Animal rights activists have slapped Topgolf with a scathing legal demand over its towering nets, alleging thousands of birds have suffered and died across the entertainment chain’s 103 U.S. Locations.
Nora Marino, president of the nonprofit Legal Action Network for Animals, sent a letter Friday to the $1.1 billion company insisting it immediately acquire proper equipment to free trapped birds “within a reasonable amount of time” using “only qualified and/or licensed wildlife rescuers and/or rehabilitators.” The attorney, whose organization is pressing the case, laid out the legal stakes in blunt terms.
“It is our opinion that when any bird is trapped in your netting, and is consequently caused to suffer, be injured, and/or die… That is an act of animal cruelty,” Marino said, adding that this violates New York state law.
The campaign against Topgolf’s 120-foot nets gained momentum after rescuers documented repeated incidents at multiple facilities. Barbara Walker, president of Tampa Bay Raptor Rescue and a licensed federal and state wildlife rehabilitator, told The Post she uncovered a pattern of harm stretching back years. She crunched the numbers based on the company’s nationwide footprint.
“Assuming there are 103 120-foot nets with an average catch of five birds per year over the last eight years — then 4,120 birds are affected,” Walker said.
“More importantly, this number can go up exponentially over future years.”
Walker’s investigation intensified after a February report from a man at the Topgolf in St. Petersburg, Fla., located near a nature preserve. The witness sent her disturbing footage of the aftermath.
“He was sending me videos and telling me that there were eight vultures caught in the net,” Walker recalled. “They were throwing up midair.”
She then turned to social media to gauge the scope of the problem.
“I decided to go out to Facebook, and I put in ‘Topgolf Bird,’ and I found story after story, video evidence after video evidence,” Walker said.
“Fire departments are shooting the birds down with hoses… There is one video where a bald eagle is on the ground struggling in the net.”
Frank Floridia, president of Strong Island Animal Rescue League, encountered the crisis firsthand at the Holtsville, Long Island Topgolf last month — twice. The first call came from a customer who spotted employees responding to a trapped hawk with methods that alarmed observers.
“I was alerted by a customer playing golf that there was a bird stuck in the net and that the people there were blowing horns and throwing balls at the bird trying to get it out, and they continued to play and keep the place open for hours while this bird was still stuck,” Floridia said.
Topgolf summoned police and fire department assistance, but their 100-foot ladders fell short of reaching the trapped bird. The hawk eventually freed itself, though Floridia could not confirm whether it survived.
“The bird ended up freeing itself,” he said.
“And within a week, we get a call that there’s another bird stuck in there.”
The second incident drew a swifter response from staff, he noted.
Floridia said the second time it happened, Topgolf employees were quicker to shut the facility down, “because they knew that people were watching.”
Walker criticized the company’s inconsistent approach to rescues, saying procedures “differs from site to site” with no unified protocol governing how employees handle trapped wildlife.
“These are really untrained people dealing with a pretty complicated rescue with zero species knowledge,” she said.
Floridia stressed the specialized skills required for such extractions.
“An average person can’t just go up there and take the hawk or an osprey down,” he added. “It has to be a rehabber that knows how to work with animals”
Marino pointed to a financial motive she believes drives the company’s handling of the nets.
“If they cut one little rung on that net, they may have to replace the entire net, so it’s much cheaper for them to just rip the bird out, break bones, break feathers, break wings,” the attorney said.
She emphasized that mortality is not the threshold for legal violation under animal cruelty statutes.
“The animal does not have to die for it to constitute animal cruelty,” Marino said.
Even birds that escape the netting without dying — impossible to verify since they go untracked — still endure terror and injury during entrapment that meets the legal definition of cruelty, she argued. Topgolf operates locations in New York and three in New Jersey among its 103 U.S. Venues, and did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
