͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌To prevent cruelty to animals, we promote enacting and enforcing good public policies. To enact good laws, we must elect good lawmakers, and that’s why we remind voters which candidates care about our issues and which ones don’t. If you’d like to unsubscribe, click here. [[link removed]]

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There’s an Intercontinental Crime Wave of Animal Fighting in the Americas and Southeast Asia. The FIGHT Act Can Stop It
Our multi-pronged, multinational plan to break up animal fighting networks
By Wayne Pacelle
Of the 17 federal policy initiatives Animal Wellness Action has launched in this Congress, the FIGHT Act has attracted more support than any of them.
That legislation has more than 1,050 endorsing agencies and organizations—from the Alabama Sheriffs’ Association to the Wyoming Sheriffs and Police Chiefs; from the American Gaming Association to the United Egg Producers; from Major County Sheriffs of America to the Small and Rural Law Enforcement Executive Association.
In the U.S. Senate, conservative Republican John Kennedy from Louisiana has joined with New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker to lead the FIGHT Act, while in the House, Nebraska Republican Don Bacon has teamed up with Oregon Democrat Andrea Salinas. They are asking their colleagues to grapple with a seeming contradiction: animal fighting is rampant despite being a settled legal (and moral) question.
The FIGHT Act, H.R. 3946 and S. 1454, would accomplish the following:
* Stop the multi-billion-dollar enterprise of online gambling on dogfights and cockfights. In 2022, more than $13 billion was wagered on cockfights staged in the Philippines alone.
* Authorize courts to seize from convicted animal fighters the barns and trailers and other property they convert into dens of violence where fighting animals are sent to die.
* Halt the smuggling of fighting roosters by the U.S. Postal Service, which is used every year to ship tens of thousands of birds to their deaths in staged knife fights.
* Empower private citizens to defend their homes and families in civil court, allowing them to seek injunctions against animal fighters who set up camp in their communities.
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. The combat sometimes lasts more than an hour and ends with blood staining every inch of the pit. They often electrocute or drown poor-performing dogs. Dogfighters may use smaller, vulnerable dogs as bait to instill more aggression in the animals.
Cockfighters strap knives or gaffs (curved ice picks) to the birds’ legs so they can deliver deep and mortal wounds to their combatants.
There are thousands of backyard dogfighting rings clandestinely operating across the nation, but the cockfighting problem occurs on a vastly larger scale. The USDA has estimated there are as many as 20 million fighting birds in the country, with those birds destined for illegal pits here and foreign fighting venues around the world.
We’ve conducted investigations of the people involved in animal fighting and have detailed reports on so many of them. With our partners at Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK), we regularly report this information to law enforcement.
But more tools are needed. That’s why we are working with the National Sheriffs’ Association (NSA) and other agencies to pass the FIGHT Act and give those tools to law enforcement and to private citizens. In its resolution supporting the legislation, the NSA declared that “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.”
We know that truth all too well. We have catalogued a mass shooting at a cockfight in Hawaii, a double-homicide at a Mississippi dogfight, and a machete fight between cockfighters at one of their cockfighting derbies in Miami-Dade County—just to name a few.
Meanwhile, U.S.-based cockfighters and dogfighters are raising and exporting hundreds of thousands of fighting animals to their associates in Mexico, the Philippines, and two dozen other nations for staged animal combat conducted there.
It’s not just the animals who are victims of these savage spectacles. In 2022, in the Mexican state of Michoacán, cartel members entered a cockfighting arena, sealed off exits, and shot and killed 20 people, including Americans. 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.
In Ecuador, armed attackers, dressed in military-style uniforms, stormed a cockfighting arena late at night and opened fire on spectators, killing 12 and injuring nine others in cartel-related violence. Meanwhile in the Philippines, where profits from gambling on cockfights total in the billions each year, there have been more than 100 cockfighting-related murders since 2021 with dozens of the victims dumped in Taal Lake.
Our elected officials must understand this: animal fighting is the engine of a non-stop crime wave afflicting the United States, Mexico, the Philippines, and other nations throughout the world. U.S.-based animal fighters are at the center of it all.
Cockfighting and Its Urgent Threat of Spreading Avian Diseases Across the World
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.
Cockfighting was documented to spread bird flu, or H5N1, across Asia. H5N1 has now hit all 50 states and been the viral agent leading to the killing of 200 million laying hens and other birds used in commercial production. Taxpayers have been on the hook for $2 billion for indemnity payments and other costs, while egg prices surged so much that there was a transfer of $20 billion in additional costs to consumers at the grocery store.
Cockfighting and Dogfighting are Savagery on Display
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.
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Wayne Pacelle, president of the Center for a Humane Economy & Animal Wellness Action, is the author of two New York Times bestselling books, “The Bond” and “The Humane Economy.”
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