In a Major New Investigation, Animal Wellness Action Uncovers and Documents Rampant Illegal Cockfighting Syndicates in Arkansas

Little Rock, AR — Today, Animal Wellness Action (AWA) 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. AWA and its partners — the Center for a Humane Economy and Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK) — are calling on law enforcement to crack down on these illicit operators and are writing to county sheriffs and to U.S. Attorneys, with documentation of ongoing crimes. The animal wellness groups are also calling on federal lawmakers to support the passage of the Fighting Inhumane Gambling and High-Risk Trafficking Act (FIGHT) Act, S. 1529 and H.R. 2742 to increase the array of tools that federal law enforcement can deploy to better target this widespread illicit conduct.

The report also lays bare a plan, uncovered during the larger Animal Wellness Action investigation, to decriminalize cockfighting in Arkansas. In the forthcoming state legislative session in Little Rock, according to a leaked audiotape of the event, cockfighters are planning to knowingly misrepresent their enterprises as benign chicken-breeding operations focused on exports of birds for legitimate purposes. They have enlisted State Senator Terry Rice, R-Waldren, and Rep. Justin Gonzales, R-Okolona, to introduce legislation to gut Act 33 passed in 2009 that made cockfighting a felony offense. Their plan is to drop penalties to low levels and to make enforcement nearly impossible, effectively decriminalizing cockfighting. Until state lawmakers passed Act 33, 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.

“A network of cockfighters in Arkansas is operating as an organized crime association, knowingly and shamelessly violating anti-cruelty laws and anti-gambling laws,” said Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. “The individuals conducting these illicit businesses are part of a larger cockfighting enterprise tied to illegal trafficking of fighting animals, illegal immigration, and narcotics trafficking. They are consorting with cartels in Mexico and organized crime interests in the Philippines that run the biggest cockfighting pits in the world, supplying them with fighting birds in violation of Arkansas and U.S. laws and directly participating in an array of illegal acts.’

Cockfighting enthusiasts in Oklahoma, operating under the banner of the Oklahoma Gamefowl Commission, have seeded the effort to decriminalize cockfighting in Arkansas and led a recent meeting of cockfighters at a venue in Little Rock.  (Animal Wellness Action obtained a complete recording of the proceedings). A new offshoot organization, the Arkansas Gamefowl Commission, has been formed, and it has hired Susanna Watt, a lobbyist with Anchor Strategies, to lead the legislative repeal effort in Little Rock. The Gamefowl Commission is registered as Watt’s “client” and has taken the address of John Slavin in Waldren, Ark. Slavin has a decades-long record of involvement in illegal cockfighting.

The report provides profiles of some major cockfighters in Arkansas:

• One cockfighter in El Dorado marketed his birds to Mexican cockfighters in four YouTube videos, touting the fighting prowess of his Arkansas-bred and -raised fighting birds and noting that “they fight into a rooster and through a rooster.”
• Kenny Henderson and his wife, though they were arrested by federal authorities for illegal cockfighting in 2007 in Crawford County, are still involved in cockfighting, along with their son. Their main source of revenue is to ship large number of birds to the Philippines, where cockfighting is big business and a prime fighting rooster may go for as much as $2,000. Shipping fighting birds anywhere is a state felony and a federal felony, including sales to any foreign nation.
• John Slavin is one of the nation’s most infamous cockfighters, with his residence in Scott County. He maintains hundreds of fighting birds that he raises, fights, and sells to others in the field. In 2019, he hosted a Philippines-based cockfighting television crew at his cockfighting complex and boasted that “we got sold out last year,” adding that “our Filipino business has been great.” Slavin adds that his birds “hit so hard, and they cut good and they’re game, and that wins you a lot of chicken fights.”

For decades, two of the three major national cockfighting magazines — The Gamecock, in Hartford, and The Feathered Warrior in DeQueen — were published in Arkansas. Every issue was chock full of advertisements for fighting implements and fighting birds, with rundowns of the results of fighting derbies in the U.S. and abroad chronicled in detail. Today, these cockfighters have moved to Facebook and other social media platforms to promote their illegal businesses.

“I worked to pass Act 33 in 2009 to shut down these illegal cockfighting operations,” said Desiree Bender, Arkansas state director for Animal Wellness Action. “Now, 15 years after we passed the law, we have seen precious few enforcement actions against people knowingly violating our animal cruelty laws. Rather than give up their criminal enterprise, the cockfighters have the gall to petition our government to gut our state laws and to commit malicious acts of cruelty for their amusement and profits.”

Bender vowed to be at the State Capitol to fight the pro-cockfighting legislation.  And Animal Wellness Action and its partners are also working to pass the FIGHT Act in Congress. This bill amends the Animal Welfare Act to enhance enforcement of our animal-fighting laws by banning simulcasting of and gambling on animal fighting ventures; halting the shipment of mature roosters (chickens only) through the U.S. mail (shipping dogs by mail is already illegal); creating a private right of action against illegal animal fighters; and allowing for forfeiture of property assets used in animal fighting crimes.

The FIGHT Act, S. 1529 and H.R. 274, led by Senators John Kennedy, R-La., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Reps. Don Bacon, R-Neb., and Andrea Salinas, D-Ore., has been endorsed by 750 agencies and organizations, including the National Sheriffs’ Association, the National District Attorneys’ Association, the United Egg Producers, and a large set of rural county sheriffs in Arkansas. U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford, a senior member of the House Agriculture Committee, is already a cosponsor of the FIGHT Act, along with 56 other House Republicans.

“SHARK has documented exactly what these people are doing: strapping knives to the legs of animals to watch them hack each other to death for human amusement and illegal wagering,” said Steve Hindi, president of SHARK. “We will work with law enforcement to give them all the evidence they need to make arrests.”

Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy also note that raising and trafficking of fighting birds is a clear and present danger to Arkansas’s multi-billion-dollar poultry businesses. The Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI, “bird flu”) H5N1 outbreak that emerged in the U.S. in February 2022 has affected both backyard and commercial poultry flocks as well as wild birds in Arkansas. As of November 2024, there have been eight HPAI H5N1 outbreaks in Arkansas poultry flocks: three in backyard flocks, one commercial turkey flock (33K birds) and four commercial broiler flocks, resulting in the death or euthanasia of 312K poultry in the state. There have also been 76 detections of HPAI H5N1 in wild birds in Arkansas.

Dr. Jim Keen, DVM, PhD, the director of veterinary sciences for the Center for a Humane Economy has written a 63-page report on the connection between cockfighting and avian diseases.  “By allowing a massive cockfighting industry to flourish in Arkansas, the state is putting its biggest agricultural industry at extreme risk,” said Dr. Keen.

A Dropbox of related assets is available here. The report is available here: Cockfighting in Arkansas.pdf.