In a Major New Investigation, Animal Wellness Action Uncovers and Documents Rampant Illegal Cockfighting Syndicates in Arkansas

There’s something wrong with this picture. Or, rather, this video.

In 2019, Arkansas cockfighter John Slavin spoke freely on camera to two hosts from BNTV, a Philippines-based cockfighting network, at his farm near the Oklahoma border in western Arkansas about the prowess of his fighting birds. “We got sold out last year,” clarifying that his shipments to the east Asian nation with legal cockfighting “has been great” and telling the hosts that his birds “hit so hard, and they cut good and they’re game, and that wins you a lot of chicken fights.”

Slavin was marketing his fighting birds to an audience of cockfighters in the Philippines, where the barbaric spectacle is legal and where there was $13 billion in wagers on fights in 2022.

But cockfighting is legal nowhere in the United States. Not on an inch of our soil. And more importantly, for Slavin, it is not legal in the United States to sell birds for fighting or to transport them across state, territorial, or national boundaries.

But Slavin has been illegally trafficking birds since Congress banned sales and shipments of fighting birds in 2002. Five years later, that crime of fighting bird shipments became a federal felony. And it became a felony in Arkansas in 2009 to sell fighting birds to anyone.

If our laws have meaning, John Slavin should be in prison now — either one in Arkansas or in some federal penitentiary in Somewheresville, U.S.A.

That long-term breakdown in enforcement is one inescapable conclusion of an undercover investigation we conducted in Arkansas and released today to the journalists and political leaders in the state.

Arkansas Cockfighters Trying to Decriminalize Cockfighting

Our investigation and report, which runs 30 pages long, shows that cockfighting is rampant in Arkansas — 17 years after Congress made the practice a felony and 15 years after Arkansas legislators strengthened its 19th-century anti-cruelty law and finally made cockfighting and related activities a state felony, too.

But in a brazen and head-snapping action, illicit cockfighters aren’t retreating quietly to their hide-outs and hoping that law enforcement won’t come to them with a search warrant in hand. Rather, as we learned from an audio recording of a cockfighters’ meeting near the state capitol in Little Rock, they have hatched plans to work with allies in the state legislature to decriminalize cockfighting.

You heard that right. The newly formed Arkansas Gamefowl Commission has hired lobbyist Suzanna Watt of Anchor Strategies, and she’s schooling the cockfighters on how to deceive legislators about who they are and what they do. “One of the things that we can do to move this forward is to not talk about certain aspects,” Watt told the 40 or so assembled cockfighters. In short, Ms. Watt told them to obscure what they do and to pretend to be legitimate “gamefowl enthusiasts” who sell their birds to legitimate enterprises.

In Arkansas, today we begin to flip the script on them, too. They won’t get their decriminalization measure passed. But they may actually get more law enforcement attention if we have our way, now that we are on to their tricks and also have seen the cockfighting complexes they operate.

Cruelty, Contagion, and Cluster Crimes

The Natural State adopted its first anti-cruelty law in 1879. That 19th-century statute, and other similar laws of that vintage, have long been ignored by law enforcement and consequently by the cockfighters. It’s akin to the “broken-windows theory” of law enforcement — if you let dysfunction and criminality go unattended and unpunished and if problems don’t get fixed, people get used to the law being ignored, including the perpetrators.

For decades, and through the end of the 20th century, two of the three major national cockfighting magazines — The Gamecock, in Hartford, and The Feathered Warrior in De Queen — were published in Arkansas. Every issue was chock full of advertisements for fighting implements and fighting birds, with rundowns of the results of fighting derbies in the United States and abroad chronicled in detail. Again, nothing but contempt for the law.

Arkansas was also a center of publishing for the dogfighting industry. In 2010, Bill Stewart (aka “Rushin Bill”), the publisher of the Pit Bull Reporter, shot himself to death after a grass fire broke out on his property in Romance, Ark. When crews arrived to distinguish the fire, they discovered $124,000 of marijuana, more than 40 guns, more than a pack of tethered pit bulls, and a dogfighting ring.

The last bust in the state — a failed one at that — came in 2018. In 2018, in De Queen, there were arrests of dozens of illegal aliens involved in cockfighting and narcotics trafficking, according to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement press release. “Upon execution of the state search warrant, agents encountered an overwhelming 134 people attending the event, 120 were taken into custody,” the release said. In the end, the case collapsed with its complexity.

It’s only reinforced that the cockfighters can go even deeper into lawlessness. Our investigation shows that Arkansas cockfighters are consorting with cartels in Mexico and organized crime interests in the Philippines that run the biggest cockfighting pits in the world, supplying them with fighting birds in violation of Arkansas and U.S. laws and directly participating in an array of illegal acts.

The connection of cockfighting to cartel violence is hard to miss, with U.S. cockfighters perhaps shipping a million birds a year to Mexico. In 2022, in the Mexican state of Michoacán, cartel members entered a cockfighting arena, sealed off exit routes, 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.

• One cockfighter in El Dorado marketed his birds to Mexican cockfighters in four YouTube videos, touting the fighting prowess of his Arkansas-bred and -raised fighting birds and noting that “they fight into a rooster and through a rooster.”

• Kenny Henderson and his wife, though they were arrested by federal authorities for illegal cockfighting in 2007 in Crawford County, are still involved in cockfighting, along with their son. Their main source of revenue is to ship large number of birds to the Philippines, where cockfighting is big business and a prime fighting rooster may go for as much as $2,000. Shipping fighting birds anywhere is a state felony and a federal felony, including sales to any foreign nation.

• Jared Walker of Elizabeth, Ark., travels the world circuit and fights his birds, but he also ships fighting birds domestically and illegally through the U.S. Postal Service — a stand-alone felony.

The good news is, in the last quarter century, we’ve been working to turn the tide — when it comes to the strength of the law and the active enforcement of those laws. Not only did Arkansas strengthen its law in 2009, but several neighboring states with legal cockfighting outlawed the activity and made cockfighting a felony — Missouri in 1998, Oklahoma in 2002, and Louisiana in 2008. We’ve upgraded the federal law five times in this century alone.

With today’s report, we provide a roadmap for law enforcement to shut down these operations. We are running our own new playbook. This kind of cruelty cannot stand the spotlight.

The FIGHT Act Cometh

The FIGHT Act, S. 1529 and H.R. 2742, led by Senators John Kennedy, R-La., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Reps. Don Bacon, R-Neb., and Andrea Salinas, D-Ore., is also part of our answer. This federal measure has been endorsed by 750 agencies and organizations, including the National Sheriffs’ Association, the National District Attorneys’ Association, the United Egg Producers, and a large set of rural county sheriffs in Arkansas and throughout the nation.

The bill bans internet gambling on animal fights, but it also creates a private right of action, allowing citizens to initiate civil proceedings if federal or local enforcement agencies don’t act to stop known dogfighting and cockfighting operations.

The National Sheriffs’ Association, which represents 5,000 elected county law enforcement personnel, notes in its endorsement says that “animal fighting investigations have uncovered intricate criminal networks and connections to organized crime, trafficking narcotics, illegal firearms, and attempted bribery of elected officials.” The National District Attorneys’ Association has also endorsed the legislation.

Cockfighting has also been linked to outbreaks of bird flu (H5N1) in Asia, and there have been 15 outbreaks of another kind of bird flu, virulent Newcastle Disease, in the United States in recent decades. Ten of those 15 outbreaks were linked to fighting birds smuggled across the border from Mexico. The United States indemnifies the farmers and has paid out billions of your tax dollars to reimburse them for birds lost to disease. That’s one reason that the United Egg Producers is an enthusiastic backer of the legislation.

Only the FIGHT Act, with its core provisions intact, can pull up cockfighting and dogfighting networks at the root.

Indeed, there is nothing storied about the tradition of animal fighting in Arkansas. It is a long, ugly chapter in the state’s history. But that narrative will only be complete when it’s all shut down — the fighting arenas, the trafficking of fighting birds and paraphernalia, and their massive breeding operations — and when there is no tolerance for anyone who gets involved in the enterprise. And when the cockfighters come to legislators pleading for a respite in the law, Arkansas’s elected officials, at the state and federal level, can give them a very direct answer: the state law is just fine, and the FIGHT Act in Congress is just what’s needed.

Please take action today.
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