Cockfighters Kill Endangered Turtles to Make Fighting Implements

Last week, Frederick Moorfield, who was a senior communications officer at the Department of Defense, was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for running a dogfighting network in Maryland and Washington, D.C.

It was a deeply disturbing revelation that a Pentagon official could be involved in this evil enterprise. Hats off to federal officials for dismantling this dogfighting network and apprehending Moorfield and his chief co-conspirator.

That case is a reminder that dogfighting and cockfighting are startlingly widespread and unusually corrosive to civil society.

Last week, I also learned that the global trade in cockfighting weapons is driving the killing of endangered sea turtles in Costa Rica, Mexico, and other nations in North America and Central America.

Specifically, the critically endangered hawksbill sea turtle has long been exploited for its ornate and hard shell for use in a wide range of ornaments and implements. The shells are being used to make deadly spurs and gaffs “(postizas”) used in cockfighting, which is legal in Mexico and some other countries in the region but illegal in others, including Costa Rica.

According to the news site Mongabay, a Costa Rica-based marine biologist “first noticed tortoiseshell spurs at holiday markets about two decades ago after moving to the country from Germany. The spurs were openly displayed, mixed in with other hawksbill-shell products like bracelets and trinkets.”  They are still sold today.

And sea turtles are not the only protected wildlife that cockfighters menace. To keep their illegal stock of fighting birds intact, cockfighters commonly engage in illegal killing of raptors and other migratory birds that might prey on the fighting birds.

The cockfighters’ roosters are typically tethered outside, making them especially vulnerable to hawks, eagles, and owls. The federal charges against a cockfighting family in Alabama convicted of cockfighting crimes in 2022 involved killing owls in violation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

Even after Oklahoma voters outlawed cockfighting by a ballot initiative, 31 cockfighters were cited a year later for killing migratory birds. A major poaching ring in California involving 21 individuals also staged illegal cockfighting derbies.

These are more good reasons for elected officials to back the FIGHT Act, which bans shipping fighting roosters through the U.S. mail and creates a private right of action when law enforcement doesn’t act to shut down fighting rings.

Wildlife protection groups should now understand that the FIGHT Act — H.R. 2742 led by Reps. Don Bacon, R-Neb., and Andrea Salinas, D-Ore., and S. 1529 led by Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and John Kennedy, R-La. – will also protect a wide range of native and even imperiled species. It has an astonishing 760 agencies and organizations supporting it.

The National Sheriffs’ Association, which treats the FIGHT Act as a top legislative priority, “acknowledges 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.”

Law enforcement agencies say the legislation is needed to make the world safer for people, domesticated animals, and wild animals as well.

But a handful of lawmakers are slowing down the progress of this legislation.

And while there are more busts because we’ve elevated penalties and prohibitions against animal fighting, there is still deficient enforcement. That’s why we need the added tools the FIGHT Act will deliver.

Since Animal Wellness Action worked to pass federal legislation in 2018 to ban cockfighting in the U.S. territories, there has not been a single arrest made in Puerto Rico, Guam, or any other U.S. territory for illegal animal fighting. We even had one Guam Department of Agriculture official on video pitting his fighting bird at an illegal arena on the island, and federal law enforcement did not take any action!

Cartels and Organized Crime Drive Animal Fighting Enterprises

Mexico and the Philippines are America’s biggest foreign partners in this illicit trade, and U.S.-based cockfighters are consorting with criminal organizations involved in murder, kidnapping, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, bribery, and more.

A Philippines-based television network in 2020 released 50 videos showing two hosts making visits to U.S.-based cockfighting complexes, where the American cockfighters touted the bloodlines of their fighting birds, with some of the animals destined for big global events such as the “World Slasher Derby” in Manilla. One Alabama-based cockfighting operator told the Filipino television broadcaster that he sells 6,000 birds a year to Mexico alone for as much as $2,000 a bird, generating millions in illegal sales.

In 2022, in the Mexican state of Michoacán, cartel members entered a cockfighting arena, sealed off exits, and shot and killed 20 people. Three of the victims were Americans, including a mother of four from Illinois. 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.

But for whatever reason, the Republican leaders of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees have been actively working to block the legislation. This comes as a surprise, because for many years, both the incoming chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Senator John Boozman, R-Ark., and the returning chairman of the House Ag Committee, Rep. Glenn “G.T.” Thompson, R-Pa., supported key animal welfare reforms, including banning animal fighting in the U.S. territories. Rep. Thompson also voted to outlaw attending or bringing a minor to a dogfight or cockfight.

It seems though they do not yet seem to recognize the scale of the crime wave and how the FIGHT Act will help curb it.

Cockfighting and Its Urgent Threat of Spreading Avian Diseases

The FIGHT Act is also one of the nation’s best and most important responses to the spread of bird flu (H5N1) and other avian diseases. Virulent Newcastle disease has entered the United States at least 10 times by illegally smuggled infected cockfighting roosters from Mexico, causing 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.

“Gamefowl are high-risk disease vectors and reservoirs because they are widely sold and traded, deliberately mixed under stressful conditions at fighting derbies, reared under poor biosecurity, and employ husbandry or fighting practices that spread disease,” according to the FIGHT Act endorsement letter from Chad Gregory, president and CEO of the United Egg Producers. “When outbreaks occur, these viruses are controlled by lethal depopulation, sometimes resulting in the killing of millions of birds, and our flocks are particularly at risk because of our housing systems and stocking densities.”

In a flash, cockfighting can spread disease from Mexico and the Caribbean into the United States and between the U.S. mainland and the Pacific Rim.

One of our investigations revealed that cockfighters based in the United States — with the largest share of them coming from Oklahoma — sent at least 11,648 fighting birds to Guam between 2016 and 2021. “While we have backyard birds on Guam that families raise for eggs or meat, these thousands of fighting roosters are useless for either,” said retired Army Colonel Tom Pool, DVM, MPH, the former Territorial Veterinarian for Guam and now senior veterinarian with Animal Wellness Action. “There is simply no other rationale for the shipment of very expensive adult roosters to our island but for cockfighting. We know that the people on both ends of these transactions have been involved in the criminal practice of cockfighting.”

Pool reports that the birds shipped to Guam come in boxes delivered by the U.S. Postal Service. The law enforcement arm of the service has failed to make a single arrest for trafficking of birds for fighting in Guam or in any other part of the United States, despite the federal law banning any such shipments.

Cockfighting and the trafficking of fighting birds is an even larger enterprise in Puerto Rico, where we estimated there were 100 arenas at the time we passed the national ban on animal fighting in 2018.

Still, when you fly into the San Juan airport, you can’t miss a large arena with “Live Cockfights” emblazoned on a neon sign. The invitation occasionally attracts the curious tourist, but most attendees are seasoned practitioners of cockfighting knowingly violating federal law.

Even after a federal court upheld the ban on animal fighting in the U.S. territories, Puerto Rico Governor Pedro Pierluisi defiantly stated that he is “committed to supporting an industry that generates jobs and income for our economy, that represents our culture and our history.”

Animal fighting prohibitions are strong but enforcement tools need fortifying

Cockfighting and dogfighting are savagery on display. There’s just no more time for delaying and political obstructionism.

Dogfighters and cockfighters deserve a fair trial and nothing more. They are knowingly violating our laws and spreading disease, crime, and cruelty in our nation and across the world.

Wayne Pacelle is president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. He is the author of two New York Times bestselling books about the human relationship with animals.