Federal Courts Close One Last Door on Legal Cockfighting in Our Nation

Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit unanimously upheld a U.S. District Court dismissal of a legal challenge by a cockfighter and former local politician seeking to nullify the application of the national animal fighting law in the Northern Mariana Islands — an archipelago whose 14 islands just peak above the swells of the western Pacific Ocean more than 7800 miles from our nation’s capital and a third of the way around the world from it.

Andrew Sablan Salas’s loss in a federal appeals court is the latest chapter in a series of setbacks for cockfighters based in the U.S. territories who have been trying to find an escape clause in the federal law prohibiting animal fighting.

After Congress passed a law to outlaw animal fighting in every jurisdiction in the United States — a measure that Animal Wellness Action helped shepherd to enactment — the cockfighters and their political allies turned to the federal courts for that last stand.

But the case in the Marianas has delivered yet another resounding defeat to the cockfighting industry. Over the past half dozen years, there have been six federal rulings — three by District Courts and three by Appellate Courts — siding with the United States and upholding the authority of the United States to treat cockfighting as a felony offense everywhere in the nation.

If a cockfighter had entered birds in six successive fights and lost every time, he would slink off and not be heard from again. But when it comes to lawlessness, many cockfighters don’t get the hint.

Cockfighting: A Resilient Form of Organized Crime

Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy have provided details of widespread, illegal cockfighting in eight statewide and territorial investigations — in Alabama, California, Guam, Hawaii, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.

These investigations have revealed that the United States has become the breeding ground for the global industry, with cockfighters raising hundreds of thousands of animals for fighting and then shipping them to other cockfighters for final acts in fighting pits and arenas throughout the United States and across the globe.

One of our investigations revealed that cockfighters based on the U.S. mainland — with Oklahoma cockfighters at the center of it all — sent between 2016 and 2021 at least 11,648 fighting birds to Guam, which is practically a neighbor to the Northern Mariana Islands in the western Pacific.

“While we have backyard birds on Guam that families raise for eggs or meat, these thousands of fighting roosters are useless for either,” said retired Army Colonel Tom Pool, DVM, MPH, the former Territorial Veterinarian for Guam and now senior veterinarian with Animal Wellness Action. “There is simply no other rationale for the shipment of very expensive adult roosters to our island but for cockfighting. We know that the people on both ends of these transactions have been involved in the criminal practice of cockfighting.”

Pool reports that the birds are shipped to Guam come in boxes delivered by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). The law enforcement arm of the service — the U.S. Postal Inspection Service —  has failed to make a single arrest for trafficking of birds for fighting in Guam or in any other part of the U.S., despite the federal law banning any such shipments.

Cockfighting and the trafficking of fighting birds is an even larger enterprise in Puerto Rico.

When you fly into the San Juan airport, you can’t miss a large arena with “Live Cockfights” emblazoned on a neon sign. The invitation occasionally attracts the curious tourist, but most attendees are seasoned practitioners of cockfighting knowingly violating federal law.

Though he took office after federal courts rejected claims by Puerto Rico’s cockfighters to challenge the federal law, Gov. Pedro Pierluisi defiantly stated that he is “committed to supporting an industry that generates jobs and income for our economy, that represents our culture and our history.” He declared that he and Jennifer González-Colón, Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner in Congress, “will continue to fight for them.”

But the federal law against animal fighting never singled out Puerto Rico, Guam, or any other U.S. territory. The federal law, step by step, applied prohibitions against cockfighting to the territories, and finally, in 2018, the Congress finished the job by banning the practice everywhere in the United States.

In assuming office, Pierluisi and González-Colón took an oath to uphold the applicable laws of the United States. They should understand that the oath doesn’t apply only to the laws they favor. But to all laws.

The Law Is Clear but Our Work Is Not Done

The Fighting Inhumane Gambling and High-Risk Trafficking (FIGHT) Act is our latest legislative maneuver to dismantle this crime business. Our legislation — H.R. 2742 by Reps. Don Bacon, R-Neb., and Andrea Salinas, D-Ore., and S. 1529 by Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and John Kennedy, R-La. — has a remarkable 715 endorsing agencies and organizations. It is the most bipartisan and broadly supported animal welfare bill in Congress.

The National Sheriffs’ Association, which treats the FIGHT Act as a top legislative priority, “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.” The National District Attorneys Association has joined the NSA in backing the legislation, as have the American Gaming Association and the United Egg Producers.

The FIGHT Act is designed to turbocharge the enforcement of our national animal fighting law. Since Congress applied the law to the territories, our law enforcement agencies have not shut down a single animal fighting pit in any of them, even as some operators openly advertise their fighting derbies.

But it’s also the trafficking to other nations that must also be the focus of U.S. law enforcement. Mexico and the Philippines are America’s biggest foreign partners in this illicit trade, and American cockfighters are consorting with criminal organizations involved in murder, kidnapping, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, bribery, and more.

A Philippines-based television network in 2020 released 50 videos showing two hosts making visits to U.S.-based cockfighting complexes, where the American cockfighters touted the bloodlines of their fighting birds, with some of the animals destined for big global events such as the “World Slasher Derby” in Manilla. One Alabama-based cockfighting operator told the Filipino television broadcaster that he sells 6,000 birds a year to Mexico alone for as much as $2,000 a bird, generating millions in illegal sales.

Cockfighting is legal in Mexico and the Philippines, but it’s widely viewed as a menace bound up with criminal activities and violence. Even as cockfighting generated billions in online gaming in his country, former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte banned online gambling on cockfights after dozens of people were kidnapped and never heard from again in the country. One woman, who had unpaid gambling debts accrued through online cockfights, reportedly sold her child to pay off her debts.

Cockfighting a Key Feature of America’s Border Crisis

All we need is to check the court dockets in Texas counties to understand that cockfighting is a little understood feature of the border crisis.

Recently, Bexar County law enforcement arrested 47 people and seized 200 birds along with illegal weapons. A raid in Goliad County resulted in 60 arrests and several illegal weapons seized. Earlier this year, more than 160 roosters were seized in a Potter County bust where according to the sheriff, “many” participants were “unlawfully in the United States.”

At a cockfight busted by the San Jacinto sheriff, suspects were “expected to face multiple felony charges, ranging from animal cruelty, cockfighting, illegal gambling, unlawful weapon possession, [and] organized crime.” We saw more of the same in Cherokee, where two dozen suspected cockfighters were arrested on similar charges. And in Lynn County, the sheriff brought felony charges “because of organized criminal activity.”

There have been a series of interdictions at the border, including a federal enforcement action where officers found “roosters deeply hidden within passenger vehicles.” In Hidalgo County, Texas, in early June, a young man shot his uncle in a dispute over birds thought to be raised for cockfighting. There was also a shooting at a Dallas cockfight last year.

Cartels dial up the violence on the other side of the border. 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.

Cockfighting has also been linked to outbreaks of bird flu (H5N1) in Asia, along with virulent Newcastle Disease (vND), in the United States. Ten vND outbreaks in the United States were linked to fighting birds smuggled across the border from Mexico. The United States indemnifies the farmers and has paid out billions of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars to reimburse them for the “depopulation” of millions of birds.

The FIGHT Act will help curb this crime wave. H.R. 2742 and S. 1529 would ban online gambling on animal fights, allow courts to seize fighting pits and other property used by convicted animal fighters in the commission of their crimes, stop the shipment of fighting roosters through the mail, and allow law-abiding citizens to protect their homes and families by bringing civil suits against cockfighters and dogfighters when governmental authorities are too slow to act.

Cruelty in Its Late Stage of Decline Does Not Mean We Can Relent

The people involved in cockfighting, often career criminals engaged in a variety of other illegal activities, typically defend the enterprise as a “livelihood” or “cultural prerogative.”

These are convenient smokescreens.

The reality is that cockfighting probably started around 3,000 years ago and spread across the globe by trade, war, and colonialism. It’s been practiced throughout much of the world, though the enclaves in which it remains legal are shrinking in number, and distaste and active opposition to the practice are solidifying everywhere.

Durability does not speak to moral worth. There are plenty of other horrors that lasted for centuries and are now looked upon as ugly footnotes of the human experience — from burning witches at the stake to gladiatorial games to bear and bull baiting.

Cockfighting must be pulled up at the root and relegated to the history books as one more example of savagery rightly left in our wake. But to do so, it will take human agency and resolve. For the moment, we should celebrate our momentous legal gains but neither relent nor relax in our quest to seek a permanent end to this spectacle of cruelty and vice.