The paraphernalia that law enforcement unearthed during a search of Jennifer Scott’s home in Chester illustrated an incontrovertible picture.
A dummy rooster provided a “simulated opponent” for the game fowl Scott raised and trained on her 15-acre property. Officers recovered sparring muffs, nine of them, and an egg incubator, according to court documents.
The living evidence was unmistakable: 76 roosters, 84 hens and 261 juvenile chickens.
Scott, who pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of Attending an Animal fighting Venture, was sentenced to a year of probation and ordered to pay a $2,500 fine on Friday — nearly six years after the Chester Police Department first received a complaint alerting them to Scott’s activities.
“The defendant participated in a multistate cockfighting venture and profited from animal
cruelty,” U.S. Attorney Erin Creegan said in a statement. “The conduct was extensive, involving networks of participants at multiple locations in North Carolina, as well as scores of animals.
Scrutiny of Scott’s illegal venture intensified in late 2020, when her children made statements at school that raised alarms for administrators.
One of her children, who was 10-years-old at the time, made a comment in conversation with a paraprofessional that indicated she had traveled with her family to North Carolina for rooster fights. “The child said that the family needed cars to transport their roosters to North Carolina and that the family made a lot of money,” according to court documents.
The school principal brought the child’s comments to the attention of Chester’s chief of police.
The other child, a 14-year-old student, justified his absence from school by explaining to a teacher that his family had returned home from North Carolina late the night before.
Investigators tracked the family’s movements along the East Coast with the help of license plate readers, which documented their travel along the Interstate-95 corridor during the weekend in question, and a search of Scott’s phone revealed more about their trip.
“We almost [w]on the derby. We lost [f]irst one because he stopped [f]or a second and he got cut in the neck,” Scott told a third-party in a series of exchanges through Facebook Messenger. “But we won 3. […] Almost [w]on the whole [d]erby.”
After law enforcement searched her home in March of 2021, Scott admitted to attending cock fights in North Carolina and transporting and trading roosters. In September of 2025, she pleaded guilty through a plea agreement.
In Creegan’s view, Scott’s activities were “serious and extensive,” causing “serious harm to hundreds of animals.”
The search of Scott’s property revealed “substantial evidence that the animals
were being trained to fight,” Creegan wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “The animals were thus not only subject to harm during the official cockfights themselves, but for their whole lives in being raised and trained to fight and to be brutalized.”
Scott is prohibited from owning or raising roosters or chickens as a term of her probation.