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Dear friend,
When the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak pandemic came to light, there was immediate focus on how the virus spilled over from non-human animals to people.
World Health Organization authorities identified inhumane live-wildlife markets as the likely source of the spillover of the pathogen.
A necessary part of any pandemic response is to get at the source of the animal-to-human transmission pathway and to block its future spread.
That’s why it’s so mystifying to see our federal government’s inept response to H5N1, or bird flu. That response has been, in some ways, exceedingly timid and, in other ways, grossly overreaching. Our nation is more at risk because of the government’s bungled response.
Since bird flu was detected in our homeland in February 2022, government authorities, mainly at the USDA, have ordered the killing of 134.7 million poultry on 637 commercial poultry farms and 773 “backyard farms” in all 50 states. Eleven million poultry have been killed in just the past 30 days. More than 99 million of the dead are laying hens and 17 million are turkeys, with the shrinkage in the national bird populations so profound that a carton of a dozen eggs costs $9 in some places.
What’s particularly scary is that this virus is built to mutate. And it is threatening to become more transmissible to people.
We know that cockfighting played an enormous and documented role in the spread of H5N1 in Asia. And in the United States, we know that cockfighting was the superspreader of a closely related respiratory disease in birds.
But the USDA and other health authorities are muted on the issue of cockfighting, even though the USDA has estimated there may be 20 million fighting birds in the United States, with millions of them trafficked all over the nation and across the world.
The USDA and other federal agencies are guilty of a dereliction of duty on this issue. The USDA is not working on prevention.
Federal Response to H5N1 Must Target Cockfighting Trade
Cockfighters are smuggling birds across state lines and across the southern border. They are hiding their valuable fighting birds from disease surveillance programs. They are avoiding veterinary diagnosis and treatment of fighting birds who are at the core of their illicit business model.
They also are shipping birds by the millions in interstate and foreign commerce, threatening to spread infection far and wide, with cross-border movement particularly brisk between Mexico and the United States and an under-reported feature of the border crisis.
The federal government is recklessly allowing dozens of fighting pits to continue to operate with impunity from Puerto Rico to Oklahoma to California to Guam. The USDA, the Department of Justice, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are watching from the sidelines and courting more risk of viral spread by doing very little to stem the cockfighting crime wave in our nation.
What’s more, the federal government should be demanding that Congress pass the FIGHT Act to broaden federal enforcement capacity and send an alert to federal law enforcement to exercise the robust anti-cockfighting laws as they now exist.
Bird Flu Is a Brewing Pandemic
The bird flu virus has already mutated and spilled over to dairy cattle. It has so far infected at least 919 dairy herds in 16 states (perhaps a million cows, out of a national population of 9 million), causing widespread suffering for the cows.
The virus has also killed millions of other animals, including 20 mountain lions, bobcats, and other captive cats at a wildlife sanctuary in Washington state.
In short, it’s a multi-species plague, crisscrossing the nation and gathering momentum. And it’s time for the Center for a Humane Economy to exert its influence to address cockfighting and a host of other issues.
One terrible effect of the spread of the virus in animals is the calamitous killing of commercial poultry. The USDA’s mass “depopulation” strategy for poultry is euphemistically called “ventilation shutdown,” where air flow into a factory-farm building is cut off.
The heat is turned up and carbon dioxide is used to asphyxiate and cook alive as many as 300,000 birds trapped in the building. In other cases, the USDA uses firefighting foam to suffocate the hapless creatures.
* The USDA must stop ventilation shutdown as a killing strategy, except in extreme cases. This mass killing is demonstrably inhumane, but it’s also not helping arrest bird flu spread. Vaccination is a more enlightened policy response.

After three years, the outlay of $2 billion, and 135 million dead poultry, perhaps the USDA should accept that bird flu H5N1 is no longer a “foreign animal disease.” It is now established and endemic in the United States, and it is going to be with us in the years ahead. We cannot kill our way out of the crisis.
*
* The USDA must be more transparent about what is happening on the ground. The agency’s disease-control arm appears to put no effort into investigating cockfighting activity as one of the root causes of bird flu H5N1 spread, to say nothing of future movement of the virus. The USDA should create a unique and separate category for premises with cockfighting birds, rather than pooling them with all “backyard poultry.”

This would better flag the role of cockfighting in spawning and propagating outbreaks, improve trace-back and trace-forward disease control actions, enhance post-outbreak risk factor analyses, and improve disease risk management.
Animal health issues and depopulation programs are animal welfare issues. The cockfighting problem is staring us in the face, and our federal government is twiddling its thumbs during this health crisis.
We must see the government step up its enforcement actions against cockfighters and also demand Congressional action to fortify the law so that we downgrade the risk of further viral spread through illegal trafficking of birds.
Please contact your federal lawmakers and urge them to cosponsor and pass the FIGHT Act. [[link removed]]
TAKE ACTION [[link removed]]
Please donate to help us mount a campaign to turn around the USDA’s bungled response as a new administration takes control. [[link removed]]
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We cannot afford continued failures when the stakes are so high for animals and people.
For prevention in response to H5N1,
Wayne Pacelle [[link removed]] Wayne Pacelle
President
Center for a Humane Economy
P.S. Please see a more detailed analysis of the problem in our recent blog. You can read it here [[link removed]] . And listen here [[link removed]] to Dr. Pool and Dr. Keen discuss the issue at length in our latest episode of the Animal Wellness Podcast.
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