For updates, and learning more about this campaign please click here Oklahomans-Urgent action needed (animalwellnessaction.org)!

A handful of state legislators in Oklahoma City are trying to substitute their judgment for hundreds of thousands of Oklahoma voters and overturn a citizen initiative that halted the barbaric and very broadly condemned practice of cockfighting.

Until that vote in 2002, Oklahoma was a rogue hold-out on cockfighting, with state legislators there kowtowing to cockfighters and refusing to pass a ban. Oklahoma was one of three states with legal cockfighting until the people righted the ship of state.

The state, according to cockfighters who were not spinning a yarn, had at least 42 cockfighting arenas in the state and raising perhaps millions of birds for fighting.

After Oklahoma citizens delivered common sense and common decency with a ballot initiative, lawmakers have pushed 30 bills in the state legislature to unwind or weaken the measure. All those bills failed through the end of 2022, but the pro-cockfighting lawmakers in the state capitol are persisting.  And their new bills have life.

In an unbelievable act of cluelessness, two legislative committees have approved legislation to gut the vote of the people by knocking down penalties to levels that are embarrassingly low levels.

Floor votes are coming.  And they are threat to pass because cockfighters have donated money, through a political action committee they created, to try to buy the votes of lawmakers.  And that’s just what is happening.  They’ve given money to the Governor, to the Speaker of the House, to the Senate President, and to dozens of other lawmakers to get them to vote their way.

These people are using the ill-gotten gains from their felony-level criminal conduct and throwing them into the political process.  In short, lawbreakers are currying favor with lawmakers.

Legislators and the governor should respect the will of the people. They recognized that cockfighting is cruelty in its purest form. Cockfighters strap knives or gaffs (curved ice picks) to birds’ legs, place them in a pit, and then goad them to fight to the death. They do it for the thrill of the bloodletting and for illegal gambling.  That’s the antithesis of Christian values or the values of any other religion.

(Read Drew Edmondson's powerful oped here. He is former Oklahoma attorney general (1995-2011) and co-chair of the National Law Enforcement Council of Animal Wellness Action.)

(You can read more about the big money influencing politicians to decriminalize bloodsport here in The Oklahoman. And here on Channel 8.)

Both bills will soon move to each chamber’s floor for a vote.

If this happens, we’ll see Oklahoma become a magnet for even more cockfighting, with cockfighters throughout the nation flocking to the state as a haven or a refuge for their staged fights.

Please sign this change.org petition that sends the right message to Oklahoma's governor, and please take further action here:

Oklahomans-Urgent action needed (animalwellnessaction.org)