Cockfighting goes against the values of Oklahomans
My tenure as Oklahoma attorney general overlapped with the qualification and passage of State Question 687, an anti-cockfighting ballot question that voters in our state handily approved in November 2002. The provisions of the enacted statute included penalty provisions in line with our anti-dogfighting statute, and commensurate with the penalties of other states’ prohibitions on cockfighting.
State Rep. Justin Humphrey introduced a bill to gut the penalties in our anti-cockfighting law. Fortunately, state House leaders didn’t give it a vote. But now Humphrey has amended his pro-cockfighting language into a second bill, SB 1522. His bill decriminalizes training and possessing birds to fight them. These are bad, worn-out ideas, and I know the people of Oklahoma do not want lawmakers to bless this idea.
We know that there are illegal animal fighting operators engaging in felony-level offenses in our state. A series of investigations have demonstrated that fact. We don’t need to encourage this illegal conduct; we need more enforcement to stop acts of animal cruelty and other criminal behavior.
When Oklahomans directly banned cockfighting in 2002, Congress also banned any interstate or foreign transport of fighting animals. Lawmakers subsequently strengthened the federal animal fighting law four times, with the Congress establishing a national ban on animal fighting in 2019cockfighting.
Rep. Humphrey mentioned allowing Oklahomans to make money by raising and training fighting animals and shipping them to Guam and the Philippines to make money. But exporting fighting birds to any other jurisdiction, whether a state, territory or foreign nation, is also a federal felony.
I want to be clear that there is no prospect that Congress will weaken that law. Our two most senior congressmen, U.S. Reps. Tom Cole and Frank Lucas, along with the overwhelming majority of Republicans and Democrats voted in favor of the national law. Not a single senator opposed that legislation. Law enforcement agencies and sheriffs enthusiastically backed the federal laws against animal fighting, as did all state and national veterinary organizations.
When Oklahoma voters approved the anti-cockfighting law in 2002, they did so at the recommendation, among others, of then Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating and U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe. The Oklahoma Supreme Court upheld the law as constitutional in a unanimous decision after cockfighters challenged it. Lawmakers then rejected a raft of bills to weaken the law and to embarrass our state by trying to legalize an activity that most states banned in the 1800s.
Law enforcement authorities often find that animal fighting is directly tied to other crimes, such as drug trafficking, illegal gambling, gang violence, public corruption, and additional forms of extreme animal cruelty and human-on-human violence.
Public officials should be condemning this disrespect for Oklahoma values. It would be an embarrassment to our state to legalize this barbaric practice.