In the legal-cockfighting states, there were dozens of fighting arenas, and hundreds of gamefowl farms. Oklahoma alone had more than forty major arenas, some with stadium seating. Experts estimated the state had 2.8 million fighting birds, with some breeding operations keeping thousands of birds tethered to A-frame huts or barrels in long rows.
In 1976, Congress had passed a law against animal fighting, restricting the transport of fighting animals, but this statute was riddled with loopholes and light penalties. The cockfighting lobby saw to that, with Senator Wendell Ford of Kentucky doing their heavy lifting. The legislation originally approved by the House banned any interstate transport of fighting animals, but Senator Ford succeeded in amending it in a conference committee to allow the shipment of fighting birds to any state, U.S. territory, or country where it was legal to engage in cockfighting. That meant cockfighters could ship fighting birds to Arizona, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and many foreign nations.
In practice, they could really ship birds just about anywhere, and law enforcement wouldn’t stop it. In the twenty years after this measure was signed into law by President Gerald Ford, authorities hadn’t prosecuted a single federal cockfighting case. So Rattlesnake Game Farm and hundreds of other advertisers were brazenly trafficking in fighting birds, even in states with laws forbidding cockfighting. It was a free-for-all, and everybody in the industry knew it.
I wondered how the humane movement could allow these industries to operate so publicly, with magazines, advertisers, thousands of gamefowl farms, and hundreds of cockfighting arenas. If we didn’t confront such gratuitous cruelty in a serious way, how could we hope to attack other, more politically challenging animal problems like factory farming, trophy hunting, or trapping of animals for fur? Our movement was rightly investing many resources in cracking down on these legal cruelties, yet here was a filthy, corrupt, and illegal industry permitted to flourish by a lack of enforcement. In the rare cases of police actually raiding animal fights, mainly in northern states, the offenders simply paid their fines and went right back to abusing animals and breaking the law.
This was the backdrop in 1997, when HSUS resolved to make it a top-tier issue for the animal-protection cause. I laid out our goals: outlaw cockfighting in the five states where it was legal; make dogfighting and cockfighting a felony-level offense in every state; make training or possessing a fighting animal, or attending a fight, a felony offense too; train law enforcement in investigating fighting operations; make all interstate commerce in fighting animals a federal felony; and shut down the major players and pits throughout the United States through aggressive law enforcement actions.
As long as cockfighting was legal anywhere in the country, that undercut enforcement efforts everywhere else. It allowed cockfighters to claim at least a shred of legitimacy and granted them legal standing to trade. Imagine trying to enforce anti-narcotics laws if drug use were legal in five states. And then suppose that federal law allowed growers and dealers in the other forty-five states to ship narcotics into those five, or to markets abroad. Any serious attempt at enforcement would be hopeless.
In the states where it remained legal—Arizona, Louisiana, Missouri, New Mexico, and Oklahoma—some politicians viewed cockfighters as a highly engaged voting bloc, and they didn’t see a group on the other side of the debate as passionate about the cause. Many lawmakers from rural districts viewed cockfighting as a form of “alternative agriculture” the cockfighters sold fighting birds, and that seemed little different from selling livestock for meat. In fact, the cockfighters liked to point out that their animals had a fighting chance, whereas millions of birds raised by Frank Perdue were doomed at birth to live in terrible conditions until a very certain death.
Three of the five states with legal cockfighting allow citizen initiatives, and we decided to launch ballot campaigns in all three—first in Arizona and Missouri and then on to a tougher battle in Oklahoma. To give you an idea of what we were up against in the Sooner State, we faced opposition from the Oklahoma Farm Bureau, and even the Oklahoma Veterinary Medical Association refused to help us. But in the short version, voters sided with us by wide margins in outlawing an obvious form of cruelty. And in their votes, in defiance of entrenched interests and their own state legislatures, they only further isolated the two states left without any prohibitions on cockfighting—Louisiana and New Mexico.
Just as we launched the Oklahoma campaign in 1999, I thought it was time for a concurrent campaign to persuade Congress to halt all interstate trade in fighting animals. I approached some unlikely allies to carry the legislation—Senator Wayne Allard, a Colorado Republican and former large-animal veterinarian, and Representative Collin Peterson, a Democrat from rural Minnesota and the cochairman of the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus. Neither was altogether aligned with animal protection, and with strong ties to the hunting and farming lobbies they inoculated us from the charge that this was a first step toward outlawing hunting and farming—a common refrain of cockfighters in all of our legislative battles. To their great credit, Allard and Peterson agreed, and by March 1999, they introduced House and Senate bills. That set a complementary federal campaign in motion.
We faced some obstacles in Congress, too. The United Gamefowl Breeders Association—the national trade group for cockfighters—mounted a major lobbying effort. Aiding them were two former U.S. senators, Steve Symms of Idaho and J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana, who together helped persuade an already reluctant House Agriculture Committee to take no action.
This time around, our best shot came in the upcoming Farm Bill—the legislation that Congress takes up every five years or so to set the nation’s agriculture policies. We decided to offer our amendments to the Farm Bill in committee or, if necessary, on the floor. We asked Representative Peterson, the author of the House bill, to carry the amendments, but he refused under pressure from the committee’s chairman, Republican Larry Combest, and the ranking Democrat Charles Stenholm, both from Texas. But knowing we had a strong chance of winning a vote on the floor, we went to one of our most trusted allies, Democratic representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, and asked him to lead the fight.
“The purpose of this amendment, Mr. Chairman, is to make sure that the Federal Government is not complicit in aiding and abetting this barbaric practice,” Blumenauer argued on the House floor. “The Federal Government has no business undermining the laws in the 47 States by permitting the transfer of these birds across State lines…. Take the Federal Government out of the business of aiding and abetting this three-century legacy of shame.”
Then Combest and Stenholm took to the floor, challenging the wording of the amendment and its alleged unintended consequences, while taking care not to go on the record explicitly defending cockfighting. But this time, it wasn’t in the cards for them. They lost the vote and had to wait for another shot at it during negotiations with the Senate on the final bill.
Blumenauer’s amendment succeeded, and sensing the strength of his position, he offered a second amendment to ban importing or exporting fighting animals, and also to make the penalties for any violations of the law a felony. That amendment passed, as well—in this case, with barely a word of objection even though its effects would be much more sweeping than the first amendment by barring all sales abroad and closing down the last of their markets.
In the Senate, we faced even less resistance. The leaders of the Senate agriculture committee, Democrat Tom Harkin and Republican Richard Lugar, were steadfast supporters, and they included the House-passed language in their committee version of the Senate Farm Bill. No amendment would be needed on the floor, and no senator had the will or the votes to try to strip it there.
Still, we knew not to celebrate too soon, and our instincts were right. On a major authorizing measure like the Farm Bill, congressional leaders appoint a small group of lawmakers—a conference committee—to reconcile differences between the House and Senate
versions of the legislation. Because the House and Senate amendments on animal fighting were identical, the subject should not have even come up in conference. But Combest and Stenholm hadn’t given up. They fought to open up discussion, and by taking advantage of some inexperienced Senate staff, they managed to nix the bill’s felony penalties.
It was this little maneuver by Combest, Stenholm, and their allies that gave Michael Vick a much softer landing when he was arrested. If the leaders of the House Agriculture Committee had not weakened the penalties, Vick probably would have faced a much lengthier prison sentence.
On balance we had come out well ahead with a new federal law banning the transport of fighting animals, and things were looking up across the board. No state had outlawed cockfighting in decades; now we had banned cockfighting in three of the five states where it was legal. We had delivered major blows to an industry grown comfortable with its semilegal status and launched an aggressive campaign to abolish it altogether.
The time had come to turn to Louisiana and New Mexico. Because neither state allowed citizen initiatives, the only pathway was through their legislatures, which had blocked reform efforts for years. To win, we’d have to challenge the conventional political wisdom. A chance came when the U.S. Senate race in Louisiana rolled around in 2004. The incumbent, John Breaux, chose not to run for a fourth term, and two long-serving congressmen from opposite ends of the state were the frontrunners to succeed him: Representative David Vitter, a Republican from Metairie, one of the conservative suburbs east of New Orleans, and Representative Chris John, a conservative Blue Dog Democrat from Crowley, in the heart of the rural Southwest and the supposed cockfighting stronghold of the state.
John had been the cockfighters’ point man in the House of Representatives, and he and I had sparred in the House Agriculture Committee when I testified in favor of legislation to close the loophole in the federal law in 2000. During that hearing, he accused me of threatening Louisianan traditions, from cockfighting to hunting. At one point, John said, “I strongly support the cockfighting industry in Louisiana” and that it was “an industry that is very important to America.” He had previously told the Baton Rouge Advocate that “cockfighting is a cultural, family-type thing.”
Congressman Vitter, on the other hand, had been an opponent of cockfighting while serving in the state legislature, though not an outspoken one. Among animal advocates, he was considered preferable by far to Chris John. But if animal advocates were going to make an issue of cockfighting in the Senate election, they’d have to demonstrate an ability to dry up votes for John, not add to his totals. It was a long-held assumption in Louisiana politics that cockfighting was popular with a subset of the electorate who cared deeply about this issue.
As in Arizona and Missouri, however, a statewide survey showed that view a false political assumption in Louisiana—there was no meaningful political support for cockfighting anywhere in the state. The poll revealed that 82 percent of Louisianans wanted cockfighting banned, and that a majority of voters would be less likely to vote for a statewide candidate if he or she favored cockfighting. Just 2 or 3 percent of the people would be more likely to support a candidate who defended the cockfighting industry. By and large, Louisianans did not regard cockfighting as some cherished, “family-type” tradition; they viewed it as an embarrassment and wouldn’t mind at all seeing it disappear.
With these findings in hand, Humane USA, a political action committee I founded to work independently of HSUS, rolled out a grassroots campaign against Congressman John. The Democrat’s bizarre quote on cockfighting as a venerable tradition and fun for the whole family was put to good use in TV ads and in leaflets distributed door-to-door. Just about every paper in the state joined us in condemning cockfighting and pronouncing it a disgrace.
After cockfighting became a campaign issue, Congressman John must have done some fast polling of his own, because he chose to say as little as possible on the subject. The cockfighters seemed to fall silent as well. Their bluff had been called. And it wasn’t a bunch of radical outsiders trying to outlaw cockfighting—just the good people of Louisiana.
When the votes were cast in Louisiana’s “jungle primary,” with about a dozen candidates on the ballot, including frontrunners Vitter and John—Congressman Vitter won the election outright. He became the first Republican to win a U.S. Senate seat in the state since Reconstruction, and it was his support of animal welfare that had made the crucial difference. A postelection poll showed that 32 percent of white Democratic women voters—the group that Humane USA had focused on—had defected from John and favored Vitter. Almost overnight, some axioms of Louisiana politics and cockfighting had been turned upside down. Legalized cockfighting was bad for a state’s reputation, and defending the practice was a bad idea for anyone trying to win votes.
Still, it took several years for us to complete the fifty-state strategy. New Mexico fell next, in the early spring of 2007, after Governor Bill Richardson finally came out in favor of a cockfighting ban during his Democratic presidential campaign. The cockfighters had done political fund-raisers for him in years past and claimed to have received a pledge from the governor to hold up legislation they didn’t like. But the pressure on a national figure like Richardson forced him to finally take a stand, which he did just before entering the 2008 Democratic primaries. He had White House ambitions, and in presidential politics the ringing endorsement of Feathered Warrior doesn’t get you too far.
In Louisiana, pro-cockfighting state legislators saw the writing on the wall and actually proposed phasing out cockfighting over three years—to preempt efforts to impose an immediate ban. Eventually, a one-year phaseout was negotiated, with the ban taking effect in August 2008. Our leading advocate in the legislature, state senator Arthur Lentini, a Republican from Metairie, anticipated this possibility and advanced a complementary strategy. At the same time he introduced his anti-cockfighting ban, he introduced a separate bill to ban gambling at cockfights. Since gambling occurred at every cockfight, that legislation killed half the fun for the crowd, and several of the state’s major pits shut down just like that.
In August 2008, with the felony cockfighting ban in Louisiana set to take effect, I appeared at a press conference with Louisiana’s attorney general and the heads of the state police and sheriffs’ associations, to tell the cockfighters it was time to stop. It was a remarkable moment. We had helped to outlaw cockfighting in a state that just a few years ago had seemed its safest redoubt. Cockfighting was now illegal in all fifty states. Even though it took a decade—starting in Arizona and Missouri—democratic decision making had worked, reshaping the law to reflect the public’s abhorrence for cruelty.
We had also finished the job at the federal level, when after needless delays the reform making it a felony to ship fighting animals across state lines finally reached President Bush in April 2007. And though the fortifying of that law came just days too late to apply to the Michael Vick case, Vick’s offenses had an immediate impact on Congress in the months after the story broke.
Taking the lead this time was Senator John Kerry, who had read enough details about Bad Newz Kennels to know that a lot of other kennels needed some policing too. His reform, prohibiting the training and possession of fighting dogs, was offered as an amendment to the latest Farm Bill. The main problem was that the House had already approved its version of the Farm Bill a few months earlier, back when Michael Vick was still best known for his running and passing.
So just as with the 2002 Farm Bill, it would all come down to the conference committee—only now, with Vick in the foreground, there would be no last-minute power plays from the usual suspects in Congress. Senator Kerry’s animal-fighting provision not only survived the conference committee, but actually came out much stronger. House judiciary committee chairman John Conyers of Michigan broadened the Kerry amendment to cover all animal fighting, upgraded the felony provision, and made any training or possession of a fighting animal a federal offens
e. The new language allowed federal authorities to bring charges even when fighting animals were not being shipped between states. With the back-to-back upgrades in the law—in 2007 and 2008—a federal statute with teeth was now on the books.
“I Won’t Disappoint You”
WITH HIS SORDID DOINGS in the dark of night, Michael Vick had not only brought changes in his life that he could not have imagined, but also brought about changes in law that none of us in the animal-protection movement ever believed could happen so quickly. Whatever was in Michael’s heart, whether or not he really was now a changed man, the things he had done had made him an agent of change in the world he had chosen.
And after his prison sentence was up, there remained the question of whether he could somehow be a good influence in the lives of young people who looked up to him. I still had my doubts about putting him to work for our campaign. I wanted to look him in the eye and ask some more questions before making him a messenger for our cause. So I agreed to meet with him once again, this time at his home in Hampton Roads, Virginia.
It was about a month after his release from Leavenworth, and the press was no longer camped out in front of his house. His publicist, Judy Smith, and I arrived to a friendly greeting from Vick and his two little girls. Kijafa was in the kitchen, and after we said hello, she told us that she was going to take the girls to a fair so we could talk business. As Mike and I sat down in the living room, the first thing I noticed was the electronic bracelet around his ankle. He was serving the sixty-day home-confinement phase of his term.
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