Crowing roosters are solar-powered
BAILEYTON, Alabama––Showing Animals Respect & Kindness drone video on the morning of April 18, 2026 caught a steady stream of cockfighters carrying dead and dying roosters out of a metal-clad shed at 1951 County Road 1570, Baileyton, in northeastern Cullman County, Alabama.
One man threw a wounded rooster into the back of a flatbed truck parked beside the building. The rooster flopped and struggled there for several minutes.
About 50 cars and pickup trucks surrounded the building––an unusually large number of vehicles to attend anything in Baileyton, population less than 700, located about 10 miles from anywhere bigger.
“There is an active cockfight”
“There is an active cockfight happening,” Showing Animals Respect & Kindness alerted members by email and on Facebook, giving the address.
“Please call the Cullman County Sheriff’s Office and demand that they go out and end this illegal animal abuse now. You can call [sheriff Matt Gentry] at 256-734-0342.
“You can also send a message through their contact form, or leave an anonymous tip on their tipline,” with links provided.
“Please take action,” Showing Animals Respect & Kindness asked. “Help end these birds suffering and make sure that Sheriff Gentry does his job and ends criminal activity happening in his county!”
Respondents made the calls. The Showing Animals Respect & Kindness drone team kept the site under video surveillance.
Non-response
But what happened was a blatant repeat of what happened the last time the Showing Animals Respect & Kindness reported a cockfight in Cullman County, on the morning of April 20, 2023, almost exactly three years earlier.
(See Cullman County, Alabama: combatting cockfighting in a KKK stronghold.)
As on April 18, 2026, a SHARK drone on April 20, 2023 discovered a cockfight in progress at a cockpit near Bug Tussle, a Cullman County hamlet notorious for hosting cockfights for at least half a century.
Alerted by SHARK, the Cullman County sheriff’s office responded, more or less, but not before nearly 100 carloads of cockfighters, acting as if tipped off, had adequate opportunity to suspend their activity and abscond, with their gamefowl, leaving only feathers, tire tracks, and of course the cockpit itself to show they ever were there.
“Are you corrupt?” demands Hindi
Demanded Showing Animals Respect & Kindness founder Steve Hindi of sheriff Matt Gentry on the afternoon of April 18, 2026, in an open email:
“Are you corrupt? Please let us know why you and the Cullman Sheriff’s Office refused to look at our clear footage of dead roosters being carried out today at 1951 County Road 1570, Baileyton,
“You’ve received our evidence,” Hindi charged. “We were told that you didn’t have enough manpower [to bust the cockfight], yet two sheriff’s deputies rolled up to the scene and did nothing.
“Please let us know why you are not busting this cockfight,” Hindi challenged, “and we will post your unedited excuse on www.CrushCockfighting.com.”
As of April 20, 2026, Gentry has apparently not responded.
Cockfighting & the KKK
Cockfighting, the Ku Klux Klan, and corruption of law enforcement came together from Georgia to Cullman County, Alabama, home of the Bug Tussle cockpit, even before Cullman County was hacked off from neighboring Blount County in 1877.
All three––cockfighting, the Klan, and corruption of law enforcement––appear to have become locally established by 1870, five years after the end of the U.S. Civil War.
Throughout the South, the Ku Klux Klan and innumerable offshoots have funded themselves and bought off law enforcement, or have actually been law enforcement, as a white supremacist rural organized crime syndicate.
Cockfighting, dogfighting, slot machines, prostitution, drug trafficking, and moonshining have all been economic foundations of the Klan.
Cockfighting remains evident in Cullman County, and lingering remnants of the Ku Klux Klan and corruption of law enforcement remain shadows in the background.
Gentry stood up to the Klan
But three-term Cullman County sheriff Matt Gentry, serving since 2015, at least made a show of standing up to the Klan when newly elected.
Reported Melanie Posey for WBRC television news in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 14, 2015, “Folks who live in the Crane Hill community,” an all-white hamlet diagonally across Cullman County from Baileyton, “discovered little baggies with candy inside and also notes that said ‘Our Race Is Our Nation’ and ‘Save Our Land…Join The Klan.’
“A North Carolina phone number is listed on the flyer,” Posey continued. “That number is answered with a recording in which black Americans are referred to in derogatory terms,” concluding “This has been a message of the Royal White Knights of the KKK.”
Gentry told Posey that “Some of the bags were [also] found in the city of Cullman,” the Cullman County seat.
“Sheriff Gentry says investigators are trying to get fingerprints off the fliers they’ve been given and have those traced if possible,” Posey concluded.
Now stands up to “liberal green energy agendas”
If anything came of that, it appears not to have been reported.
Gentry did, however, on January 29, 2026, post disapproval of someone having drawn a swastika in snow at a local park two days before, on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
What has been extensively reported is that Gentry is currently a Republican candidate for Alabama Public Service Commission, running on a platform of “pledging to fight back against liberal green energy agendas,” claiming a start-up campaign budget of $197,800.
Steve Hindi and Showing Animals Respect & Kindness, meanwhile, are more than 50 years from the first to expose and try to stop cockfighting in Cullman County.
Cullman County cockfighting exposed in 1972
As Ku Klux Klan influence faded nationally, Cullman Times Democrat staff writer W.R. Morris produced an exposé of cockfighting on August 27, 1972, with help from renowned International Society for the Protection of Animals investigator John Walsh.
(See Time Is Short And The Water Rises.)
“Cockfighting is a growing ‘sport’ in Cullman County,” Morris warned. “Chicken fighters in Cullman County usually hold their bouts on Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons, in the southeast section of the county,” in other words in the Bug Tussle neighborhood.
If W.R. Morris ever had another byline in the Cullman Times Democrat, NewspaperArchive.com seems to have no record of it.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Jerry Thompson exposed Klan in Cullman
Tyler Roden, whose father and grandfather also served at times as Cullman County sheriff, in 1999, 2002, and 2009 led the only documented cockfighting busts in county history, all at Bug Tussle, seizing $18,000 in cash in the 2009 raid.
Elected sheriff in 1994, Roden was voted out of office in 2010.
The Ku Klux Klan, meanwhile, put in many more Cullman appearances. Knoxville Tennessean investigative reporter Jerry Thompson (1940-2000), author of My Life With The Klan (1980), journeyed to Cullman to expose Bill Wilkinson’s Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, identified by the FBI at the time as the most violent and dangerous of the many Klan factions.
Wilkinson himself, ironically, resigned from the Klan in 1984 and relocated to Belize after turning FBI informant.
Please donate to help our work:
www.animals24-7.org/donate
Discover more from Animals 24-7
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Kindness, compassion and personal responsibility should never be politicized or criticized.
Sharing with gratitude and a lot more.
These ugly, little, small-minded, corrupt Southern towns hide a multitide of sins – hidden, aided and abetted by ugly, little, small-minded, corrupt Southern sheriffs and other local officials carrying on a long line of doing nothing and very likely being paid off for it, if not secretly participating themselves.
But no matter how hard they try, their days are numbered now.
Time’s up, rules change.
This is why I would never live in the south. Not only do they abuse roosters, they abuse other animals.
I’ve worked on many dogfighting cases where the fighters in New York state came up from the south and brought their poor dogs with them, only to get the “game” started up here. I rescued some of these poor dogs. I hear the people are all great Christians in the south though —no matter how corrupt and cruel they are to other living creatures.
Well, remember they weren’t so great to people of color either, in the not-so-distant past, despite their Bible thumping.
Personally, I cannot believe that any deity as powerful as God would EVER create anything as flawed, destructive and gullible as man. The Bible is an interesting fairy tale that takes all the responsibility off of people – which is why they do all the unbelievable BS that they do, and then say “But God told me it was okay.”
Also, don’t believe that “Southern Hospitality” either . If you’re not from an OLD, OLD Southern family, they may smile at you, but you will never be anything but a foreign outsider to them. And I assume you know the hypocritical phoney meaning when they say “Bless your heart.”
Interesting people. Bless their hearts.
Time to get the DOJ to investigate – both the crime AND the local law “enforcement.”
Thank you for keeping up w/ this cockfighting schlock which is ‘supposedly’ a ‘federal crime’ involving animals. So no wonder cockfighting never ends, esp. as a result of meaningful, diehard federal prosecution. Since the first colonizers set foot here, wildlife was theirs for the taking & followed w/ all animals in this eventual nation being treated w/ little or no respect. And ‘used’ by a seeming majority of Americans, however they choose. Which is not to say that, as far as animals are treated in nations globally, America didn’t just simply join the club.