Raising Roosters is Big Business. Now a Push to Ease Penalties for Cockfighting is Ruffling Feathers

There are rows and rows of small white structures housing individual roosters on Troy Thompson’s farm in southern Oklahoma.

“You know, some people like pigs, some people like horses — I like chickens,” Thompson said.

These breeds of colorful Hatches and Kelsos are said to derive from jungle fowl and have historically been bred for fighting, but Thompson said he sells them for breeding purposes.

After living in Texas, Thompson decided to return to Oklahoma and raise his own roosters. It’s something he’s been around throughout his life, and he said, it’s pretty typical in the rural communities he knows.

“There's hardly a town you can go to in the state of Oklahoma or any town in Texas where somebody doesn't know something or own some game fowl in one of those towns,” Thompson said.

He is one of 15,000 members of the Oklahoma Gamefowl Commission, a nonprofit that promotes the interests of game fowl owners.

In recent years, the commission has given campaign contributions and advocated for laws to reduce the penalties for cockfighting. The sport was banned in Oklahoma in 2004, but there’s a long tradition in the state.

Within the last couple of years, several bills have been introduced in the Oklahoma legislature to reduce the cockfighting penalty from a felony to a misdemeanor in the first two instances or to give individual counties the right to do so. One bill made it through the state's House of Representatives this past spring, but has not been picked up by the state Senate.

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