An article by DRONELIFE.com shares:
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 21st 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.”
Soaring to new heights, together.
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