On Kauaʻi, where thousands of feral chickens freely roam, residents are accustomed to rooster noise. But in this neighborhood on the island’s east side, the owners of $2 million homes on land zoned for agriculture say the disruption from a rooster farm next door is unreasonable. 

At 4 a.m., all it takes is one raucous bird to pierce the silence of night for dozens more to join in, setting off a crescendo of crowing that does not stop for hours. More than an issue of property values and peace and quiet, the land use clash in the shadow of the Makaleha Mountains is exposing just how difficult it is to crack down on cockfighting in Hawaiʻi.

Residents claim the rooster farm is breeding birds for underground cockfighting, and they say their complaints to county, state and federal enforcement agencies have been shrugged off. Cockfighting in Hawaiʻi is illegal, but it’s not a crime to raise game cocks for fights, a loophole that helps fuel the blood sport.

“We’ve got it on full display,” said Sarah Schalk, a nurse whose family of four uses earplugs and sound machines to combat the crowing of over 100 tethered birds on the 2-acre farm lot beside her family’s $1.7 million property. “We’re just watching it happen from our backyard and it’s like no one cares.” 

The rooster farm is under investigation by the Kauaʻi Planning Department. County spokesperson Kim Tamaoka declined to comment while the investigation is active.

The rooster farm’s southeast edge runs up against a half-dozen homes on grassy lots dotted with fruit trees and an in-ground swimming pool. The homes, built 15 to 20 years ago, long predate the roosters, which arrived in November, legs tethered to A-frame huts.

Previously, the agricultural land was overgrown. A donkey sometimes meandered in the pasture, rendering an idyllic backdrop to its neighbors’ backyards. Now, the distance between a squawking bird beak and back door is roughly 60 yards.

The rooster farm lot is owned by John and Crystal Contrades, according to county property records. Until last year, the parcel had an agricultural dedication that gave the owners a reduced tax rate. When it expired, the property tax skyrocketed by well over 2,000%, from $179 in 2023 to $5,065 in 2024.

Neighbors say the landowner began leasing the farm to a rooster breeder to help shore up the tax bill. Efforts to reach the landowner and rooster farm operator for this story were unsuccessful.

While there’s no evidence beyond neighbors’ suspicions that the roosters are being raised to fight, Hawaiʻi Agriculture Director Sharon Hurd said it’s generally not hard to discern when someone’s breeding birds for combat. Still, lax enforcement is a problem statewide.

“If you’re raising cocks for cockfighting, everybody in the neighborhood knows,” said Hurd, who leads the agency charged with regulating Hawaiʻi’s commercial chicken operations. “But you have to catch them in the act. It’s kind of like selling drugs. We as the state enforcement agency need to watch this guy with a rooster under his arm walk into a cockfight and actually make money off of it.”

For The Good Of The Economy?

Although criminal, fighting roosters for entertainment is a lucrative gambling activity viewed by some in Hawaiʻi as a cultural rite. It’s also a popular sport in the Philippines and it was practiced openly in Hawaiʻi during the plantation era. Today it remains an emblem of rural island life, drawing enthusiasts who usually wager on the birds as they battle, sometimes with sharp blades affixed to their legs.

In 2010, a failed resolution introduced in the Hawaii House by then-Reps. Roland Sagum, Joey Manahan and Gil Keith-Agaran would have protected cockfighting as a cultural activity. It was the most recent attempt in a series of state legislation aimed at legalizing rooster fighting.

The practice is illegal in all 50 states, but Hawaiʻi is one of the few that considers it only a misdemeanor. State lawmakers this year voted down a bill that would have upgraded the crime to a felony.

Policing it is an interagency responsibility that Hurd said is plagued by lax enforcement at least partly fueled by an attitude of acceptance.

Over the years, several Honolulu police officers have even gone to prison for taking money from cockfighting operations in exchange for warning them about upcoming raids. Another factor is a fear of retaliation that prevents residents from calling the cops in the first place.

Kauaʻi Police Department spokeswoman Tiana Victorino said the department has no active cockfighting investigations and there have been no cockfighting-related arrests in the past five years. No one from KPD was available for an interview, she said.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation also has the jurisdiction to investigate cockfighting in Hawaiʻi but a spokesperson said the agency does not pursue it unless there’s an associated federal crime allegation, such as drug trafficking.

Cockfighting goes hand in hand with gambling, which is also illegal in Hawaiʻi. And the large sums of money wagered at a rooster fight sometimes have links to organized crime. A shooting at a Waiʻanae cockfight on Oʻahu last year left two people dead and three injured. A raid at a Big Island cockfight in May resulted in police confiscating 25 dead roosters, four injured birds, $20,000 in cash, gambling records and a small amount of marijuana.

Yet there’s a long history of cockfights happening in the open with little criminal blowback. On any given Saturday evening, cockfights can be found in pockets all over the islands.

When Rep. Luke Evslin added his name to a bill last year that would have stiffened penalties for fighting birds, he said he found himself bombarded with angry phone calls from Kauaʻi constituents.

“One of the criticisms was the economic impact it would have because there are a whole lot of people raising roosters and they’re buying fencing and feed and that’s a major part of Kauai’s economy,” Evslin said. “I don’t know if that’s true but there is at least the perception that it’s true and so it would seem that cockfighting might be pretty prolific on Kaua‘i.”

The fights often take place on private property in remote areas obscured by jungle, unpaved roads or difficult geography. The rooster farms that fuel the fights are typically less hidden since simply raising the birds is not unlawful.

“Those of us that have been to a cockfight cannot believe how organized it is,” Hurd said. “If this is illegal, then all these vendors selling balloons and popcorn under a permanent structure with parking lots and parking attendants, how can that be illegal? If it is illegal, someone is not enforcing the law. And that’s hard to fix.”

Hurd likened it to Hawaiʻi’s relationship with fireworks. Most fireworks in Hawaiʻi are also illegal, but on holidays — especially New Year’s Eve — the night sky burns bright with technicolor explosives. The practice took a deadly turn last week when a fireworks explosion at a Salt Lake home on Oʻahu left four people dead and seriously injured more than 20.

Raising Roosters For Cockfighting — Legally

For the Kauaʻi neighbors, the biggest issue with raising chickens for fighting is the disturbance. Animal noise is typically governed at the county level but Kauaʻi has no rooster noise ordinance.

Maui County’s animal nuisance laws also fail to govern rooster crowing. Only noise from dogs and equine animals that bark, bay, cry or howl are regulated there. By contrast, Oʻahu’s animal nuisance ordinance prohibits animal noise that’s continuous for at least 10 minutes or intermittent for at least 30 minutes.

The Hawaiʻi Department of Health regulates human-made noise from machinery, but generally not noise from animals. KPD this year investigated 500 noise complaints, some of them involving roosters, but a spokesperson provided no further information.

Kauaʻi County does not limit the number of birds that can be raised on an agricultural lot unless the parcel is close to land in another zoning district. The Kauaʻi Humane Society investigates cruelty or neglect to cats or dogs — but not chickens.

As long as the birds are treated humanely, raising roosters — even for cockfighting — is permissible by law. 

“It’s not illegal simply to raise them for cockfighting,” Hurd said. “And I don’t think anyone raises roosters for anything other than cockfighting.”

For Harold Timmins, 80, there’s no escaping the screeching birds. 

“The noise is outrageous,” said Timmins, who worries the racket could reduce the value of his $1.9 million home. “I have to keep everything buttoned up, windows and doors.”

He said he visited the county Planning Department twice to implore officials to take action against the rooster farm but left feeling dismissed. Because he fears retaliation, he said he doesn’t want to call the police and escalate conflict with his neighbor. 

But he said he won’t give up his fight against what he’s convinced is an illegal operation. Now he’s looking into buying an experimental device that claims to emit a high-pitch sound inaudible to humans that’s meant to annoy, or even harm, the roosters.

“If you wanted to raise chickens for eggs or to eat, you’d be contributing to our food system,” he said. “I understand that this is agricultural land but this doesn’t do anything positive for our community.”