Oklahoma Republican wants to legalize cockfighting against robots

EDITOR’S NOTE (2/14): This article has been updated to include comments from Animal Wellness Action’s Kevin Chambers. Also, a previous version of this story stated that Justin Humphrey was a police officer. He worked in law enforcement, but as a corrections officer for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections. And a previous version of this article claimed that an Oklahoma couple was facing up to 590 years in prison for cockfighting, but all but one of the charges have been dropped. These has been fixed.

Oklahoma state Rep. Justin Humphrey (R-Lane) is sponsoring legislation to loosen restrictions on cockfighting and legalize a form of the practice that involves roosters fighting a robot.

House Bill 1326, which has been referred to the state’s Rules Committee, would legalize a relatively nonviolent form of cockfighting against an inanimate robot. Humphrey said the technology for the variation of cockfighting was developed in Brazil, and it entails the roosters fighting the robot with a scoring system to measure how well the bird does.

“You have a scoreboard, so no chickens have to be killed. It measures blows, it measures the pressure of the blows, it measures where the blows hit, are the blows vital,” Humphrey explained. “Probably old-school game fighter would not be interested in this, but for those who haven’t been involved in it, it seems to be entertaining for a lot of people.”

Humphrey hopes that the robot would help eliminate the animal rights concerns involved with cockfighting, but also that the bill likely won’t garner enough support. The Animal Wellness Action (AWA) organization, which works to eliminate animal cruelty, vehemently opposed previous legislation proposed by Humphrey in 2023, which would have legalized traditional cockfighting as long as the roosters weren’t wearing weapons.

The AWA’s Oklahoma Director Kevin Chambers contends that the robot bill, although frivolous, does not remove the aspect of training the birds to be aggressive.

“When you force an animal to fight either another animal or a robot, it’s inhumane,” Chambers said. “The bird has no choice in the matter.”

Chambers agreed that traditional cockfighters would probably have no interest in the robot version, partially due to the gambling involved with two birds slashing each other to the death.

Humphrey, who said he has never been to a cockfight nor wants it to be legal anymore, claims that animal rights organizations simply want to make money off the issue.

“Yet there’s a big pushback from animal activists, who just use this stuff to milk people out of money, milk those who really care about [animal rights],” Humphrey said.

Chambers pushed back on this claim.

“If anyone is in it for money, it’s the cockfighters and their supporters,” Chambers said. “The cockfights bring in thousands of dollars in illegal betting proceeds. So money is definitely on their side.”

The Oklahoma Gamefowl Commission, a political action committee that advocates to decriminalize cockfighting, has reportedly given more than $41,000 to Oklahoma politicians in recent years, including Humphrey.

Humphrey is also currently sponsoring House Bill 1313, which would reduce the penalty of people participating in cockfighting or related activities from a felony to a misdemeanor. He said he would rather see the state levy fines for cockfighting participants than have taxpayers house them in prison. He also argued that keeping cockfighting illegal hasn’t stopped it from happening.

“If you did legalize it, you could make a lot of tax money,” Humphrey said. “Pay for your hospitals, keep it county, and pay for your county roads, hospitals. Those kind of things. However, we’re not going to have that conversation. It should be a misdemeanor, and we should level high fines against those people [cockfighting participants].”

A previous version of HB 1313 passed in the Oklahoma House last year but was voted down in the state Senate. At the time, Humphrey said his bill was in step with voters’ wishes to reduce the population of state prisons. Chambers contends that the number of people currently imprisoned for cockfighting in Oklahoma numbers in the single digits.

The current penalty for raising a cockfighting animal is a fine up to $25,000 and up to ten years in prison. Other felonies include encouraging a cockfight, maintaining places, equipment and facilities for a cockfight, and facilitating a cockfight. One Oklahoma man went on trial last year for alleged cockfighting. Humphrey, who was a state Department of Corrections officer, argued that the penalties for cockfighting should not be more severe than other crimes such as child sexual abuse.

Underground cockfighting persists in the state even though Oklahomans voted to make the practice illegal via ballot initiative in 2002, a vote that was unanimously upheld by the state Supreme Court in 2004. Chambers said a lack of enforcement of the law has led to the underground industry flourishing in parts of rural Oklahoma, drawing interest from parties out of state. Chambers, who claims to have seen several cockfights over a four-decade career investigating animal cruelty, also pointed to the difficulty involved in stopping a given event.

“It is not easy to stop a cockfight because there are normally anywhere from 100-200 people at a typical cockfight,” Chambers continued. “It’s difficult for law enforcement to handle a typical event, so it needs to be a felony to make it worthwhile for law enforcement to try to enforce the law.”

Chambers also said he has not seen a cockfight that did not have children in attendance, adding to the potential dehumanizing nature of the blood sport.

A 2023 poll from CHS & Associates suggested that 71% of Oklahomans oppose changing cockfighting to a misdemeanor, and 88% want to keep the practice illegal. Cockfighting is also a felony in 46 states.