283 Fighting Cocks Are Seized in Pacoima, Some for 2nd Time

Los Angeles authorities Tuesday seized 283 fighting cocks in a raid on a Pacoima home that they said was a gamecock breeding and training center.

Some of the birds had been stolen from the East Valley Animal Shelter last week, police said, adding that authorities had seized those birds in an earlier raid in Sun Valley.

The back yard of the house, in the 10300 block of Norris Avenue in Pacoima, was a labyrinth of cages, training enclosures and fighting rings--many made from scraps of wood and old doors, Sgt. Wayne Woolway said.

“It’s indescribable,” he said.

The raid began at 10 a.m. but did not end until after 6 p.m. because officers from the Foothill Division vice squad and the Los Angeles Department of Animal Regulation had to write reports on each bird before loading them onto seven trucks.

Arturo Cordova, who was living at the house, was arrested on suspicion of maintaining fighting birds, a misdemeanor. The lone arrest was in stark contrast to 90 arrests made at a cockfight in Sun Valley on Feb. 20.

Woolway said that at least five cockfighting operators had rented space in the Pacoima house’s 2-acre back yard. The house had been the site of previous cockfighting arrests and had been under surveillance, he said.

Police confiscated a handgun, training equipment, cages, scales and several sets of razor-sharp metal spurs, called gaffs, which are worn by birds during fights.

In the Feb. 20 raid, believed to have been the largest ever in the San Fernando Valley, police confiscated 95 fighting cocks in the back yard of a house in the 11200 block of Goss Street.

Nine days later, thieves cut through the chain-link fence surrounding the East Valley Animal Shelter in North Hollywood and stole 29 of those confiscated gamecocks. The fighting cocks remaining at that shelter were transferred to the West Valley Animal Shelter in Chatsworth for security reasons, authorities said.

The birds confiscated Tuesday were taken to the West Valley shelter, which already housed more than 300 fighting cocks seized during the last six months.