Arkansas House Takes the Extraordinary Step of Legalizing Some Cockfighting Activities, Makes Anti-Fighting Law Unworkable

Little Rock, AK — Yesterday, at the same time that Arkansas House members passed HB 1611 to remove prohibitions against a wide range of cockfighting practices, Washington County authorities arrested Luis Gonzalez-Flores and Dillon Simmerman for pitting two roosters against each other in a backyard fight, charging them with unlawful animal fighting under Arkansas’s robust existing law.

Had HB 1611 been in place, these cockfighters would never have been arrested, since the legislation now being examined by the state Senate would have made their arrests impossible. HB 1611 is scheduled for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing tomorrow at 10 a.m.

“I am shocked that lawmakers in our state are falling for this legislative shell game brought to Little Rock by a pair of notorious cockfighters from Oklahoma,”said Desiree Bender, Arkansas state director of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. “We have footage of their gamecock farms and we have audio of them celebrating cockfighting. They are lawbreakers, and our lawmakers should not be hoodwinked by these criminals.”

Not a single Arkansan testified in support of HB 1611 in its House hearing, and no legitimate Arkansas poultry or farming group supports the legislation. Only Blake Pearce, the co-founder of a cockfighting front group called the Oklahoma Gamefowl Commission, testified. Blake Pearce’s father was the lead plaintiff 20 years ago in legal maneuvers to overturn a voter-approved ballot initiative in Oklahoma to make cockfighting a felony. The case was Edmondson v. Pearce, and it was decided by the Oklahoma Supreme Court, which unanimously ruled that Oklahoma’s comprehensive anti-cockfighting law (a model for lawmakers in Arkansas who enacted a similar statute in 2009), was constitutional.

Arkansas’s current law, including § 5-62-120, defines “animal fighting” and clearly imposes felony penalties (Class D felonies) for acts like rooster fighting, as seen in the Gonzalez-Flores and Simmerman case. The fighting practices from the two men charged yesterday would be permissible under the provisions in HB 1611.

Since the enactment of the Arkansas anti-cruelty law 16 years ago, there have been no instances of show bird owners or farmers being unfairly targeted for legitimate agricultural or exhibition purposes. In fact, there’s never been such a case of this kind of overreaching enforcement in any state under either federal or state law. “The entire premise of HB 1611 is fraudulent, given that there’s never been a case of a legitimate poultry operator targeted by law enforcement,” added Bender. “The people driving the lobbying campaign for HB 1611 are known cockfighters who are continuing to engage in animal cruelty crimes. They are coming to lawmakers so their brethren in Arkansas can continue their savagery and criminal behavior and no longer need worry that law enforcement will apprehend them.”

While Arkansas law bans possession and sale of fighting birds — a practice that would be legalized in the state by HB 1611 — so does federal law. Even if HB 1611 passed, it would still be a federal felony to ship fighting birds to cockfighting enthusiasts in Mexico, the Philippines, or in Oklahoma.

Pearce and his associate, Anthony DeVore, have repeatedly failed to gain any traction with similar efforts in the Oklahoma capitol to weaken that state’s anti-cockfighting law. Despite forming a PAC and distributing tens of thousands of dollars to state lawmakers, not one of their three bills even made it out of its first committee this year.

“No state has ever weakened its anti-cockfighting law,” said Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action. “Arkansas lawmakers would stand alone in being hustled by cockfighting con men and decriminalizing staged animal fighting, with all of its cruelty, illegal gambling and other criminal conduct bound up with these spectacles. No good can come from lawmakers enabling a practice banned in every state in the nation and also criminalized under federal law.”

In November, Animal Wellness Action and its partner organizations released a damning investigation that reveals that illegal cockfighting is rampant in Arkansas, documenting that a network of animal fighting complexes are operating in explicit violation of state and federal laws against animal cruelty and related crimes.

The report also exposed the legislative plan, uncovered during the larger Animal Wellness Action investigation, to decriminalize cockfighting in Arkansas. According to a leaked audiotape of a gathering of cockfighters in Little Rock — organized by the Oklahoma-based pro-cockfighting leaders Pearce and DeVore — cockfighters explicitly stated their plan to knowingly misrepresent their enterprises as benign chicken-breeding operations focused on exports of birds for legitimate purposes.

Until state lawmakers passed Act 33 in 2009, cockfighting in Arkansas was treated with minimal penalties akin to a parking violation — and that is the circumstance that the cockfighters want to restore through the gutting of the state law. Act 33 simply aligned the state’s cockfighting prohibitions with the laws against dogfighting. “Lawmakers wouldn’t hear nonsense from dogfighters masquerading as beleaguered pit bull owners who were making up stories about being targeted by law enforcement,” added Pacelle. “They should give no more credence to the phony tales of Oklahoma’s cockfighters pleading for the decriminalization of their activities.”

Animal Wellness Action can provide footage of the cockfighting complexes of the Pearce and DeVore families, as well as social media posts and audio recordings that document their history of cockfighting activities and political efforts to decriminalize the practices. That evidence is available on request.