Dear John,
We are in the biggest battle over cockfighting in the United States in 20 years.
The battlegrounds are the biggest cockfighting states in the nation. Let me give you updates from the front lines.
Oklahoma: This is the most urgent theater of action, with the state’s anti-cockfighting law on the verge of repeal!
Shockingly, State Senate and House committees have given the green light for legislation to gut the state’s voter-approved anti-cockfighting law and to decriminalize cockfighting in the places it occurs throughout Oklahoma. The two bills, HB 2530 and S 1006, would allow counties to opt out of the state’s strong anti-cockfighting law.
Even though the state’s anti-cockfighitng law is strong, rural elected sheriffs have not been enforcing it and prosecutions have been rare. What’s most shocking is that cockfighters are openly defying the law, staging fights throughout Oklahoma and shipping tens of thousands of birds all over the world from their cockfighting farms.
The cockfighters even formed a political action committee and they’ve donated tens of thousands of dollars to try to buy off politicians, including the Governor and the Speaker of the House!
We need help to fight this effort in the legislature and throughout Oklahoma.
Kentucky: Animal Wellness Action and our partner organization, Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK) released a list of 16 cockfighting arenas from Butler to Pike counties that have illegally operated in the state. We’ve released the actual coordinates of these fighting venues — a first-ever disclosure of this number of fighting arenas in any state in the nation. We are now demanding that law enforcment shut them down.
Alabama: We conducted a statewide press conference in Alabama too and wrote to Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey and alerted her to the dangerous overlap between widespread illegal cockfighting operations and the state’s massive commercial poultry operations, urging her to initiate in this session a priority legislative effort to upgrade the state’s anemic anti-cockfighting law, which has gone unchanged since 1896. That law is the nation’s weakest of its type, stipulating that “any person who keeps a cockpit or who in any public place fights cocks shall, upon conviction, be fined no less than $20 but no more than $50,” the letter stated.
Dogfighting is a felony in Alabama, but cockfighting warrants less in the way of penalties than a parking ticket. This weak law has provided an invitation for enthusiasts to flock to Alabama and grow major cockfighting operations, especially as other states adopted felony-level penalties for these crimes.”
Tennessee: We are also fighting in the state capitol to upgrade Tennessee’s weak anti-cockfighting law. Acting on a tip from SHARK, Union County Sheriff Billy Breeding and his deputies raided a cockfighting derby in progress on January 31, but because the law is so weak, he just issued citations.
Animal Wellness Action just last week called on Tennessee lawmakers to give favorable consideration to
SB 194, by Senator Jon Lundberg, R-Bristol, and HB 285, by Rep. Sam Whitson, R-Franklin, to make core cockfighting activities a felony offense in the state.
If we don’t prevail in these fights, here’s what will happen:
- Countless thousands of birds bred for fighting will die in pits in Oklahoma, Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee throughout the world.
- Millions of birds will be shipped from cockfighting farms in these states all over the world to fighting arenas from Mexico to Guam to the Philippines.
- Lawless cockfighters from other states will flood into these states, bringing their money laundering, narcotics trafficking, and illegal gambling into the state.
- The current Avian Influenza outbreak, which has already resulted in mass depopulation of commercially raised birds for eggs and meat, will get wind in its sails and create even more havoc.
We’ve never needed you more for this fight. We need your voice and we need resources to fight a battle on more than four fronts on cockfighting. That battle rages in other jurisdictions, including our effort to strengthen the federal law and not let these states run wild on cockfighting or dogfighting.
Please donate today. How can the nation root out systemic forms of animal cruelty if lawmakers and governors tolerate open cockfighting throughout the nation? We cannot allow this kind of setback for our movement to help all animals.
Please dig deep and let’s protect our laws and bring these cockfighters to justice.
Wayne Pacelle
