“Nearly all of the birds shipped as 'brood fowl' were males,” noted Drew Edmondson, co-chairman of the Animal Wellness National Law Enforcement Council and also the former Attorney General of Oklahoma. And the law is specific about not using the mail service for this purpose: “It shall be unlawful for any person to knowingly use the mail service of the United States Postal Service or any instrumentality of interstate commerce for commercial speech for purposes of advertising an animal, or an instrument described in subsection (d), for use in an animal fighting venture, promoting or in any other manner furthering an animal fighting venture except as performed outside the limits of the States of the United States.”
“It shall be unlawful for any person to knowingly sell, buy, possess, train, transport, deliver, or receive any animal for purposes of having the animal participate in an animal fighting venture,” reads the law. 2156, there are strict prohibitions on transporting animals across state or territorial lines, regardless of whether cockfighting is legal at the export destination. Under Section 26 of the Animal Welfare Act, 7 U.S.C. AWF and AWA noted that illegal shipments of fighting birds were coming more frequently than every other day for the first three years of the assessment, but then with a steep drop-off of shipments since November 2019. Our investigation - which included examination of industry sources, online research, and satellite imagery of farms raising roosters for fighting - makes it clear that dozens of shippers knowingly violated federal law, as did the importers on Guam.ĪWF and AWA note that there is no commercial poultry industry to speak of, and there are not competitions for show birds of any consequence on the island. The shippers typically mischaracterized the shipped birds as “brood fowl” or “show fowl” rather than fighting birds in a subterfuge to try to skirt the federal animal fighting law. No fighting roosters, according to GDOA records, have been shipped since June. The top exporters to Guam during the last year were Bill McNatt of Oklahoma (84 roosters) and #3 exporter over the four-year period analyzed Domi Corpus (61 roosters) of California, the #6 exporter John Bottoms (48 roosters), also of Oklahoma, and the #1 exporter and Erwin Kagimoto (45 roosters) of Hawaii and the #7 shipper. Adkins and the other members of his family involved in trafficking animals. With some birds selling for as much as $2,000 each, that could generate millions in gross sales for Mr. One shipper, Jerry Adkins of Slick Lizard Farms in Nauvoo, Ala., recently told a Filipino television broadcaster that he sells 6,000 birds a year to Mexico alone. Most of these individuals are shipping birds across the world. Oklahoma cockfighters shipped more fighting animals to Guam than any other state, with California, Hawaii, Alabama, and North Carolina traffickers next in line by volume.
District Court of Puerto Rico rejected claims by Club Gallístico and other cockfighting clubs, declaring that “either the Commonwealth’s political statutes, nor the Territorial Clause, impede the United States Government from enacting laws that apply to all citizens of this Nation alike, whether as a state or territory.”Īfter obtaining thousands of pages of shipping records from the GDOA, AWA and AWF investigated the major shippers to Guam and determined that these individuals have been knee-deep in the cockfighting industry. In late October last year, Judge Gustavo A.
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