Marijuana raiders get chicken

This looks suspicious to me. The Santa Clara County sheriff's marijuana suppression team (marijuana suppression team?) spent a week staking out a farm, one would assume in order to suppress some cannabis. I guess they found a couple of plants, but since they refuse to say how many, one would think it wasn't a very impressive bust and probably not worth the cost to the taxpayer.

They did however get dozens of chickens, namely gamecocks that they are certain were being used in cock-fighting, although they admit they were not aware of any cockfighting at the site in recent times. This is just another way that the authorities co-opt the war on some drugs and use it to "fight" other crimes just as they co-opt the war on terror and use it to bust drug consumers.

I'm not condoning cock-fighting, I understand it's a brutal sport but I figure they could have sent in the SPCA and a game warden which would have cost the taxpayers a lot less of their hard-earned money. One would bet that they didn't have the evidence to arrest these folks for raising chickens so they used a couple of marijuana plants as a ploy to gain access to the property.

It's begging for civil rights violations when the police start blurring the lines of proper investigative procedure like this. You pay a lot for special training for drug cops and they should not be employed in chasing poultry. If you let them get away with the little stuff, by the time they get to the big stuff it will be too late to stop the police state.

UPDATE: Now this is interesting. I just found an older piece that spins this story in an entirely different direction. This "news outlet" says it was a month long investigation based on helicopter flyover which saw 5,000 plants and that the chickens were discovered inadvertently. They still admit having a weeklong stakeout. I leave it to you to figure which version is true but I've raised poultry in my lifetime. They stink and they're noisy. No way they could have missed that and if they busted 5,000 plants, don't the think the "supression team" would be boasting of a huge bust instead of declining comment?

Could it be that they couldn't prove a nexus between the field and the chicken farmers and now want to let the press attention die down? Something smells wrong here, and I don't think it's just the chickens.