advantage has his combatant by the throat and just won’t let go.
• With the birds, the wounds come from knives and curved ice picks that land and then cut in a blur. The weapons are affixed to the animals’ legs just before combat begins. Gouged eyes, punctured hearts or lungs. Slashing wounds that open up arteries.

Make no mistake, these are terrible ways to die. Traumatic. Painful. Animals terror-stricken.

Will you join our fight to end this brutality with a gift of $10 today?

The men who stage these fights are intentional and malicious in allowing this violence and cruelty to befall innocent animals. Sometimes both the victor and the loser perish in the staged combat.

It’s perhaps the most despicable and malevolent form of animal cruelty in our nation. And that’s saying something.

People Die at Animal Fighting Derbies, Too

It turns out that non-human animals are not the only victims.

Just two weeks ago, at a cockfight in Mexico, six people were killed and 14 wounded when cartel-on-cartel violence broke out at the spectacle of cruelty. One of the dead was a 16-year-old boy from Washington State, killed in a hail of automatic weapons fire. His father was shot and injured.

You might ask, what are Americans doing at a cockfight in Mexico?

The reality is, Americans are the major suppliers of fighting animals to the cartel-controlled cockfighting pits throughout Mexico. This is an illicit trade every bit as ugly and violent as the drug trade, and these two forms of trafficking are bound together.

U.S.-based cockfighters breed fighting birds by the hundreds of thousands, and the cartels run through the animals in orgies of animal violence at cockfighting pits with stadium seating. They enjoy the bloodletting and the gambling, deadening their hearts even more to the suffering of others.

Prior to that latest mass shooting, there were 20 people killed in a separate massacre at a cockfight, and an American from Chicago was one of the victims.

And shootings occur on our side of the border as well. A referee shot at a cockfight in Miami. A spectator shot at a cockfight in Dallas. A mass shooting at a cockfight outside of Honolulu, with two dead and three wounded.

And the dogfighting is just as violent.

In Mississippi, just two months ago, two men were shot and killed execution style.

We have multiple problems at the southern border, and one of those problems is the trafficking of fighting animals back and forth across it. This trafficking comes with cruelty, chaos, and crime, and it spills over into our communities.

I am shouting from the rooftops to lawmakers about the importance of passing the FIGHT Act. All of this cruelty and mayhem must end! All of this crime must be shut down.

The people conducting these crimes are a menace to our society. It won’t stop unless we get off of the sidelines and get involved.

It's critical that we finish off animal fighting. Will you commit to joining us in this task?

Because of our pushing them to act, federal and state authorities have made a range of arrests, including that of a senior official who worked at the Pentagon and ran an alleged dogfighting operation for more than 20 years! But these enforcement actions are just scratching the surface of the problem.

Indeed, our Animal Fighting Is the Pits campaign is designed to eradicate staged fights involving dogs, or roosters with knives strapped to their legs.

We’ve long known that good laws are not enough. We need more enforcement of the law. We have a rewards program that offers cash to tipsters who alert us or law enforcement to these intentional crimes against animals. (Email [email protected].)

But there are vast stretches of the United States without any meaningful enforcement and where the animal fighters operate with impunity. To our great dismay, for instance, the federal government has conducted no enforcement actions against animal fighting in Oklahoma, Guam, or Puerto Rico, even though we know where the animal fighters operate. In fact, we recently called out Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt for issuing a video tribute to the cockfighters in The Sooner State.

FIGHT Act Ratchets Up Enforcement

It's spotty enforcement of anti-animal-fighting laws that we’ve identified as a core problem. And that’s also why we are working to strengthen the federal law and to give law enforcement more tools to bring down the dogfighters and cockfighters. That measure is the FIGHT Act—bipartisan legislation in the House and Senate to tackle these problems.

There are a number of provisions in the FIGHT Act, but one of the most important is to create a private right of action against animal fighters. If the measure passes, 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 gambling on on-line cockfights, which is a $10-billion-plus enterprise in the Philippines alone. And it allows for the forfeiture of property and other assets used in the commission of an animal-fighting crime. That kind of penalty—losing a house or a truck—will be felt by any animal fighter.

It was a major moment when we passed a law in Congress in 2018 to ban animal fighting everywhere in the United States. But now 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 features of the organized crimes of dogfighting and cockfighting.

I hope you’ll write your federal lawmakers in support of the FIGHT Act. Contact your federal lawmakers and urge them to cosponsor the Fighting Inhumane Gambling and High-Risk Trafficking (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?

For the animals,

Wayne Pacelle President Animal Wellness Action