The Science of Looking Away
What Psychology and Sociology Tell Us About the Participants — and the Institutions That Protected Them
Today, as I watched the NBC national telecast of the Preakness Stakes, I witnessed a masterclass in corporate damage control. Deep into the broadcast, the production truck finally got around to addressing the radioactive elephant in the room: Irad Ortiz Jr. and Jose Ortiz.
Two weeks ago, these two brothers engaged in a thrilling, heart-pounding stretch battle to finish one-two in the most exciting two minutes in sports, the Kentucky Derby. Yesterday, a front-page USA Today exposé blew the doors off the industry, detailing their filmed involvement in a federal felony underground cockfighting ring driven by illicit gambling.
And what did NBC give the viewing public? A punt. A hand-off. A cynical, legally insulated footnote.
The broadcaster spent a single, fleeting sentence on it — an annoying obligation, a box that corporate attorneys told them they had to check. The line was something to the effect of: You may have heard about cockfighting stories, but no charges were brought and no racing jurisdictions took any action, so as you can see, they are here riding today.
That clinical dismissal didn’t happen in a vacuum. It immediately followed a heavily produced, heartwarming feature package showcasing the brothers’ early life in Puerto Rico and their fraternal camaraderie.
What would life be without irony? Because a short time later, the broadcast aired a profile on trainer Brittany Russell and her jockey husband, Sheldon, showing their beautiful life on the farm. And right there on national television, the cameras highlighted the chickens they raise.
That is the exact moment I realized I had stepped squarely into the Twilight Zone.
That NBC sentence did not arrive from nowhere. It was the final link in a chain of institutional silence that Past The Wire has been documenting since November.
When Past The Wire was the absolute first publication to break this cockfighting story, the industry’s response was a chilling, collective silence. Nobody wanted to touch it. It took PETA issuing a formal demand letter to ban the brothers from the Eclipse Awards for the Thoroughbred Daily News to even acknowledge its existence. It quickly reverted to something only Past the Wire had the backbone to investigate and expose.
We saw it then for exactly what it was: a tightly controlled narrative driven by systematic indifference. There was no regard for the sickening animal cruelty, no regard for the federal statutory violations, and a complete blindness to the massive implications of unregulated, underground gambling markets operating parallel to our legal pari-mutuel pools.
Nobody cared then, and despite USA Today and dozens of downstream publications playing catch-up six months behind us, nobody in power cares now. Not in any way that leads to action.
This stunning vacuum of accountability made me stop and look past the racing surface. If nobody in leadership cares, why? What does this pathological aversion to reality actually mean for the soul of this sport?
To answer that, we have to look past the racing rules and dive into the clinical reality of human behavior. We have to answer two fundamental questions:
What does engaging in a blood sport like cockfighting, and outwardly appearing to enjoy it, say about the psychological makeup of the individual doing it?
And what does condoning it, looking away, and failing to take action when you possess the explicit legal right and moral responsibility to do so say about the institutions and executives running the game?
Is there a documented, scientific answer to these questions? Yes. The data is peer-reviewed, published, and devastating. I provide these findings not to cast stones, but with the genuine hope that self-reflection can make the world a better place and make better people of all of us.
Part I: The Psychology of the Participant
To understand the mindset of those who derive passion and pleasure from the mutilation of animals for entertainment and cash, we turn to the behaviorists who have forensically mapped this exact subculture.
In his foundational study published in the peer-reviewed journal Society & Animals, criminologist Dr. Fred Hawley of Louisiana State University embedded himself within cockfighting rings across the Midwest, the South, and Latin America over fifteen years to analyze their psychological architecture. His methodology was meticulous: structured interviews, field observation, and what he termed an “observer-participant” stance consciously reversing the traditional participant-observer role of ethnographic research because of the illegal nature of the activity.
Hawley discovered that participants rely on a deeply held set of rationalizations, apologia he documented in detail. The cultural worldview of the cockfighter, he found, is built around what he termed “teleological totemism,” a framework in which the gamecock functions as a sacred symbol of masculine identity, bravery, and dominance. The bird is simultaneously totem, proxy, and sacrificial object.
Because cockfighting is subject to criminal sanction and informal social disapproval, cockfighters have developed rationalizations which they use among themselves and offer to outsiders. These rationalizations are complex; some are overtly religious in nature.
— Dr. Fred Hawley, “The Moral and Conceptual Universe of Cockfighters: Symbolism and Rationalization,” Society & Animals, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1993
Critically, Hawley observed that the surface “pugnaciousness” of cockfighters masked a profound psychological defensiveness. The handler projects their own aggression and desire for dominance onto an animal trained to die, using the bird as a safe proxy for their own ego. The violence of the pit, in this framework, is not incidental. It is the point. It is the mechanism through which identity, status, and belonging are confirmed.
Hawley also documented that participants actively lobby to keep criminal penalties low and engage in organized advocacy to protect the practice, not passive cultural participants, but active defenders of a system they know is legally and socially condemned.
But it goes deeper than mere rationalization. In a robust 2012 peer-reviewed study titled “Who Feels Sympathy for Roosters Used in Cockfighting?” published in Society & Animals, researchers Sherman A. Lee and Linsey Quarles of Christopher Newport University mathematically measured human emotional responses to cockfighting video evidence, mapping the results against established personality trait scales. Their findings accounted for a remarkable 51% of the variance in human sympathy toward cockfighting roosters.
The significant predictors were telling: feelings toward roosters, extraversion, conscientiousness, and — most critically — trait sympathy for animal suffering. Abstract belief in animal cognition was not a significant predictor. In other words, what separated those who felt empathy from those who did not was not philosophical conviction but felt, human empathic response. The capacity to emotionally register another creature’s suffering.
Individuals who can actively manage and enjoy these events possess a profound capacity for moral compartmentalization. They can be affectionate fathers, smiling brothers, or brilliant athletes in one arena, while completely deactivating their human capacity for empathy in another. According to decades of psychological research into what researchers call “The Link” — the documented crossover between animal abuse and broader antisocial behavior, led by experts including Dr. Frank Ascione of the University of Denver’s Institute for Human-Animal Connection — adults who organize or enjoy intentional animal abuse show significantly higher rates of antisocial personality traits, reduced remorse, and disregard for statutory boundaries.
The cultural argument that cockfighting is tradition, that it is heritage, that it cannot be judged through an American legal lens collapses under the weight of the research. The federal ban has been in place since 2019. The Supreme Court has upheld it. The psychological literature does not distinguish between cultural participants and criminal ones once the legal framework is established and known. The choice to participate after that point is a different psychological act entirely.
Part II: The Psychology of the Bystander
If the psychology of the participant is unsettling, the psychology of the institutional bystander, the regulators, racing commissioners, and network executives who look the other way is an outright indictment of something deeper and more systemic.
When powerful entities remain silent in the face of documented wrongdoing, psychology tells us they are engaging in what the legendary Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura defined as Moral Disengagement. In his foundational 1999 paper “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities,” published in the Personality and Social Psychology Review — a paper with over 3,500 academic citations — Bandura documented the precise mechanisms by which professional, educated people deliberately deactivate their moral self-regulation to protect institutional and financial interests.
These mechanisms are not abstract. They are specific and they are recognizable in every institutional response to this story:
Moral Justification — recasting the inhumane as culturally acceptable. Cockfighting is tradition. It is heritage. It is not our place to judge.
Euphemistic Labeling — NBC called it “cockfighting stories.” Not a federal felony. Not documented animal torture. Stories.
Displacement of Responsibility — HISA says it is the commissions’ jurisdiction. The commissions say they investigated. Kentucky says no further comment. Every institution points to another.
Diffusion of Responsibility — when everyone is responsible, no one is. The fractured regulatory landscape of state-by-state licensing ensures that accountability disappears into the gaps between jurisdictions.
Disregard for Consequences — the roosters’ suffering does not register. The bettors’ right to know does not register. The sport’s social license does not register. Only the wagering handle registers.
Many inhumanities operate through a supportive network of legitimate enterprises run by otherwise considerate people who contribute to destructive activities by disconnected subdivision of functions and diffusion of responsibility.
— Albert Bandura, “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities,” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 1999
Read that sentence again. A supportive network of legitimate enterprises — the Jockey Club, the racing commissions, the Eclipse Awards, NBC Sports, the racing media, run by otherwise considerate people, contributing to a destructive outcome through disconnected subdivision of functions and diffusion of responsibility. Bandura wrote that in 1999. It describes horse racing’s response to this story with clinical precision.
The sociological dimension of this failure is equally documented. In his groundbreaking work on the sociology of denial, Rutgers sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel profiles what he terms the “conspiracy of silence” the phenomenon whereby members of an insular group collectively ignore something of which each one of them is personally aware. His framework, published in Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence (Cambridge University Press, 2010), is precise about the mechanism:
Conspiracies of silence revolve around undiscussables — uncomfortable truths hidden in plain sight. Each conspirator is aware of something yet nevertheless unwilling to publicly acknowledge it. They are generated by pain, shame, embarrassment, or fear. They highlight the fundamental tension between personal awareness and public discourse.
— Eviatar Zerubavel, “The Social Sound of Silence: Toward a Sociology of Denial,” in Shadows of War, Cambridge University Press, 2010
Uncomfortable truths hidden in plain sight. That phrase does not require elaboration. It is the story of horse racing and the Ortiz brothers from November 2025 to May 2026 in six words.
In tight-knit communities like horse racing, Zerubavel documents, individuals experience an intense psychological dread of social and professional ostracization. Even if an executive or a television producer is privately disgusted by the digital evidence, their need for group conformity and the protection of institutional relationships overrides their ethical compass. The unspoken agreement is maintained not through coordination but through shared understanding of what cannot be said.
A peer-reviewed study applying this framework specifically to animal suffering, published in the journal Animals by researcher Kate Stewart concluded that silence around animal cruelty is not passive. It is active, social, and collaborative. It has patterns and dynamics. And those patterns can be broken.
Sociologists studying institutional apathy note that bystanders perform a rapid, cold cost-benefit analysis. If the immediate institutional cost of speaking out, scratching a Derby winner, disrupting a multi-million-dollar Preakness broadcast, or alienating a powerful stable is perceived as higher than the moral cost of staying silent, the bureaucratic mind will choose apathy every single time. They make a calculated, cynical gamble that the public’s memory is shorter than the Preakness weekend wagering handle.
The Verdict
NBC’s one-sentence dismissal this afternoon was not a reporting of facts. It was a symptom of a deeply infected institutional psyche. By using the racing commissions’ lack of summary discipline as a shield to justify their own journalistic silence, NBC became an active partner in the industry’s strategy of containment.
The science is settled. The studies are published and peer-reviewed. We know exactly what it says about the mind of a person who can run a cash-driven animal fighting ring. And we know exactly what it says about the institutions that stood down and let them ride.
Hawley’s 1993 research documented the rationalization architecture. Lee and Quarles’ 2012 study measured the empathy deficit. Bandura’s framework named the institutional mechanisms. Zerubavel identified the social conspiracy. Four independent bodies of peer-reviewed academic work, spanning three decades, converge on the same conclusion: what happened here is not an accident, not an oversight, and not a cultural misunderstanding.
It is a choice. Made at every level of the sport. Documented in the scientific literature. And now documented in the public record.
When Past The Wire wrote about this six months ago, we did it because we believe the integrity of this game matters. Now that the national media has forced the sport’s hand, the time for managed public relations and Capitol Hill photo ops is over. The betting public, the fans, and the horses themselves deserve a sport run by people with the psychological courage to face the truth.
And then, as if the universe itself decided the irony had not yet been sufficiently delivered, the Preakness Stakes was won by Napoleon Solo, ridden by Paco Lopez.
Yes, that Paco Lopez.
The same Paco Lopez whose case Past The Wire raised by name at the HISA Town Hall — the jockey who received a suspension for excessive use of the whip, which is the industry’s preferred language for what the rest of us would simply call striking a horse repeatedly beyond any competitive necessity. Lopez rode during that suspension in Louisiana, a state actively litigating against HISA’s authority, where HISA had no jurisdiction. When he eventually returned to HISA-covered tracks, the organization counted his Louisiana rides as time served rather than requiring him to actually serve the suspension under their watch.
He won the Preakness Stakes.
I had thought the chicken farm segment was my Twilight Zone moment. I was wrong. This was it. A jockey who evaded a meaningful whip suspension on a jurisdictional technicality, whose case Past The Wire raised formally and on the record with racing’s own regulatory authority, winning the most prestigious race of the weekend while the sport’s two most prominent jockeys rode without consequence after six months of documented involvement in a federal felony.
You genuinely cannot make this up. I have tried to find the words. There aren’t any.
Racing can no longer afford to protect its stars at the absolute expense of its soul.
After all this I said I might have overthunk it, maybe George Carlin was right all along:
Academic Sources Referenced:
Hawley, Fred. “The Moral and Conceptual Universe of Cockfighters: Symbolism and Rationalization.” Society & Animals, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 159-168. Louisiana State University, 1993.
Lee, Sherman A. and Quarles, Linsey. “Who Feels Sympathy for Roosters Used in Cockfighting? Examining the Influence of Feelings, Belief in Animal Mind, Personality, and Empathy-Related Traits.” Society & Animals, Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 327-341. Christopher Newport University, 2012.
Bandura, Albert. “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities.” Personality and Social Psychology Review, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 193-209. Stanford University, 1999.
Zerubavel, Eviatar. “The Social Sound of Silence: Toward a Sociology of Denial.” In Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Ascione, Frank R. Children and Animals: Exploring the Roots of Kindness and Cruelty. Purdue University Press, 2005. Institute for Human-Animal Connection, University of Denver.
Hawley Study:
Lee, Quarles Study:
Related Coverage:
