Animal rights group uses drones to combat abusive situations

By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

Because cock fighting is illegal in every U.S. state, the gamblers and promoters of this cruel sport most often resort to holding their events behind high fences or in remote rural areas far from the view of critical eyes.

However, thanks to the efforts of Showing Animals Respect & Kindness (SHARK), a small Illinois-based non-profit which for almost two decades has been using drones to expose cock-fighting and other forms of animal abuse, these abusers have fewer places to hide.

Steve Hindi, founder and president of SHARK, said the group believes the best way to stop animal abuse is to bring evidence of it to light.

“I think the way to make things clear for people is to get video documentation or still pictures of whatever you’re concerned about and just let people see for themselves and make up their own mind,” he said.

Since the early years of the 21^st century SHARK has relied on unmanned aerial vehicles and ultralight aircraft to collect the images that it uses to try to bring animal abusers to justice. “Obviously, being able to put yourself in the air, you could get past the barriers that animal abusers tend to put up, which can be lots of trees, high walls, fences, whatever,” he said.

The group already had begun experimenting with the use of small radio-controlled helicopters to collect airborne images, when the first generation of multi-rotor drones was being introduced. However, SHARK’s drone program really took off following its receipt of a $500,000 grant from the late game show host and-rights activist Bob Barker. SHARK used the grant money to buy its first rudimentary drones and equipment.

Even then, the animal rights group took its time to learn how to embrace the new technology to help pursue its pro-animal mission.

“Nobody knew anything about flying drones. I and another associate, we’re private pilots, but that didn’t really translate too much into remote-controlled aircraft. So, we just started training,” he said. “It wasn’t until 2010 that we actually flew in the field and did an operation.”

That first surveillance mission involved recording the activity of a live-pigeon shooting operation. Live-pigeon shooting is a form of skeet shooting in which the participants fire live birds — rather that clay pigeons — out of traps, to be shot for sport. Although clay pigeons have been around for years, some “sportsmen” still prefer to test their shooting skill on live animals.

“There are some people who want to kill animals. They didn’t want to have to understand them or stalk them or clean them or eat them. They just want to kill them,” Hindi said.

Those early-version drones were difficult to fly and had limited capabilities for capturing still or moving images. “Those cameras were jumping around and the copters just couldn’t fly very long. But we stuck with it.” Gradually, as the technology improved SHARK became more proficient in using unmanned aerial vehicles to document incidents of abuse.

“First it was the German products. And then, DJI came along and we just started going with them, developing and improving our drone operation as we went, as the gimbals became more steady and the cameras improved,” he said.

Today, the organization deploys a wide array of drones for different operations. “We’ve got Mavics, we’ve got Matrices — we have the new Matrice 400, which is a wonderful aircraft — all the way down to the Mavic Mini.”

Documenting many forms of abuse

SHARK deploys its drone fleet to document many forms of abuse, from cock fights to steer-tailing, a cruel form of rodeo entertainment, which causes much suffering to both the steers and the horses involved.

One form of abuse that the group was instrumental in putting a halt to was the illicit hunting of cownose rays, a type of fish from the shark and skate family. “These beautiful animals would come into the Chesapeake Bay area to spawn every spring,” Hindi said.

The creatures would swim close to the surface, making them easy targets for hunters in boats. “They were using bows,” he said. The hunters would shoot the ray and haul them into the boats with a line attached to the arrow.

“They wouldn’t eat them,” Hindi said. “They claimed to eat them, but we actually filmed them taking all the dead ones after they were weighed, taking them back into the bay and dumping them. That was one of the things that we got stopped.”

In another well-known incident, in 2022 SHARK helped spur the investigation of a beagle-breeding and research facility in Virginia, which resulted in the rescue of 4,000 of the dogs. Although several large nationally known animal rights groups eventually took part in the investigation, Hindi said SHARK was the first organization to collect video evidence of the abuse taking place at the facility.

“It was our drones that first went in and filmed the beagles because they had outside pens and we could see the beagles. They were fighting, and they had their feces and urine all over their pens,” he said. “Some of them were cage crazy and it was just a mess.”

SHARK has a big bite

Although it is tiny compared with some of the more well-known and better funded animal rights organizations, SHARK’s focus on in-the-field investigations helps it have an outsized impact on animal abuse cases in states across the U.S. The group has helped break up cock-fighting rings in Texas, California and Delaware, and live-pigeon shooting operations in Pennsylvania.

Because it operates in different states, with varying laws regarding the operation of drones, Hindi said SHARK’s Part 107-certified drone pilots must be cognoscente of all the various state and local drone ordinances as well as federal aviation laws.

“Sometimes, we’ve got to get waivers, if we’re close to an airport or something like that,” he said.

Some state laws are more restrictive for drones than others. For example, in its home state of Illinois SHARK is not prohibited from flying over private property, while the state of Texas prohibits drones from collecting images while flying above someone’s private property and prohibits the publication and distribution of those images.

In addition, Hindi said the group strictly adheres to the federal prohibition against flying over people, both to remain on the right side of the law and for more practical reasons as well. “It’s just not a great idea anyway, but we have no desire to fly over people. You can’t see as well what they’re doing when you’re flying right over them,” he said. “For us, we want to be off to the side.”

There’s another consideration for not flying above people, especially those who’re engaging in illicit activity, who don’t want observers in the sky above them recording their actions.

“I doubt there’s any organization in the world that has had as many drones shot down. At one time, at a live-pigeon shoot in South Carolina, we had three shot down in one day,” Hindi said. “Which I guess leads to the question of: ‘How many drones do you carry?’ We carry a number of them. We don’t really give those numbers out.”

Because it is a small operation that relies a lot on volunteers in its operations, SHARK is constantly on the lookout for certified drone pilots across the country.

“So, any drone pilots or even would-be drone pilots out there who want to help animals, get in touch with us. We’d love to work with you,” he said.

Read more:

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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.