State Agriculture Commissioner Helping Cockfighters to Thwart Citizens' Will

This cockfighting war in Oklahoma just keeps getting more and more bizarre. The Daily Oklahoman reports today that Dennis Howard, the Commissioner of Agriculture in Oklahoma, announced he was considering becoming involved in the cockfighters attempt to weaken the anti-cockfighting law that was overwhelmingly passed by the electorate last week. According to the article, Howard is considering using the legal staff at the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture to try to help the cockfighters overturn the new law by joining in the effort to get a Little Dixie judge to declare the law unconstitutional. A few days after the law passed in a statewide vote cockfighters succeeded in getting District Judge Willard Driesel of Idabel to issue an injunction against enforcement of the ban pending consideration of whether it was unconstitutional. Some have speculated that cockfighters are taking this action in far southeast Oklahoma where their base is strongest in an effort to remove the contest from media view as much as possible.

Dennis Howard was an early opponent of the anti-cockfighting campaign. According to the Tulsa World, Howard, a state employee, traveled to cockfighter meetings in 1999 to advise them on how to stop the Oklahoma Coalition Against Cockfighting's initiative petition drive. In an October 10, 1999 Tulsa World article Dennis Howard was quoted as saying:

"I gave them a lesson in Politics 101," Dennis Howard said, describing his presentation to cockfighters at the Oklahoma Gamefowl Breeders Association's annual meeting in McAlester. "I told them, `You need to pick an election date when you can win.' "

The World said that Howard advised the cockfighters to do everything they could to challenge the signature process and postpone the cockfighting measure to an election date other than the presidential election of 2000. Howard said that the bigger the election turnout by voters the worse their chances of winning were.

After the cockfighters failed in their attempt to have enough signatures disqualified from the initiative petition Howard put his state agency to work to assist the cockfighters. In a letter on state stationery dated September 7, 2000, and widely used by the cockfighters, Burke L. Healey, DVM and director of Howard's Animal Industry Services Division said:

"The gamefowl industry is significant to Oklahoma's economy. There are millions of dollars pumped into the state through the retail sales of gamefowl out of our state to other states and other countries... Understand that I promote agriculture commerce and the gamefowl industry is a large part of our economy. I truely hope it will continue in the future."

During the cockfighter's campaign to defeat State Question 687 (that banned cockfighting) they sited estimates from Howard's Department of Agriculture that the "gamefowl" (cockfighting) industry "pumps $105 million into Oklahoma". Proponents of SQ 687 demanded the substantiating data for the supposed Agriculture study but the Department of Agriculture was not forthcoming. The state's media were also unable to obtain any information to support the Department of Agriculture's reported figures.

The cockfighters took the Ag chief's advice and through court challenges were able to delay the vote until November 2002. The people of Oklahoma finally got their chance to tell the politicians what they wanted. By a margin of well over 100,000 votes Oklahomans let Dennis Howard and the Legislature know that they wanted cockfighting banned and they wanted it to be a felony to engage in cockfighting. After three-years of support of the secretive cockfighter/gambling network Howard is trying to step in in the guise of an objective state official.

Citizens may rightly be asking if Dennis Howard (e-mail at: dennis.howard@gov.state.ok.us) has used state funds to support the much-disdained cockfighters' association in their efforts to keep Oklahomans from voting on the controversial issue and to distribute misleading information designed to support the cockfighting side. The media should now be asking why Howard wants to use the state's resources to try to overturn a resounding vote of the people to ban this third-world bloodsport in Oklahoma. Perhaps its time for the State Auditor and Inspector to look into whether Howard has inappropriately utilized state resources?

Thanks to J. Casey for contributing the above.