It isn’t a coincidence that the humane movement got its start in England: it was there that the cruelties of animal fighting became commonplace. In Medieval Britain, bull and bear baiting with dogs were common village entertainments. In A.D. 1050, Edward the Confessor presented a fight between a bear and six mastiffs: as spectators huddled around a ring, the dogs were thrown in and set upon the bear tethered to a pole in the center. During her reign, Queen Elizabeth I granted her royal patronage to several bull-baiting rings and entertained foreign ambassadors with bear-baiting spectacles.
Cockfighting also flourished in Britain from the twelfth century as entertainment for both the landed gentry and for commoners. Though British authorities and the Roman Catholic Church frowned upon such pastimes, the blood sport was too popular to be outlawed. King Edward III attempted to ban cockfights in 1365, as did Oliver Cromwell three centuries later, but both times to no avail. Ultimately it would prove more deeply entrenched than bull baiting or dogfighting, and cockfighting would be the last among them to be banned.
When Henry VIII took on the Catholic Church, the church’s moral influence against cockfighting also fell away, and among his successors James I, Charles II, William III, and George IV were all cockfighting enthusiasts. Such was the popularity of this “sport” that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, cocks bred on Cock Lane, near St. Paul’s Cathedral, were equipped with silver spurs made on Cockspur Street, near present-day Trafalgar Square, and sent to fight in cockpits across town. Three pits stood in the city of Westminster, where Parliament is located. Animal fighting had powerful fans and friends.
Dogfighting was a favorite pastime in what one author has called “Bulldog Nation.” The original English bulldog, with its strong lower jaw and deep-set nose, was bred for the baits of the early modern era. In the nineteenth century, it was crossbred with more agile and speedy terriers to create the modern bull terrier or “pit bull” breed. This was the animal that flourished in the dogfighting pits of the era, but also was used in interspecies fights, such as badger drawing and rat killing.
Over time, fights between different dog breeds ensued, as breeds other than pit dogs were matched against dogs specifically bred for the sport. Dogs and monkeys were sometimes thrown together too. In the 1820s, a monkey named Jacco Manacco fought dogs and kept winning until his final match, in which he and the dog both met a violent end.
Around that time, the humane movement in England was gathering strength and calling for the abolition of animal fighting. Between 1800 and 1835, Britain’s Parliament considered eleven bills on animal cruelty, most seeking to prohibit animal fighting. The bills enjoyed the support of the great William Wilberforce, and in 1826 secured fifty-two petitions of support from across the nation, but they still went down in Parliament amid a hail of ridicule. Yet the reformers persisted, and in 1835 and 1849 passed bills outlawing various forms of animal fighting.
English and other European immigrants brought cockfighting, dogfighting, bull baiting, gander pulling, and a few other blood sports to the American colonies, where they flourished, especially in the South. In the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic, Puritan and Quaker reformers enjoyed a degree of success in efforts to prevent animal fighting. The 1641 Massachusetts “Body of Liberties” included an implicit prohibition on bull baiting, and in 1687, the Puritan minister Increase Mather condemned cockfighting as a “great inhumanity, and a scandalous Violation of the Sixth Commandment.”
As in England, some of the strongest opposition to animal cruelty came from various strains of Protestantism, which regarded animal fighting and related activities like gambling and drinking as sinful. In 1682, the Pennsylvania Assembly, influenced by the colony’s large Quaker population, banned cockfighting, bull baiting, and other “rude and riotous sports.” The First Continental Congress even temporarily banned blood sports, in part to encourage the virtues necessary for success in the revolution. That progress was short lived, however, and after the revolution, cockfighting quickly caught on again.
In the United States, of course, prohibitions against cruelty necessarily had to proceed state by state, and in a few cases anti-animal-fighting statutes appeared even before the founding in 1866 of the ASPCA. Cockfighting had even been an issue in the presidential election of 1828, when Andrew Jackson was careful to assure voters that he had not been near a cockfight in thirteen years. The first state prohibitions against cockfighting came in Pennsylvania (1830), Massachusetts (1836), and Vermont (1852). New York prohibited all forms of animal fighting in 1856, and other states followed. By the end of the century, a majority had outlawed animal fighting—making animal-fighting prohibitions the first victories of the humane movement in America.
Yet after those early successes, it would be decades before further progress came. And even though broadly criminalized, animal fighting continued. The pit bull debuted in America sometime in the 1860s or 1870s, and by the early twentieth century this type of dog was the victim of choice for animal fighters. As late as 1881, the Ohio and Mississippi railroads advertised special fares to dogfighting matches in Louisville.
By the 1930s, as high-profile organizations such as the United Kennel Club (which had previously sanctioned dogfighting) dropped their endorsement, animal fighting lost its institutional support, but it was still widely practiced. Enforcement was inconsistent and halfhearted, however, and so it fell to modern humane societies and national animal-protection groups to carry on the campaign against animal fighting. The HSUS arrived on the scene in the mid-1950s and has been on the case ever since.
“The Feathered Warrior”
IT WAS IN MISSOURI—JUST over the Kansas border from Leavenworth—where we launched a major campaign against cockfighting back in 1997. At the time, few humane organizations were doing much in the way of public policy, and I had come to HSUS three years before intending to change this. I knew that most humane organizations devoted the bulk of their resources to animal rescue, sheltering, and animal care. That is crucial work, but ultimately it addresses only the by-products of cruelty and not the underlying problems. The obvious way to stop those profiting from cruelty was to take the money out of it—by setting bright-line standards and by imposing penalties in the form of fines and jail time. The goal was to prevent cruelty in the first place, and often that meant reforms in law, enacted by lawmakers or, in some instances, by direct voting of the people.
In my first few years at HSUS, we stepped up our activities in state legislatures and Congress and began developing a serious public-policy agenda. But when we tangled with major industries, like agribusiness or the hunting lobby, we often ran into legislative committees dominated by rural lawmakers beholden to these constituencies. These lawmakers had the power to stop our reforms cold, no matter how popular our measure might be with the public, and they used that power to the full.
Like other reform movements before ours, we ran into a lot of powerful legislators who didn’t have much use for us and wouldn’t give us the time of day if they had a choice in the matter. That’s when a winning cause starts looking at the full range of options, and in our case that led to a national strategy of taking matters directly to voters. We launched a series of ballot initiatives, mainly on wildlife issues such as trophy hunting, bear baiting, and trapping with steel-jawed traps. We won most of our battles, even against tough, politically astute opponents like the NRA. The animal-use industries we were up against had a lot of money and political influence on their side. But when the issues appeared on election-day ballots, suddenly these industries and their lobbyists didn’t look so powerful anymore. The public was with us, and with the animals. The folks on the fringe, it turned out, were the people involved in the abuse, and the men with the gavels in those legislative committees.
When I first tried to get the lay of the land on animal fighting, there was only one place to turn, and that was my colleague Eric Sakach. Dogfighting was banned in all fifty states back in 1975, when Eric started with HSUS, but it w
as not a felony anywhere. There were no felony cockfighting laws, either, and cockfighting was legal in more than a half-dozen states. Very few humane organizations focused on animal fighting, and law enforcement generally did not consider this misdemeanor offense worthy of their attention. Thanks to Eric and to Ann Church, then HSUS’s director of state legislation, our organization and others began the campaign to upgrade penalties. Progress was slow and halting, but they did manage to persuade some states to enact felony-level penalties.
Passing better laws was the straightest path to getting rid of organized animal fighting. Although we could educate young people and try to warn them about dogfighting and cockfighting, there were tens of thousands of hard-core “dog men” and “cockers” intensely, almost religiously, committed to their sports. Only the threat of arrest and serious penalties would compel them to give it up.
Eric gave me a tutorial and suggested I acquaint myself with the animal-fighting subculture by reading its magazines, especially the advertisements. There were three major national journals: Grit & Steel, published in South Carolina, and The Gamecock and The Feathered Warrior, both based in Arkansas. These were monthly, full-color, aboveground subscription magazines, written by and published for cockfighters—each with thousands of paid subscribers. Some years later, you could subscribe to them on Amazon.com, and they were among Amazon’s 150 top-selling periodicals.
The cockfighting culture had three principal areas of commercial activity beyond gambling: the sale of fighting birds, breeding birds, or their offspring; the sale of stimulants and other performance-enhancing drugs; and the sale of cockfighting implements—knives or curved ice picks called gaffs, which are affixed to the birds’ legs to deliver lethal killing blows during the bouts.
There were no aboveground dogfighting magazines, but at least ten underground publications, such as the Sporting Dog Journal and American Game Dog Times. Like cockfighting, the sale of pit bulls was the big moneymaker. But there was also commerce in growth-promoting drugs, treadmills, spring poles, and other paraphernalia of dogfighting—the kind of stuff found at Michael Vick’s house. You could learn the basics of becoming a “dogman” by purchasing the videos and books advertised in the magazines and on the Internet.
The “gamefowl breeders,” as they were known, raised fighting birds in states throughout the country, but most advertisers operated in jurisdictions where cockfighting was legal—a tier of southern states including Arizona and New Mexico in the West, Oklahoma and Missouri in the Midwest, and Louisiana in the Deep South. There were also thousands of gamefowl breeders in states where cockfighting was illegal—the magazines ran ads for sellers from Connecticut to Oregon, with a good many in Texas and California.
The ads were customized but had the same basic elements. Typically, the advertisers boasted that their birds had competed at major cockfighting derbies and won in these round-robin fighting competitions. Only cockers with winning birds could sell their fowl at a higher price point, so there was not a class of “breeders” and a separate group of “fighters.” To make money, you had to do both.
For example, David Mitchell of Rattlesnake Game Farm in Robards, Kentucky, was a regular advertiser in The Gamecock, offering “battle cocks” for $200, “brood cocks” for $500, and, for $750, “grey trios”—one rooster and two hens for breeding purposes. Mitchell provided his name, address, e-mail, and even his pager number and identified himself as the president of the Kentucky Gamefowl Breeders Association—the statewide pro-cockfighting trade group.
Cockfighters also advertised stimulants and steroids for the birds. Doping improved performance. A product called “Pure Aggression” was advertised to “do more than any other single last-minute pit aid to prepare your cock for his time in the pit.” “Strychly Speed,” which is a strychnine product, “speeds up a bird’s reflexes, making him ‘quick on the draw.’” A product called “Insulator” was said to “insulate your cock from shock, with all natural, extremely potent ingredients.” Each magazine was a shopping guide for drugs for fighting fowl.
This is the world Eric Sakach came to know well. Standing six feet four inches, strongly built, and possessing a thick shock of salt-and-pepper hair, Eric could easily pass for many of the county sheriffs he worked with on animal-fighting cases. When he came to HSUS in his early twenties, he was an investigator and an undercover infiltrator of the animal-fighting underworld, and he had emerged through the years as the nation’s preeminent expert on the subject. He was a court-certified authority, and he had been involved in dozens of raids on dogfights and cockfights. He testified before state legislatures on upgrades of animal-fighting laws and helped to train law enforcement on the ways of the industry.
But Eric was fighting an uphill battle. In the 1980s, he began working in our West Coast regional office and eventually became director, covering a large swath of western states and animal issues. He was shoehorning his animal-fighting work into a busy schedule, while confronting an industry with commerce in the hundreds of millions of dollars. He, Ann Church, and others were fighting to upgrade dogfighting laws to make them felonies in a number of states, but arrests were still infrequent and there just weren’t enough resources to turn around the situation. It was even tougher on the cockfighting front. Florida banned cockfighting in 1986, and the Kentucky Court of Appeals in 1994 interpreted its anticruelty law to prohibit the fighting of roosters, but that still left five states with legal cockfighting and a raft of others with anemic laws that police and cockfighters essentially ignored.
We were in an odd political circumstance. Most people considered animal fighting a vice—it was largely a settled moral question. Yet here we were dealing with a vast and thriving underground—and, in some cases, cockfighting rings operating in plain view. The industry had lots of money behind it, a political operation to fend off further restrictions, and more participants than anyone would expect. And although there was enough law enforcement activity to keep the animal fighters alert, it was hardly enough to threaten their industry.
Traditionally, the people involved in dogfighting were rural whites, many of them “professional” fighters who focused on the bloodlines of the dogs and made a livelihood by gambling and selling dogs to other dogfighters. There were even growing international markets for the dogs in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Italy, and American dogfighters sold their breeding stock all over the world.
At the same time, the growing problem of street fighting had emerged in the 1980s, with young men like Michael Vick in urban neighborhoods fighting pit bulls for bragging rights and gambling money. The growth was fueled by hip-hop music and the fad of pit bulls as powerful, walking weapons. It didn’t take long for young men to square up their animals to see which one was stronger, in alleys or abandoned buildings. The dogs were easy to get, either by breeding them, stealing them, or even going to animal shelters to adopt them under false pretenses.
Cockfighting, like dogfighting, had a strong rural component—and fewer risks for the participants since the laws were either weaker or nonexistent. It was legal in a few states, and in many others the penalties were so slight that it was effectively decriminalized. The most troublesome region was what my colleague John Goodwin called the “cockfighting corridor”—a contiguous group of states stretching from Alabama into Tennessee and Kentucky and up into Ohio. These states banned cockfighting, but just barely. In Alabama, the maximum penalty for fighting roosters was a $50 fine. In Ohio, it was $250, hardly a deterrent when you could sell a trio of fighting birds for $1,000. These people were also gamblers, and if they’d risk $5,000 on a fight, they’d risk $250 on getting caught. For them, it had all the sting of a parking ticket. Eric and John told me that some local law enforcement officials were clearly on the take—allowing cockfighting to occur in their jurisdictions with impunity, thanks to the protection money doled out by those running the house.
There was no better example of this culture of corruption than in east Tennessee, which boasted the nation’
s largest cockfighting pit in, of all places, Cocke County. The Del Rio pit had been operating for decades, and almost everybody in town knew that the pit was hosting weekly fights before a packed house. State authorities raided Del Rio in 1988, arresting four hundred people, and prompting Tennessee lawmakers to adopt a felony penalty for animal fighting. But it was short lived; the state representative for Cocke County led a successful campaign to reduce the penalty to a misdemeanor. After the raid, Del Rio had only a short interruption before it was back in business. It took another seventeen years for the pit to be shut down—and federal authorities had to do it. When the FBI raided the pit in 2005—finding violations of animal-fighting laws, prostitution, and gambling—they arrested not only the pit’s owners, but also top officers from the Cocke County Sheriff’s Office, who had been running a protection racket for the operation.
On some fight nights, there were crowds of six hundred to seven hundred. A cooperating witness for the federal government noted that there were “approximately 182 cock fights at the Del Rio cockfight pit in a single evening,” and in each fight “between $2,000 and $20,000 was gambled by the spectators.” The pit was drawing cockfighters from throughout the South, and for some it was a family outing: parents brought their children to watch and even to wager on the outcomes. Another “cooperating witness observed a girl approximately 10 years old with a stack of $100 bills gambling on several different cock fights.”
As depressing and corrupt as all of this was, cockfighting in the United States was one vice bound up with other problems, and with consequences that in recent years have even put public health at risk. When the avian influenza outbreak in 2008 occurred in Southeast Asia, cockfighting contributed to its spread, yet even then many governments refused to crack down. In Thailand alone, there are reportedly thirty million fighting cocks. Its enthusiasts like to boast that cockfighting is the second-most-popular sport in the world, after soccer. New waves of immigrants from nations where cock-fighting was legal were fortifying the industry in the United States. Once the recreation of rural whites, it was now Mexicans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and others often filling the stands at cockfighting pits in the United States.
The Bond Page 17