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By Wayne Pacelle
Recently, I shared important and good news: the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in a challenge brought by a cockfighter, said the national law against animal fighting applies to the Northern Mariana Islands. Cockfighters in Puerto Rico and Guam who also challenged the national animal fighting law also got shot down in similar cases. The result of these multiple challenges: the federal courts have declared that there’s no place left in the United States, including in the U.S. territories, where anyone can legally stage animal fights.
Now that we’ve run the table against the animal fighters in the courts, it’s time to step up the pressure on them and shut down dogfighting and cockfighting operations in every dark corner where they fester.
Our ideas to achieve that goal are embodied in the FIGHT Act — H.R. 2742 by Reps. Don Bacon, R-Neb., and Andrea Salinas, D-Ore., and S. 1529 by Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and John Kennedy, R-La. This bill has an astonishing 750 agencies and organizations supporting it and broad support within the Congress from both parties.
The National Sheriffs’ Association, which treats the FIGHT Act as a top legislative priority, “acknowledges animal fighting is a crime of violence” with “links to crimes against people including, but not limited to, child abuse, murder, assault, theft, intimidation of neighbors and witnesses, and human trafficking.”
Seventeen state sheriffs’ associations, representing all the sheriffs in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas, are backing the bill.
Also joining the pack of partners on this legislative campaign are the American Gaming Association, which represents all the major casinos in the United States, and the United Egg Producers, whose members represent nearly all egg production across the country. The UEP is behind the bill because cockfighting has been linked to outbreaks of bird flu (H5N1) in Asia, along with virulent Newcastle Disease (vND), in the United States. Ten vND outbreaks in the United States were linked to fighting birds smuggled across the border from Mexico. The United States indemnifies the farmers and has paid out billions of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars to reimburse them for the “depopulation” of millions of birds.
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The FIGHT Act Will Add Game-Changing Enforcement Tool
The FIGHT Act is designed to turbocharge the enforcement of our national animal fighting law. We are seeing more and more busts because we’ve elevated the issue of animal fighting and we are conducting investigations, often with Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK), and then feeding the information to federal law enforcement. But since Congress applied the law to the territories, our law enforcement agencies have not shut down a single animal fighting pit in any of them, even as some operators openly advertise their fighting derbies.
And there’s a disturbing level of trafficking of animals for fights to other nations. Mexico and the Philippines are America’s biggest foreign partners in this illicit trade, and American cockfighters are consorting with criminal organizations involved in murder, kidnapping, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, bribery, and more.
A Philippines-based television network in 2020 released 50 videos showing two hosts making visits to U.S.-based cockfighting complexes, where the American cockfighters touted the bloodlines of their fighting birds, with some of the animals destined for big global events such as the “World Slasher Derby” in Manilla. One Alabama-based cockfighting operator told the Filipino television broadcaster that he sells 6,000 birds a year to Mexico alone for as much as $2,000 a bird, generating millions in illegal sales.
Cockfighting a Key Feature of America’s Border Crisis
All we need is to check the court dockets in Texas counties to understand that cockfighting is a little understood feature of the border crisis. Texas law enforcement is treating animal fighting as the crime it is.
Recently, Bexar County law enforcement arrested 47 people and seized 200 birds along with illegal weapons. A raid in Goliad County resulted in 60 arrests and several illegal weapons seized. Earlier this year, more than 160 roosters were seized in a Potter County bust where according to the sheriff, “many” participants were “unlawfully in the United States.” At a cockfight busted by the San Jacinto sheriff, suspects were “expected to face multiple felony charges, ranging from animal cruelty, cockfighting, illegal gambling, unlawful weapon possession, [and] organized crime.” There have been a series of interdictions at the border, including a federal enforcement action where officers found “roosters deeply hidden within passenger vehicles.”
Cartels dial up the violence on the other side of the border. In 2022, in the Mexican state of Michoacán, cartel members entered a cockfighting arena, sealed off exits, and shot and killed 20 people. Three of the victims were Americans, including a mother of four from Illinois. A similar incident occurred at a cockfighting derby in Guerrero in January 2024, where 14 people were wounded and six murdered, including a 16-year-old boy from Washington state attending the fight with his father.
But Congressman Glenn Thompson, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, has been blocking the legislation. He’s the same lawmaker who is working hard to overturn Prop 12 in California and unwind the nation’s most important farm animal welfare law. It’s surprising because in the past, Rep. Thompson once was a reasonable lawmaker who supported some animal welfare reforms.
He apparently doesn’t grasp the scale of the problem and the threat to agriculture. The FIGHT Act will help curb this crime wave. H.R. 2742 and S. 1529 would ban online gambling on animal fights, allow courts to seize fighting pits and other property used by convicted animal fighters in the commission of their crimes, stop the shipment of fighting roosters through the mail, and allow law-abiding citizens to protect their homes and families by bringing civil suits against cockfighters and dogfighters when governmental authorities are too slow to act.
Our investigations have revealed that the United States has become the breeding ground for the global industry, with cockfighters raising hundreds of thousands of animals for fighting and then shipping them to other cockfighters for final acts in fighting pits and arenas throughout the United States and across the globe.
One of our investigations revealed that cockfighters based on the U.S. mainland — with Oklahoma cockfighters at the center of it all — sent at least 11,648 fighting birds to Guam between 2016 and 2021.
“While we have backyard birds on Guam that families raise for eggs or meat, these thousands of fighting roosters are useless for either,” said retired Army Colonel Tom Pool, DVM, MPH, the former Territorial Veterinarian for Guam and now senior veterinarian with Animal Wellness Action. “There is simply no other rationale for the shipment of very expensive adult roosters to our island but for cockfighting. We know that the people on both ends of these transactions have been involved in the criminal practice of cockfighting.”
Pool reports that the birds shipped to Guam come in boxes delivered by the U.S. Postal Service. The law enforcement arm of the service — the U.S. Postal Inspection Service — has failed to make a single arrest for trafficking of birds for fighting in Guam or in any other part of the United States, despite the federal law banning any such shipments.
Cockfighting and the trafficking of fighting birds is an even larger enterprise in Puerto Rico.
When you fly into the San Juan airport, you can’t miss a large arena with “Live Cockfights” emblazoned on a neon sign. The invitation occasionally attracts the curious tourist, but most attendees are seasoned practitioners of cockfighting knowingly violating federal law.
Though he took office after federal courts rejected claims by Puerto Rico’s cockfighters to challenge the federal law, Gov. Pedro Pierluisi defiantly stated that he is “committed to supporting an industry that generates jobs and income for our economy, that represents our culture and our history.” He declared that he and Jennifer González-Colón, Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner in Congress, “will continue to fight for them.”
The Federal Law Is Strong But It Can Be Engineered for Greater Impact
Cockfighting and dogfighting must be pulled up at the root and relegated to the history books as one more example of savagery rightly left in our wake. But to do so, it will take human agency and resolve. For the moment, we should celebrate our momentous legal gains and our past legislative achievements. But we can neither relent nor relax in our quest to seek a permanent end to this spectacle of cruelty and vice.
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