It’s Time for National Leaders to Understand Magnitude, Impact of Animal Fighting Crime Wave
Our multi-pronged assault on animal fighting requires your help
- Wayne Pacelle
Animal fighting is a parade of horrors.
Dogfighters put dogs of the same weight in an enclosed pit and goad them to attack each other, with blood staining every inch of the pits and the contests sometimes lasting more than an hour.
The people who stage these fights have been known to electrocute or drown poor-performing dogs.
As a training strategy, dogfighters may use smaller, vulnerable dogs, or bait dogs, to instill more aggression in the animals.
We’ve even seen cases of “trunk fighting,” where two dogs will be put in the trunk of a car to attack and kill each other — in the most compact and closed-off fighting pit imaginable.
Cockfighting is no less vicious and cruel.
Cockfighters strap knives or gaffs (curved ice picks) to the birds’ legs so they can deliver deep and mortal wounds to their combatants.
Some cockfighters kill critically endangered hawksbill sea turtles and use their hard shells to make gaffs (“postizas”).
Cockfighters set up pole traps and other traps to kill eagles, hawks, and owls, because their fighting birds are sitting ducks during the rearing and training stage of cockfighting. The beautifully colored roosters are kept in the open air outside and tethered, so they are unable to escape avian attacks. One cockfighter recently told one of our informants he’s just recently killed 50 raptors.
Cockfighters stick fighting birds in boxes and ship tens of thousands of them through the U.S. Postal Service every year, without food or water, even to far-flung destinations like Guam.
For these reasons and so many others, this cruelty and crime must end.
That’s why our multi-pronged campaign — Animal Fighting Is the Pits — aims to root it out.
Investigations and Enforcement to Stop Animal Fighting
Despite laws to forbid animal fighting in every state, and a federal law treating staged fights as felonies on every inch of U.S. soil, dogfighting and cockfighting are startlingly widespread and unusually corrosive to civil society and animal health.
There may be 150,000 backyard cockfighting operations in the United States. The USDA has estimated there as many as 20 million fighting birds in the United States, with those birds destined for illegal pits here and to foreign fighting venues around the world.
We are investigating animal fights across the country, gathering intelligence online, by drone, and through the use of informants.
We’ve conducted investigations of the people involved in animal fighting and have detailed reports on them all. We regularly feed this information to law enforcement.
We pay rewards for information to citizens that leads to the arrest and conviction of animal fighters, whether under federal or state law.
This set of actions, including with our partner organization Showing Animals Respect and Kindness, has produced a new level of enforcement: more busts, more arrests, more fines and incarceration for the criminal at the center of these operations.
But for us, it’s not enough. More work is required to dismantle these organized crime networks. We need your help.
Bringing More Firepower to Stop Animal Fights
Our top priority is to work with Congress to pass the FIGHT Act, led by Don Bacon, R-Neb., and Andrea Salinas, D-Ore., in the House, and John Kennedy, R-La., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., in the Senate. This path-breaking legislation outlaws online gambling on dogfighting and cockfighting, allows for forfeiture of property used in the commission of animal fighting crimes, halts shipping fighting roosters through the U.S. mail, and creates a private right of action when law enforcement isn’t able to shut down fighting rings.
It has an astonishing 760 agencies and organizations supporting it, including the National Sheriffs’ Association, which treats the FIGHT Act as a top legislative priority. The Association “acknowledges animal fighting is a crime of violence” with “links to crimes against people including, but not limited to, child abuse, murder, assault, theft, intimidation of neighbors and witnesses, and human trafficking.”
Law enforcement agencies say the legislation is needed to make the world safer for people, domesticated animals, and wild animals as well.
At the same time, we are pressing for the creation of an Animal Cruelty Crimes section at the Department of Justice to crack down on animal fighting crimes. We need more prosecutors and strategists to break up these fighting rings.
The United States has a very clear interest in all of this because cartels and other organized crime operators are driving animal fighting enterprises.
Mexico and the Philippines are America’s biggest foreign partners in this illicit trade, and U.S.-based cockfighters are consorting with cartels involved in murder, kidnapping, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, bribery, and more.
In 2022, in the Mexican state of Michoacán, cartel members entered a cockfighting arena, sealed off exits, 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 attending the fight with his father.
Animal fighting activities amount to a non-stop crime wave afflicting the United States, Mexico, the Philippines, and other nations throughout the world. U.S.-based cockfighters are the center of all of it, and the FIGHT Act gives law enforcement the tools and support to fight back.
Cockfighting and Its Urgent Threat of Spreading Avian Diseases
Cockfighting also poses a viral threat to our nation and the globe. Virulent Newcastle disease has entered the United States at least 10 times through illegally smuggled infected cockfighting roosters from Mexico, causing an epidemic in southern California, triggering mass depopulation of millions of commercial poultry, and spurring the federal government to spend more than a billion dollars in containment and indemnity costs.
In a flash, cockfighting can spread disease from Mexico and the Caribbean into the United States and between the U.S. mainland and the Pacific Rim.
Cockfighting was documented to spread bird flu, or H5N1, across Asia. H5N1 has now hit all 50 states, and we don’t know the extent to which cockfighting has contributed to its spread. But we do know that the USDA has now depopulated 155 million birds, including 122 million laying hens, in a response that has been timid in some ways and overreaching and ineffective in others.
Beyond all of that suffering and loss of life, the march of this zoonotic disease, and our government’s ham-handed response to it, the crisis has driven up the price of eggs by $2 per carton. Consumers have absorbed $20 billion in extra costs just from price inflation because of the mass depopulation of laying hens.
And taxpayers have been on the hook for $2 billion for indemnity payments and other costs, with more of the same to come.
FIGHT Act is an Urgent Matter for the Nation
Cockfighting and dogfighting are savagery on display. There’s just no more time for delay and political obstructionism. The FIGHT Act is a response to cartels. It is a response to bird flu. It is a response to the most widespread form of criminalized animal cruelty.
Dogfighters and cockfighters deserve a fair trial and nothing more. They are knowingly breaking our laws, and they are the force behind a wave of crime and viral spread doing practical and lasting damage to our nation.
Will you join the movement to stop animal fighting by donating to support our work today?
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Wayne Pacelle, president of the Animal Wellness Action and the Center, is author of NYT bestseller The Bond: Our Kinship with Animals, Our Call to Defend Them.