State: Alabama · Statute: Code of Alabama § 13A-12-5 (enacted 1996, repealed 2015) · Filed by The Bureau of Real Laws
The claim, as it appears on a thousand "dumb laws" listicles: in Alabama, bear wrestling matches are illegal. For once, the listicles undersold the story. Alabama did not merely ban bear wrestling. For nineteen years, bear wrestling in Alabama was a Class B felony — and the statute reads less like a punchline than like a rescue operation.
Bear wrestling was a real, disreputable attraction: carnival and barroom matches in which a man grappled with a bear for a crowd. The statute's own text tells you how the "sport" worked. Among the offenses it lists is subjecting a bear, "for purposes of exploitation," to surgical alteration "in any form, including, but not limited to, declawing, tooth removal, and severing tendons." In other words, the spectacle depended on mutilating the animal first. In 1996, the Alabama Legislature passed Act No. 96-468, creating the crime of "unlawful bear exploitation."
Section 13A-12-5 gave Alabamians four distinct ways to commit the offense: (1) promote, engage in, or be employed at a bear wrestling match; (2) receive money for admitting another person to a place kept for bear wrestling; (3) sell, purchase, possess, or train a bear for bear wrestling; or (4) surgically alter a bear for exploitation, as described above. Note that merely working the door at a bear wrestling match was a felony.
The enforcement provisions sided squarely with the bear. An arresting officer could seize and take custody of any bear in the arrested person's possession. On conviction, the court could order the bear forfeited to a humane shelter, an animal-protection society, or the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources — and could order the defendant to pay restitution for the bear's housing, feeding, and medical treatment. The bear, legally speaking, was the victim, and it got victim services.
A note on proportion: the statute did not reserve its felony for the man in the ring. The promoter, the ticket-taker, the bear's trainer, and the person who merely owned a bear destined for the ring all stood in the same Class B felony exposure as the wrestler himself. Alabama, in effect, outlawed the entire supply chain of bear wrestling — the venue, the gate, the animal, and the surgery that made the animal "safe" to fight. As anti-cruelty statutes go, it was unusually thorough, and unusually specific: the Legislature did not ban animal fighting in the abstract here. It named the bear.
The section was repealed by Act 2015-70, effective April 21, 2015, and bear wrestling quietly exited the Alabama Code. (General animal-cruelty law, the Bureau notes, never left; the repeal retired a specific statute, not common sense.)
One correction this Bureau is duty-bound to file: the bear law is often miscited as § 13A-12-4.1. That is the wrong animal entirely. Section 13A-12-4 is Alabama's cockfighting statute ("Keeping cockpit; cockfighting"), and § 13A-12-4.1 was a proposed cockfighting section that appeared in bills introduced in 2010, 2011, and 2012 and never became law. The bear lived one section further down, at § 13A-12-5, sandwiched between the cockfighting ban and § 13A-12-6, "Hog and canine fighting" — a whole neighborhood of the Code devoted to stopping people from fighting animals for entertainment.
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