SHARK, Animal Wellness Action Applaud Kentucky State Police for Latest Cockfighting Arrest

Louisville, KY — Leaders with Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK), the Center for a Humane Economy, and Animal Wellness Action applauded the Kentucky State Police (KSP) for its latest arrest for an alleged illegal cockfighting operation.

Yesterday, KSP Post 4 arrested and charged 37-year-old Aaron John Thompson of Bardstown in Nelson County with second-degree animal cruelty, according to information from the law enforcement agency. KSP says the investigation is ongoing and other arrests may be announced. The tip on an alleged illegal cockfighting operation was called in by a SHARK representative.

The animal wellness organizations last month applauded the KSP for a bust of a cockfight that resulted in the arrests of 54 people in Casey County.

KSP’s enforcement work is complicated by Kentucky’s anti-cruelty law because that statute has weak anti-cockfighting provisions. A bill by state Senator Greg Elkins, R-Winchester, would make cockfighting a felony and prohibit a range of activities associated with cockfighting.

SHARK and Animal Wellness Action refer to cockfighting as a “runaway crime” in Kentucky and have identified illegal fighting pits across the state, including now the venue just identified in Nelson County.

“We applaud the Kentucky State Police for making this latest arrest and hope other arrests will soon follow,” said Steve Hindi, founder of SHARK and a field investigator who has obtained extensive undercover footage of cockfighting in the Commonwealth. “Cockfighting is never a solo crime, but an act committed typically with dozens of participants and often hundreds of spectators. The whole bunch should be rounded up and charged for these animal cruelty crimes.”

The groups also refer to cockfighting as a “viral superspreader” in Kentucky and said that it poses a direct and documented threat to the state’s $1.7 billion poultry industry. The group’s scientists said that rampant cockfighting and trafficking of fighting birds could spread H5N1 to some number of the state’s 1,000 or so commercial broiler bird and laying-hen farms.

“Cockfighting is not a petty offense, but a form of organized crime that threatens not only to spread cruelty but also an avian disease that could create chaos for the state’s multi-billion-dollar poultry industry,” said Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. “H5N1 is also driving higher prices for consumers, collectively costing them $20 billion in higher egg prices alone during the last three years, and cockfighting could extend the reach and virulence of the disease.”

Pacelle called on state lawmakers to pass the bill from Senator Elkins to make cockfighting a felony. Kentucky is one of a half dozen or so states that treat cockfighting as a misdemeanor. That bill is Senate Bill 39.

Dr. Jim Keen, director of veterinary sciences for the Center for a Humane Economy, said that cockfighting traffickers are potential superspreaders of H5N1. Already USDA has directed the killing of 1554 million birds in the United States to contain the spread of bird flu.

“Cockfighting birds were responsible for two-thirds of all U.S. outbreaks of virulent Newcastle disease, a dangerous viral poultry disease very similar to bird flu,” said Dr. Keen. “It is axiomatic that trafficking and smuggling of fighting birds constitute extreme risk for our poultry industry, especially when so many non-nationals working in our poultry houses hail from countries that allow cockfighting.”

While acknowledging that control of bird flu H5N1 is challenging, Dr. Jim Keen is critical of the USDA’s focus on poultry depopulation, mainly 125 million laying hens, by swamping the animals with firefighting foam and suffocating them or by using “ventilation shutdown,” where birds are killed by halting air flow into a poultry house and then turning up the heat and introducing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to asphyxiate or “cook alive” the animals.

Animal Wellness Action provides rewards of $2,500 to citizens who report cockfighting crimes and whose information leads to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators. Citizens can email information to [email protected].