In November 2025, the Oklahoma Sheriffs' Association did something it had never done before. Speaking for the elected sheriffs of all 77 counties in the state, it wrote to Oklahoma's seven members of Congress and asked them to help pass a federal bill cracking down on cockfighting.

The letter was blunt about what these operations actually are.

"Cockfighting pits are often centers of gambling, narcotics, and violence, drawing offenders from across state lines," wrote Kyle Keller, the association's deputy director. "Families living near these operations are exposed to danger, and communities are degraded by the criminal culture that accompanies them."

One of the seven people who got that letter was Josh Brecheen, who represents Oklahoma's 2nd District — the eastern quarter of the state. He is also the one member of the delegation who has gone on the record for the other side.

What he actually said

Back in December 2023, Brecheen met in Washington with Anthony DeVore, then the president of the Oklahoma Gamefowl Commission — a group lobbying to knock cockfighting down from a felony to a misdemeanor. Two days later, DeVore stood up in front of a new gamefowl group in Kentucky and bragged about it.

"Josh is a good guy, a real staunch constitutionalist," DeVore told them. "We were in a meeting with several people and the people looked at him like, what are you talking about? He said, 'Dude, we're talking about chicken fighting.' He said, 'Chicken fighting ought to be legal.' He said, 'I don't have an issue with it. Neither should anybody else.' And this is a U.S. congressman."

When NonDoc asked Brecheen's office about it, his communications director put out a statement in the congressman's name confirming it:

"I, like many Oklahomans, support the decriminalization of cockfighting. With our border crisis and rise of violent crime, Oklahoma law enforcement should be spared from having to spend their limited time and resources investigating who is chicken fighting and who is not."

Two things are wrong with that sentence. Start with "many Oklahomans."

He is not speaking for Oklahoma

Oklahomans already voted on this. In 2002, 56.1% of them passed State Question 687, making it a felony to fight roosters, to raise them for fighting or to run a pit. The state Supreme Court upheld the ban unanimously in 2004.

Two decades later, Oklahomans have not changed their minds. A 2023 Sooner Survey found fewer than 10% of Oklahomans think cockfighting should be legal. Pollster Pat McFerron put it this way: "there are few issues that unite Oklahomans more than their belief that cockfighting should be illegal." Support for the ban ran at 88% in the Oklahoma City and Tulsa areas — and 87% across the 71 rural counties. This is not a city-versus-country fight.

And in Brecheen's own district? 83% said cockfighting should be illegal. 11% said it should be legal. He is siding with the 11%.

The sheriffs disagree with his excuse, in writing

The second problem is the excuse — that law enforcement shouldn't waste its "limited time and resources" on chicken fighting.

Oklahoma's law enforcement never asked to be spared. They asked for the opposite. The sheriffs' association told Congress that the federal bill "provides urgently needed tools to combat the widespread and highly organized animal fighting that continues to threaten public safety, law and order, and animal welfare across Oklahoma and beyond." Keller added that for "rural sheriff's offices with limited manpower and budgets, these provisions provided by the FIGHT Act would be indispensable."

Brecheen justified his position by pointing at the border and violent crime. The sheriffs' letter says cockfighting pits are where the narcotics and the violence are, and that moving fighting birds across state lines "is a disease vector which threatens agricultural poultry operations."

He picked the one argument his own state's cops had already refuted.

Everyone he stood with is now in court

In June 2025, Animal Wellness Action investigators released undercover video that appeared to show DeVore and the group's vice president, Blake Pearce, at illegal cockfights held May 31 and June 7 in the Shady Grove community of McIntosh County, on Cherokee tribal land. That is Brecheen's district. Investigators also filmed children at the pits — a felony under state, tribal and federal law.

Since then, almost everything about the operation Brecheen lent his name to has come apart:

• In September 2025, the Oklahoma Ethics Commission fined the Oklahoma Gamefowl Commission $10,000, ordered it disbanded, and cited gross campaign finance violations. Investigators say the group raised money by selling fighting birds and funneled it to state politicians.
• DeVore and Pearce were charged in McIntosh County District Court under Oklahoma law by District Attorney Carol Iski.
• In March 2026, the former sheriff of McIntosh County, Jeff Coleman, was charged with felony animal cruelty by Cherokee Nation Attorney General Chad Harsha, accused of organizing the June 2025 derby on his own property. Court records show DeVore missed a January court date and a bench warrant is under advisement.
• DeVore resigned as president of the group to run for the Oklahoma House in District 19.

Brecheen said law enforcement had better things to do. In his district, a sheriff is the one charged with organizing the derby.

The crime he says isn't there

In October 2025, Animal Wellness Action and SHARK published an investigation into what they call the "Texoma Cockfighting Corridor" — a network running from Tulsa to Dallas that they tie to illegal gambling, narcotics trafficking, tax evasion and international money laundering, shipping fighting birds to organized crime networks in Mexico and the Philippines.

Read the Oklahoma names in that report and check the map. A LeFlore County man who mailed more than 1,700 roosters to Guam. A Coalgate man previously charged in federal drug trafficking and money laundering cases tied to the Gulf Cartel, still running one of the state's largest gamefowl farms, selling birds into Mexico and the Philippines. Adair County deputies who declined to act on a large cockfight even after being handed GPS coordinates. A Bryan County ringleader who hosted hundreds of people and walked away with a $200 fine.

LeFlore, Coal, Adair, Bryan, McIntosh. Every one of those counties is in Oklahoma's 2nd District. Every one of them is Josh Brecheen's.

He told Oklahomans the real threat was at the border and that chicken fighting was a distraction. The investigators who mapped the corridor say the birds are crated out of a Dallas-area front company and flown to the Philippines, and that one shipment mailed from Oklahoma was headed for a Texas border town.

The bill he hasn't signed

The FIGHT Act — H.R. 3946 in the House — would ban gambling on animal fights in person and online, stop mature fighting roosters from moving through the U.S. mail, allow citizens to sue the people running the fights, and let the government seize the animals and property used in them.

It is about as bipartisan as anything in Congress: 147 cosponsors — 84 Democrats and 63 Republicans — from 37 states and the District of Columbia.

Not one of them is from Oklahoma.

Not Brecheen. Not anyone else in the delegation the sheriffs wrote to. The most recent member signed on in May 2026 — six months after the letter — and Oklahoma is still not on the list.

Brecheen does find time for other bills. He is a member of the Sharia Free America Caucus, the 50-member group organized around a takeover of American law that traces back to a hate group's blog post and a five-house subdivision in Little Rock, two of them lived in by Christians. He can find the bandwidth for a threat that isn't happening. He can't find it for the one his sheriffs put in writing.

This isn't new for him

Brecheen's record on animal protection goes back to his first months in office. In December 2010, as a freshman state senator, the Tulsa World reported that he had filed a bill to end Oklahoma's new pet breeder regulations — the Commercial Pet Breeders Act, which required large breeding operations to be licensed and inspected.

A month later, the Tulsa World's Oklahoma Poll found that more than 70% of those surveyed supported state regulation of large breeding operations.

Same pattern, sixteen years apart: a lopsided majority of Oklahomans on one side, a small industry on the other, and Brecheen with the industry.

He's on the ballot again

Brecheen won the Republican primary on June 16, 2026 and faces a Democrat in the general election on November 3.

When 83% of the people you represent tell you where they stand, and all 77 of your state's sheriffs put it in a letter to your office, and the lobbyist who shook your hand in Washington ends up with a bench warrant under advisement — there is no version of this where you didn't know.

The bill his sheriffs asked for is still sitting in committee. His name is still not on it.

Source

• U.S. Rep. Josh Brecheen backs 'decriminalization of cockfighting' — Michael McNutt, NonDoc, January 24, 2024
• Oklahoma Sheriffs' Association Backs FIGHT Act — Animal Wellness Action, November 10, 2025