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Dear Friend,
This week, the Center for a Humane Economy announced a set of extraordinary findings in a long-running investigation of animal fighting scofflaws operating in a region spanning eastern Oklahoma and northeast Texas. We’ve labeled the area the “Texoma Cockfighting Corridor,” and it may be the region most severely plagued by illegal animal fighting operators. You can read the full report here. [[link removed]]
For the past two years, with our partners at Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK), our investigators located cockfighting breeding facilities and droned their operations. They slipped into cockfighting derbies with hidden cameras and recorded lawlessness and cruelty in progress at fighting pits. They tracked transports of fighting birds shipped through the U.S. Postal Service and by Korean Airlines.
The Dallas Morning News breaking the investigation yesterday [[link removed]] , and we are calling on U.S. Attorneys and other federal law enforcers to make arrests based on the incontrovertible evidence we’ve provided.
We got inside more than a half-dozen cockfighting derbies firsthand, uncovered political front groups handing off money to politicians and pleading with them to weaken state anti-cockfighting laws, and even exposed an international trafficking pipeline moving fighting birds from North Texas all the way to the Philippines, where murder and mayhem are bound up in this illicit industry.
Here are some details.
* We’ve plotted hundreds of gamefowl farms and dozens of fighting pits generating tens of thousands of dollars per derby in gambling and animal sales. Birds can sell for $2,000 each, with tens of thousands exported illegally to Guam, Mexico, and more than two dozen other nations.
* We exposed a sham business called the North Texas Livestock Shipping Company. It’s nothing but a cockfighting front group, with foreign commerce at its heart. This “company” ships fighting birds via Korean Airlines to the Philippines — where cockfighting is a multi-billion-dollar racket involving murder and money laundering.
* And in Oklahoma, our work led to the arrest of cockfighters and political organizers Anthony Devore and Blake Pearce, who created the “Oklahoma Gamefowl Commission” as their political front group. Devore and Pearce raised money for their political activities by illegally auctioning and selling fighting birds, funneling donations to lawmakers in a scheme we exposed. Their “commission” is now disbanding, and they are facing fines and jail time.
Our investigation also exposed John Bottoms, who boasts that cockfighting is “what we do for a living,” and Bobby Fairchild, once charged with drug trafficking and money laundering tied to the Gulf Cartel. They ship fighting birds to border towns in Texas so that their birds can fight at fighting pits in Mexico controlled by murderous drug cartels.
None of this “tradition” or “farming” or anything else is legitimate. This is organized crime.
That’s why we are pressing federal agencies — including the Department of Justice, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and the USDA’s Inspector General — to take the evidence we’ve assembled and act on it. The arrests we’ve seen so far are significant, but not enough to dismantle the whole band of lawbreakers making up the Texoma Cockfighting Corridor.
You may wish to read the full report [[link removed]] and join us in demanding enforcement. But please don’t forget to remind your federal lawmakers [[link removed]] to support the FIGHT Act.

TAKE ACTION [[link removed]]

And please remember this: you enable our dangerous and game-changing work to expose cruelty by being on the frontlines. None of it could happen without you. We are counting on you to help us continue this daring work. [[link removed]]

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For all animals,

Wayne Pacelle [[link removed]] Wayne Pacelle
President
Center for a Humane Economy
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