By Bernard Unti

The cockfighters lay spread-eagle on the ground near the fighting pits, as law enforcement officials swarmed the site, collecting live and dead gamecocks, gaffs, drugs, cash, and other evidence. As the lead detective approached, one of the suspects, a large, imposing figure, stood up. “We were just having fun, why have you got to come in and spoil it?” The detective reacted quickly, bent one of the man’s arms around his back, and upended him with a sweeping kick behind the knees. “Arrest him and put him into a patrol car,” he told deputies.

Later, poking his head into the police vehicle, the detective said, “Hope I wasn’t too hard on you, Eric.”

HSUS' Eric Sakach is "arrested" as part of his undercover work exposing animal fighters.

The “suspect” in this 1978 northern California bust was Eric Sakach, a field investigator for The HSUS on one of his earliest undercover assignments. In subsequent years, he would demonstrate special proficiency at infiltrating animal fighting rings, helping to secure the arrests of more than 500 individuals involved in illegal animal fights, as well as some of the first convictions ever under the federal Animal Welfare Act.

And that’s not all. In 30 years with The HSUS, the last 11 as director of the West Coast Regional Office, Sakach has investigated animal cruelty in myriad contexts: in slaughter plants, rodeos, the Iditarod race, the Class B dealer pipeline, the Omak Stampede, the Safari Club, hoarding cases, game farming, and more.

A Family Affair

Sakach was, in a sense, reared for the cause. His mother Elizabeth participated in humane work in the western states beginning in the early 1960s. A musician in a municipal band, she often performed at rodeos where she often saw the handling of animals up close. Her activism began after an incident in which two horses’ legs were broken, and they were not put down for two days. She went on to make a film exposing the rodeo, and traveled as far away as Ohio to support The HSUS’ reform efforts. She was once interviewed about her views in “Cosmopolitan.”

In the Sakach family, someone was always bringing home a stray animal, and working alongside his mother, Eric met many humane advocates near Reno, Nevada, where he grew up. One of the most memorable was Velma Johnson, known as “Wild Horse Annie,” who also lived there.

With the encouragement of HSUS staff member Dale Hylton, Eric founded Ecolokind, a youth outreach group. After attending college, Eric worked as a commercial illustrator. He kept his hand in humane work, testifying at a hearing on pound seizure in Nevada, and contributing pre-computer era “clip art” to The HSUS’ humane education publications.

A Great Friend and Mentor

Hired by John Hoyt in 1976, Sakach worked under the WCRO’s Charlene Drennon but answered to Frantz Dantzler at HSUS headquarters. Dantzler, who directed the regional office system and the investigations section, would often pull field investigators out of their regions for special assignments.

“I felt an immediate affinity with Frantz, in part because he was 6 foot 6 and I was 6 foot 5,” Sakach recalled. “He had intelligence and persistence, which you need to be a successful investigator.”

Some of the greatest challenges Sakach faced came during the years he worked under Dantzler. “There were some dangerous situations. Assuming a character, going into livestock auctions, and slaughterhouses, and fighting pits, all that stuff.”

Then too, there was the classic dilemma the humane investigator faces, “the difficulty of having to look at something that’s awful, knowing that this is what it takes to get the evidence you need.”

The suspense and the risk weren’t always momentary. During a dogfighting investigation in Arkansas in 1979, the largest ever of its kind, Sakach spent some days undercover. Once in your role, Sakach said, “you don’t have much access to outside information, you are in the middle of nowhere, you are there with the bad guys, you don’t know if the good guys are coming, and when they do, you are going to get arrested with the bad guys and treated like one to preserve your cover.”

“I was drinking a lot of Pepto-Bismol in those years,” Sakach recalled.

Taking the Long View Forward

After 30 years in the field, Sakach’s passion for the work remains high, and he’s encouraged by what he considers a stronger commitment by The HSUS to root out animal fighting. In California, Nevada, Washington and Oregon, for example, all states in which he has worked extensively, cockfighting has gone from a misdemeanor crime to a felony in only a few years. Still, he admitted, “I am a realist. Animal fighting is not going away soon. But it’s going to go away a lot sooner now that we’re staying with it.”

As part of his general responsibilities, Sakach has evaluated numerous sheltering facilities, testified and lobbied on humane issues in legislatures, contested inappropriate uses of animals in secondary and higher education, and served as an expert witness on animal fighting in the courts of several states, and in Canada. An instructor at the California Humane Law Enforcement Training Academy since 1984, and in other settings across the United States, he has taught some 11,000 humane and law enforcement personnel.

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Sakach on the scene of a dogfighting case.

A veteran disaster responder, Sakach served as part of The HSUS’ disaster response team in the Gulf Coast states during Hurricane Katrina, doing a stint as incident commander in Gonzales, La.

For some years Sakach has also been a member of the Awards Committee for the Genesis Awards. One of the things he likes best about that assignment is the boost he receives from seeing so much animal-friendly content.

You need these “little shots in the arm,” Sakach said, "and you don’t always know where and when they are going to come along,” he commented, pointing to the recent announcement by Smithfield Foods that it would phase out gestation crates for sows by 2017. “Things happen for the good, sometimes unexpectedly, in our work,” he said. “That kind of stuff keeps me going.”