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Saffron Finch
(Photo by racketrx on Flickr Creative Commons)

After a year-and-a-half in prison for running an illegal dog-fighting ring, Michael Vick is allowed to play football again. Have others learned from this pro-athlete’s mistakes? Apparently not.

This past weekend, in Shelton, CT—a quiet, 32-square-mile town in Fairfield County—police arrested 19 people allegedly connected to a bird-fighting operation, according to Wayne Kasacek, assistant director of ’s Bureau of Regulation and Inspection.

Working off a tip that a bird fight was about to take place, Shelton police and the CT Department of Agriculture took action. “We all thought we were going to [find] a cock fight,” Kasacek says. “Turned out not to be.” Instead, they found 150 songbirds, mostly saffron finches and a few canaries—species authorities say they don't recall having previously encountered as fight birds. Several of the animals were injured in a manner “consistent with previous fights,” Kasacek adds.

Forty-two-year-old Jurames Goulart, the Shelton homeowner accused of cruelty to animals and gambling, denied all charges. But his wife told the Associated Press that the fighting had gone on for years, and that participants fed the birds some type of substance—she guessed sugar—to make them hyper and spur the fighting.

These aren’t the first crimes of this kind in Connecticut. In another raid two weeks ago in Harwinton, a town just west of Hartford, that were part of an alleged cock-fighting breeding and training operation. “Cock fighting is something that law enforcement seems to encounter fairly regularly,” Kasacek says.

Even so, bird- and cock-fighting seem easy targets for mockery as not-so-serious offenses. They shouldn’t be, according to Kasacek. “With cock fights, there’s violence, illegal drugs, guns involved. We can’t say much about saffron finch fighting. We know too little about it [right now],” he says. But “in general animal fighting involves violence not only to animals, but to people.”