If everyone here wants to target a country with outrage over abject cruelty, you all only need to look at our industrial meat industry. Which PR doesn't have.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/chickens-slaughtered-conscious_n_580e3d35e4b000d0b157bf98?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAItR29JZoInTHH7bAcgvoXn0ubtaXRwy9zGbO692BTtrHZlYOXx4TVutDOroCDRi11S3YVy_sjJi_q4FBQxFFgYboKmnLyQIiDMvaMOKifc6f302h_LrwH8q1vNxrmEFvp7oO7DfMKAYcoYVhCZ0uHxR6FbFHo3vlIOY02DcvTxv
"... while animal rights activists are celebrating the move, it’s putting the livelihood of thousands at risk at a time when Puerto Rico desperately needs jobs. It’s also raising questions about self-determination and democracy in this U.S. territory, which is ruled by Washington but has little sway over those who determine its fate.
Puerto Rico’s breeding farms and 71 registered cockfighting establishments, or galleras, generate some $65 million a year and account for more than 7,200 direct and indirect jobs, according to a report commissioned by the island’s largest cockfighting organization and adopted by the local government.
Crucially, the industry is one of the foundations of the rural economy — a sector that has been hit hard by a decade-long recession and is still recovering from Hurricane Maria in 2017.
Even if Gov. Wanda Vázquez signs the law before the deadline, there’s no guarantee it will keep the feds at bay, said Orlando Vargas, the president of the San Juan Cockfighting Club, the island’s largest organization.
At best, the Puerto Rican bill might spark a legal confrontation that could buy the industry some time, he said.
“We know this is an uphill battle,” he said. “But this is a tradition that’s part of Puerto Rico’s folklore. We’ve been doing this for 400 years, since Spanish colonization, and to lose this would be to lose part of our history.”
The case against cockfighting is straightforward: Critics say there’s no room in modern society for a cruel “sport” that forces birds to gouge at each other with sharpened spurs, often to the death, as crowds bet on their chances of survival.
“While it is true that cockfighting has been practiced for centuries in various countries, including the United States, ‘old’ does not necessarily mean right or even acceptable,” the U.S. Humane Society argues ...
There are also worries about the unregulated and illegal gambling that surrounds cockfights. At any given match in Puerto Rico, wads of cash exchange hands after each bout.
But if Washington wants to take a stand against animal cruelty it should start closer to home, says Gerardo Mora Pagán, the head of the Puerto Rican Cockfighting Commission inside the Department of Recreation and Sports.
Puerto Rico’s cockfights are heavily regulated, provide much-needed income to the government and are no more reprehensible than other beloved U.S. activities like horse racing, rodeos, or even boxing or football, he said.
'You want to talk about cruelty? You have millions of hunters in the United States who shoot a deer, decapitate it and then mount its head on the wall as a trophy and nobody says anything about it,' he said. 'But we have people in Congress who don’t even know where Puerto Rico is and they’re going to take away our cockfighting industry?'
Living in an unincorporated U.S. territory, Puerto Ricans are effectively U.S. citizens with little sway on the mainland. Residents of the island cannot vote for the U.S. president and have no voting members of Congress. Not surprisingly, decisions taken on Capitol Hill are often seen as cold and unfair impositions — a blow to the island’s right to self-determination.
Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/article238313273.html#storylink=cpy
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