I commend Honolulu Civil Beat for promoting community safety with its extensive coverage in 2023 of illegal cockfighting, recognizing its corrosive effects on Hawaii’s civil society.

Civil Beat also called for accountability by pressing state and federal lawmakers on their appetite to fortify the state’s anemic anti-cockfighting law — an outlier statute in a nation where other states treat cockfighting as a felony and increasingly view it as an invasive, deadly weed that must be pulled up at the root.

Only because Hawaii-based cockfighters think they can get away with these victim-rich crimes do they continue to stage animal combat, trade in fighting birds and paraphernalia, and gamble on the mayhem. In 2020, Animal Wellness Action released the results of a statewide investigation in Hawaii and found the practice rampant on the islands, the state law porous, and enforcement severely lacking.

One indicator of that trade, according to our report, was live exports of fighting birds to Guam. AWA’s ongoing review of live-animal shipping records to Guam revealed that state-based cockfighters have sent at least 11,648 fighting birds to Guam over the last five years.

Hawaii-based cockfighters have shipped 1,742 fighting birds since the records’ review commenced — with Hawaii eclipsed only by Oklahoma and California in volume of these live-animal shipments. Hawaii had 32 exporters just to Guam — more than any other state.

Hawaii is not only a global hotspot for illegal fights on the islands, but it is at the center of the cockfighting trade in the Pacific Rim. On their social media pages, cockfighters openly touted the abilities of fighting birds and sold them all across the Pacific Rim to die in fighting pits.

If Hawaii has 32 individuals exporting fighting birds just to Guam, multiply that number by 10 or 20 and you’ll get the number of people in Hawaii breeding tens of thousands of birds for cockfights in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Northern Marianas islands. Cockfighting derbies occur routinely somewhere in Hawaii.

Our investigative report detailing major traffickers of fighting birds surmised that it would only be a matter of time for murder and other chaos to occur. Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened in 2023.

No More Head-In-The-Sand Behavior

Local police knew about the regular cockfights in Waianae but did nothing about them. On the April night when shots rang, there were 100 to 200 spectators, with five ending up shot, two fatally.

News reports across the country show that cockfighters engage in a wide range of correlated crimes, including murder as we’ve seen in Hawaii, as well as money laundering, drug trafficking, and high-stakes gambling.

The shooting in Waianae — and the international attention it attracted — may turn out to be a wake-up moment for Hawaii on cockfighting. Last month, Civil Beat reported that six Waianae residents face illegal cockfighting charges under federal law, which does bring with it the prospect of federal felony penalties.

And one powerful Hawaii lawmaker — U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono — has heard the crowing and the shooting and the moral inconsistency and has taken some action. Sen. Hirono recently cosponsored the bipartisan Fighting Inhumane Gambling and High-Risk Trafficking (FIGHT) Act, H.R. 2742, in Congress to enhance U.S. capacity to deter and interdict cockfighting and dogfighting crimes throughout the nation, including in Hawaii. 

This bipartisan measure would amend the Animal Welfare Act to ban online gambling on staged animal fighting, halt the shipment of fighting animals through the U.S. mail, and allow the forfeiture of property assets used in animal fighting crimes, along with other measures to end animal fighting altogether.
Now we need state lawmakers in Honolulu to act and to fortify the embarrassingly weak state law against cockfighting.

Never Excuse Cruelty As Culture

No one should excuse cruelty and vice and lawlessness as culture. We don’t make such hollow arguments for dogfighting, and we shouldn’t invoke such flimsy arguments for cockfighting.

Action is required not only to address moral degradation and violence, but also public health, as Animal Wellness Action’s two agriculture veterinarians issued a new research paper on cockfighting and avian influenza and other infectious diseases.

It’s time to take meaningful action at the local, state, and federal level against cockfighting. It is a vice, and it leads to chaos and cruelty.

Hawaii only courts more violence, mayhem, and crime when its political and civic leaders and its law enforcement agencies take a timid approach to a criminal enterprise that has no redeeming value, debases participants, and leaves a trail of animal victims and even a few people in its wake.