Arkansas Senate Committee Crushes House-Approved Bill That Would Have Decriminalized Core Cockfighting Activities

Little Rock, AK — Just two days after the Arkansas House of Representatives approved HB 1611 to roll back the state’s popular and comprehensive anti-cockfighting law, the Senate Judiciary Committee overwhelmingly quashed the effort, defeating the measure on a voice vote.

The defeat of the bill came just two days after Washington County authorities arrested two backyard cockfighters whose activities would not have been illegal under the terms of HB 1611.

“Cockfighting is barbaric, and it is bound up with an array of other crimes that degrade the safety of our communities,” said Desiree Bender, Arkansas state director of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. “Two notorious cockfighters from Oklahoma brought this bill to the state, and their motivations and their backgrounds as cockfighters were unveiled by our team at Animal Wellness Action. We are grateful to the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who saw through the cockfighters’ charade.”

Three elected Arkansas District Attorneys explained to Senators that HB 1611 was not about protecting legitimate poultry producers but was instead about decriminalizing cockfighting. The Arkansas Animal Control Association also weighed in against the measure.

 The major witness for HB 1611 was Blake Pearce, the co-founder of a cockfighting front group called the Oklahoma Gamefowl Commission. 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, and the family maintains a major cockfighting complex in eastern Oklahoma. 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.

“The only people behind the HB 1611 were cockfighters, and I am grateful to Senate Judiciary Committee members for allowing us to detail the motivations of the proponents,” said Kevin Chambers, the Oklahoma state director of Animal Wellness Action and who worked against similar measures advanced by Mr. Pearce in Oklahoma City. Pearce and his associate, Anthony DeVore, have repeatedly failed to gain any traction with similar efforts in the Oklahoma Legislature to weaken that state’s anti-cockfighting law. Despite forming a PAC and distributing tens of thousands of dollars to state lawmakers — with tainted money from raffling fighting birds to other cockfighters — not one of their three bills in Oklahoma even made it out of its first committee this year.

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

“No state has ever weakened its anti-cockfighting law, and I am awfully glad that Arkansas law remains intact,” said Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. “In recent weeks, we have provided a roadmap of key members of the illegal cockfighting network in Arkansas, and we stand ready to work with law enforcement to dismantle their illegal fighting operations, their illegal training operations, and their shipment of their fighting birds to other cockfighters across the world.”

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 — which subsequently came in the form of HB 1611. According to a leaked audiotape of a gathering of cockfighters in Little Rock — organized by 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.