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We began with the obvious, a search on "cockfighting." As expected, Yahoo! had a cockfighting category that featured 10 web sites. Unfortunately, none of these web sites had up-to-date information on the legality of cockfighting in the United States. It was time to revise our search. The two most important words in the question were "cockfighting" and "legal," so we searched on those terms -- a wise decision. Although we didn't receive any Yahoo! categories incorporating these terms, we did receive several hundred web page matches. We clicked on a web page titled, "Congress
asked to end cockfighting." The article was part of Capitol Hill Blue, a web site that claims to be the oldest political news daily on the Web. Published in February of 1999, the article says New Mexico, Louisiana, and Oklahoma are the only states in which cockfighting is still legal; Missouri and Arizona voters banned the practice in November of 1998. Fairly pleased with our findings, we headed back to the search results page to double-check our work and search for more recent information. We found a page from the ASPCA (The American Society For The Prevention of Cruelty To Animals) that addressed the issue. Although there is no date on the web page, it does state that in the year 2000, New Mexico, Louisiana,
and Oklahoma still permit cockfighting. Hoping to find an article written in the past couple of months, we decided to scroll through the search results one more time. We quickly found "Feathers and Blood," a recently published article from Weekly Wire, a network of alternative news and content sites. The in-depth article profiles the dark, violent world of cockfighting. After reading the article, we learned that although cockfighting is indeed legal in the three aforementioned states, matches are illegally staged in many part of the country.
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