Hawaii called hub for illegal cockfighting trade

Hawaii is “at the center of the cockfighting trade in the Pacific Rim” with the state acting as a hub for animal-fighting activities throughout the region, two animal advocacy groups said Tuesday.

Animal Wellness Action and Animal Wellness Foundation said they reviewed 2,500 pages of avian shipping records for Guam over a three-year period ending in September 2019. Their investigation found 750 shipments of birds to Guam by 71 people from more than a dozen states — with Hawaii having the most shippers at 22.

Of about 8,800 birds shipped to Guam, by far most of them roosters, Hawaii residents mainly on Hawaii island and Oahu were responsible for over 1,000 bird sales, which can run $500 to $3,000 for a single bird, said Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action.

Cockfighting was legal in Guam until a federal ban on the activity went into effect for the U.S. territories last December.

The organizations asked U.S. Attorney Kenji Price, representing the District of Hawaii, to investigate their claim that “a substantial number of residents in the state are knee-deep in the business of illegal trafficking of fighting animals and perhaps making millions of dollars from the trade.”

The birds’ legs are fitted with knives or ice pick-like gaffs prior to a fight. Birds that aren’t killed during a cockfight can suffer terrible injuries, according to the Humane Society of the United States.

Hawaii “has one of the nation’s weakest anti-cockfighting laws, and the presence of that anemic law has given false comfort to the people involved in the industry,” said Margery Bronster, a former Hawaii attorney general.

The federal law, however, “is as strong as it can be,” she said. Under current federal law, it is illegal to knowingly buy, sell, possess, train, transport, deliver or receive any animal for purposes of having the animal participate in an animal fighting venue, the two groups said. Cockfighting is illegal in all 50 states and now in U.S. territories.

Federal penalties provide for a maximum of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

“We appreciate the information provided to our office today concerning potential violations of federal law, and will refer the information to an appropriate investigative entity,” Price said in an email.

According to the Animal Wellness investigation, Hawaii is one of just eight states lacking felony-level penalties for cockfighting. Hawaii provisions mainly apply to organizers of fights, the report said.

During a Zoom news conference Tuesday, Pacelle said the United States is “becoming the game fowl farm to the cockfighting world globally.”

Cockfighters in the United States are “selling hundreds of thousands of birds throughout the world” and especially in the Pacific Rim to countries including the Philippines and Vietnam.

Even though Guam is a small island with only 170,000 people, it has become a hot spot — and an indicator that exporters “are almost certainly selling to other major fighting jurisdictions,” Pacelle said.

He added that he believes those individuals misrepresented the sale of birds as “brood fowl.”

“These were cockfighting birds,” he said. “They call them brood fowl because this is a way they think they’re being clever to evade prosecution, because it’s not illegal to ship roosters or chickens in general. It is illegal to possess and ship birds for fighting purposes.”

There is no poultry industry on Guam, Pacelle noted. Nor is there a game fowl show industry, he said.

Drew Edmondson, a four-time Oklahoma attorney general and co-chair of National Law Enforcement Council for Animal Wellness Action and Animal Wellness Foundation, said labeling the birds as broodstock is nonsense.

“Just think about this,” he said. “If you are sending broodstock, you would send 90 females and two or three roosters. But the shipments are exactly the opposite. They’re like 90 to 95 roosters to two or three hens. Any farmer will tell you that’s a crazy ratio.”

The Animal Wellness report, available at animalwellnessaction.org, names names in Hawaii. A news release accompanying it points to “apparent illegal animal fighting activities” involving one handler who shares pictures on his Facebook page of his participation in cockfighting in the Philippines and in Guam.

Another is characterized as a “long-time participant in the Slasher World Cup in the Philippines.”

One man on Oahu says in a TV broadcast that “there’s a lot of people here that are really good rooster men. What holds us down is the fact that we not supposed to be doing it here,” according to the animal wellness groups.