Bill,

We are working on a compromise to try and reduce the first two offenses to a misdemeanor and the third offense a felony. I do believe this is the best we can do in the House. Then try and kill it in the Senate. Have you talked to your lobbyist Dar(r)ell Campbell?

TED

YOU MIGHT think the House had made a bold statement last week when it passed a bill to toughen the anemic penalties against cockfighting.

That is, if you hadn’t seen the e-mail that accurately predicted precisely what the House did — posted a few days earlier on a web site that caters to acknowledged criminals — which “Bill” says came from S.C. Rep. Ted Vick. Or if you didn’t know that cockfighting would still have a special status in South Carolina, with penalties far less than those for dog fighting, bear baiting and other sports designed to nurture the bloodlust of spectators.

Rep. Vick, one of 30 House members who voted against the cockfighting bill even after winning concessions from the bill’s sponsors to water it down, told me Thursday he didn’t remember writing to “Bill” but could have. He readily acknowledged that he was among the legislators who had worked to make sure that the penalties weren’t too tough for people who break the law.

Mr. Vick called my concerns about legislators working with criminals to keep their crimes from being punished enough to deter their actions “very valid.” But he explained that in any field, “there’s gonna be a couple of yahoos in the group that are gonna say things that aren’t couthful” and give others “a bad name.”

They would be the folks who wrote Rep. Merrill Smith to say they “defeated a gubernatorial candidate who opposed cockfighting in Oklahoma, and I needed to reconsider my position.”

They would be the now-infamous cockers who showed up at Mr. Smith’s subcommittee hearing and said “we’re not cockfighting, we’re ‘gamefowl-fighting,’ or we’re ‘testing.’”

“They said don’t make us criminals,” Mr. Smith recalled after the House vote, still amazed by the encounter that turned him into a passionate advocate for the change. “I said, ‘Do you cockfight?’ and they said ‘yes.’ I said, ‘Aren’t you a criminal?’ They said ‘no.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute; you’re violating an existing statute.’ They said, ‘Yes, but it’s not serious.’”

Think of them as little-bit-pregnant cockfighters.

They would be the people who kept my phone ringing off the hook and my e-mail account buzzing the day I wrote a column explaining why it was important to remove the special exemption lawmakers had given cockfighting from the tough penalties of the Animal Fighting and Baiting Act (“The provisions of this chapter do not apply to game fowl.”).

When one caller followed the standard script — demanding to know if I had ever attended a cockfight and saying I had no right to denounce the “sport” if I hadn’t — I told him I felt perfectly qualified to denounce murder, even though I had never offed anyone. He wasn’t amused.

I could barely keep from rolling on the floor in laughter when he finally got to the “substance” of his argument: Since chickens are naturally aggressive, there’s nothing owners can do to prevent a “spontaneous” fight; if the bill passed, every chicken owner in the state could be hauled off to prison and have his property confiscated. That argument — which ignores the plain “intent” language of the bill — turned out to be the substance of nearly all the messages.

And if a ring sprouts up around my testy chickens, and they strap little spurs onto their feet, and 100 people wander onto my property and start giving me wads of cash to place bets on the spontaneous brawl, how is that MY fault?

I have tried for three weeks now to imagine the same outpouring of nasty phone calls and e-mails from drug addicts challenging my right to call for longer sentences for distribution since I don’t use crack.

But my imagination just isn’t that good. The only parallel I can come up with is video poker operators who used to harangue me for demanding that they be required to obey the law. Like the old poker barons, the chicken fighters think themselves astoundingly clever, defiantly refuse to obey the law and have decided that the way to keep having their way with our state is to grease the right politician’s palms. And that — more than the particulars of their criminal activity — is what makes them dangerous.

Another cockfighting web site was buzzing Thursday with outrage over the fact that the House had passed the bill — and with plans to launch the second part of the strategy Mr. Vick might have outlined: Kill it in the Senate.

“To all you bunny huggers that read this board ... you can never stop what we do,” one proud criminal wrote. “Home of the South Carolina Gamecocks(.) I have a good feeling the Senate want (sic) have enough time to vote on this bill, may have the summer to be better prepared ... keep em crowing(.) I heel to kill!”

For the uninitiated, Webster’s says “heel” means “to equip a gamecock with metal spurs.”

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.