A Plea to Federal Law Enforcement to Address Cruelty and Its Consequences

Before being indicted last April by federal authorities, Carlton Adams maintained two dogfighting yards on a pair of properties in central Alabama. During a months-long investigation, federal law enforcement agents recovered tools and supplies “used in the training and keeping of dogs used for fighting” including the following:

• Modified treadmills to hold dogs in place for conditioning;
• Injectable veterinary steroids, suture materials, and syringes;
• A skin stapler;
• A break stick device used to break the bite hold of a dog “during specified intervals in a dog fight”; and
• A homemade breeding stand used to immobilize female dogs who are “too aggressive to mate naturally.”

Mr. Adams may be no better or worse than any other dogfighter. The problem with dogfighting is that the norm or the baseline behavior is unconscionably cruel. Their treatment of dogs gives us a window into the human potential for savagery.

The arrest in Alabama was one in a series of federal actions against the nation’s network of dogfighters in recent years, including a noteworthy indictment of a senior Department of Defense employee who’d been running a fighting network for two decades. Kudos to the Environment and Natural Resources Division at the Department of Justice (DOJ) for this work. 

The Rule of Law and Animal Fighting

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence who more than two centuries ago sent the nation down the path of a democratic society that balanced freedom with the rule of law, had it right when he observed that “the strength of society lies in the enforcement of its laws.”

There must be consequences for cruelty. In fact, in so many respects, the rise of the animal protection movement is a reaction to awareness of the many forms of callousness and viciousness to other animals. It’s a cause that calls for mercy to replace cruelty, charity to substitute for greed.

With the introduction today of the Animal Cruelty Enforcement Act in the U.S. House — led by Reps. David Joyce, R-Ohio, Joe Neguse, D-Colo., Juan Ciscomani, R-Ariz., and Steve Cohen, D-Tenn. — a bipartisan team of lawmakers is honoring those principles. They are calling for the creation of an Animal Cruelty Crimes section within the DOJ, now headed by longtime animal advocate and new U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. This modest reorganization of function with the federal agency is a longtime aspiration of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy, and either Congress or General Bondi can get the job done.

The ACE Act puts prosecutors in place to focus on animal cruelty crimes so that the networks and individuals who commit violent and illegal acts against animals face consequences. The convicted will be incarcerated so they’ll not menace other animals. And the hope is that the sentencing — a loss of freedom and perhaps also their assets — will hurt enough to deter repeat behavior.

Animal Cruelty Is Tied to Human Violence, Other Threats

In recent years, Congress passed the Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act, the Pet and Women’s Safety Act, the original Animal Crush Video law, and the Dog and Cat Meat Protection Act. It has upgraded the Animal Fighting Prohibition Act five times in the 21^st century, including in 2018, with a provision to extend all animal fighting prohibitions to the U.S. territories.

Except for a run of dogfighting cases, federal action against malicious cruelty has been timid, spotty, and, in some jurisdictions, non-existent.

It’s partly a matter of priority and structure. While the DOJ has divisions and sections devoted to enforcing other categories of law — civil rights, violence against women, and organized crime, for example — there are no dedicated resources for enforcing anti-cruelty laws. And it’s especially important to confront violence against animals because it is closely correlated with subsequent acts of other forms of social violence.

So many of the boys and young men involved in mass shootings started their descent into violence and mayhem by committing animal cruelty. Teenage gunman Payton Gendron, arrested for gunning down 13 people in a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022, stabbed and decapitated a feral cat, according to several sources, including the Buffalo News. Salvador Ramos, the 18-year-old who massacred 19 children and two teachers at a school in Uvalde, Texas, allegedly boasted to friends that he “tortured” animals. These two young men are among the latest examples in a long list of mass shooters and serial killers who got started with animal cruelty. 

Animal Cruelty Remains Disturbingly Widespread

Despite state and federal prohibitions targeting them, there are hundreds of cockfighting pits and tens of thousands of traffickers of fighting animals who operate in our nation. While we applaud the DOJ for stepping up its work to interdict animal fighting crimes, the agency’s capacity is very limited and its strategic work against these massive criminal networks has been underdeveloped.

U.S.-based cockfighters are business partners with cartels and other organized crime associations, and they may be trafficking a million fighting animals to supply fighting pits in other nations, especially Mexico. In December 2024, four people were murdered at a Mexican cockfighting arena, including “El Chabelo,” a leader of the Sinaloa Cartel. In November 2024, cockfighting enthusiast and son-in-law of cartel leader “El Mencho” was arrested in Riverside County. In late January 2024, 14 people were wounded and six murdered, including a 16-year-old from eastern Washington, at a cockfighting derby in the Mexican state of Guerrero. Months before, also in Mexico, 20 people were massacred at a cockfighting derby, including a Chicago woman.

Organized criminals control the cockfighting venues in the Philippines, too — and that nation, after Mexico, is the second largest destination for illegally trafficked fighting birds from the United States. In the Philippines, there were 32 people kidnapped from cockfights in 2022 and never found. And there was an estimated $13 billion wagered on online cockfights (e-sabong).

We’ve seen mass shootings at a Hawaii cockfight, a double homicide at a dogfight in Mississippi, and a raft of other shootings and other violent incidents in our homeland.

Despite this pattern of violence and mayhem, the DOJ and other federal agencies are very gingerly addressing the problem of cockfighting. Animal Wellness Action provided dossiers on 94 major cockfighting traffickers in the states, but just one of those individuals has been arrested and prosecuted. We’ve provided information on dozens of illegal cockfighting pits in Puerto Rico since federal law banned fighting there in 2019, yet not one case has been initiated. The same is true in Guam, where cockfighters illegally shipped and received more than 11,500 fighting birds during a recent five-year period.

We’ve provided a 100-page report on cockfighters illegally shipping fighting birds through the U.S. mail, but the agency’s law enforcement arm, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, hasn’t brought a single case since Congress banned any shipment of fighting birds through the mail 18 years ago.

By no measure is this an acceptable record of enforcement, given the detailed intelligence and investigations work provided to federal authorities.

Add the concern about the risk that cockfighting poses to avian health and even human health, and it starts to look like a gross dereliction of duty. The smuggling of cockfighting birds from Mexico into the United States was linked to 10 of 15 outbreaks of a bird disease known as virulent Newcastle Disease here at home, running up more than a billion dollars in containment costs and indemnification payments to farmers. Cockfighting played a role in spreading H5N1 (“bird flu”) in Asia, and it may be playing a major role in the current spread of the costliest zoonotic disease outbreak in American history.

Cockfighting, dogfighting, animal-crush videos, bestiality, domestic violence, and other malicious forms of cruelty are almost never the work of upstanding citizens obeying laws and playing by the rules. These practices are typically bound up with organized crime, money laundering, narcotics trafficking, and so many other crimes.

With an Animal Cruelty Crimes section at the DOJ, and the concurrent passage of the Fighting Inhumane Gambling and High-Risk Trafficking (FIGHT) Act, police and prosecutors can lead the way in going after the kingpins of cruelty. We continue to be ready to help them and provide details on the animal fighting operators and other organized animal cruelty networks. But only with structural change will the DOJ and other law enforcement agencies be prepared to take a serious bite out of animal fighting and other forms of violence against animals that are a threat to the safety of our communities, including their animals.