The one-time Democrat leader of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Michigan’s U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, has been deeply involved in upgrading our federal animal welfare laws during her 21st-century career in the upper chamber.
During her management of the 2018 Farm Bill, Stabenow helped to pass laws that protect pets of domestic violence victims and to ban the sale and slaughter of domesticated dogs and cats for human consumption. She also helped to pass a bill to apply all federal prohibitions against animal fighting in Puerto Rico, Guam and the other U.S. territories.
As chairwoman of the Agriculture Committee for the 2024 Farm Bill, it’s our hope she continues to make animal welfare a priority. She has a chance to make an additional mark by including the the Fighting Inhumane Gambling and High-Risk Trafficking (FIGHT) Act, Senate Bill 1529, as a key animal welfare provision in the Farm Bill.
The bipartisan FIGHT Act 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. It’s especially distressing when people commit acts of senseless cruelty to animals and there is no act that is more gruesome or barbaric than dogfighting or cockfighting. Animal fighting is a threat to keeping our communities safe, as these events are nearly always bound up in trafficking of deadly drugs, including fentanyl, high stakes illegal gambling, violence and even murder. Michigan has had an ugly history of staged animal fights.
Nationwide, more than 375 law enforcement agencies, agricultural trade associations and animal welfare groups are asking Congress to pass the FIGHT Act. This includes Michigan’s more than 35 county sheriffs and prosecutors in both the upper and lower peninsulas. We are also so pleased that the Michigan Sheriffs’ Association is an advocate of the FIGHT Act.
Dogfighting is barbaric, and cockfighting is a crime of the same moral order. Fighting birds are bred to be aggressive toward other birds, then placed in a pit with razor-sharp blades or curved icepicks attached to their legs. Typically, a strike to the eye will “brain” a bird to the death. In other cases, it’s a heart stab or a puncturing of the lungs.
In Michigan, nearly 50 complaints of dogfighting have been reported in the past few years, according to authorities.
Nationwide, news reports across the country show that these kinds of dogfights and cockfights are tied to human crimes, including murder, as we saw in one of the worst cases recently in Hawaii, where a teenager allegedly opened fire at a cockfight and was charged with the murder of two people.
The best solution is the FIGHT Act.
As president of Animal Wellness Action, I can tell you my nonprofit has been working hard to find the best solution to rampant and violent animal fighting in our nation as well as abroad. The FIGHT Act, we believe, will give law enforcement the tools to root out this activity.
There is a very good reason why so many law enforcement officers and agents across Michigan support this bill, and we hope to see Sen. Stabenow lend her name, too.
Please visit our website www.animalwellnessaction.org to learn more about animal fighting, and how you can help.