A lot of the gambling in Washington takes place in large glitzy casinos or cozy neighborhood card rooms.
There’s a darker type of betting that happens in underground events with makeshift dirt arenas or cinder block lined pits where spectators bet on which dog or rooster will prevail in a vicious fight.
This week The Impact delves into how state and local investigators are working to interrupt animal fighting operations and some of the recent changes to state law that help them do that.
The show features a panel interview with Sam Moore, the founder and president of Washington State Animal Fighting Task Force, and Ronnie Cooper, a special agent supervisor for the Washington State Gambling Commission.
View the episode below or you can jump to specific portions of the interview using the links below.
- Cooper: 3:11 – 3:18 Direct link “The gambling commission, we’ve investigated cock fighting throughout the state and, and most of it’s in our rural areas.”
- Cooper 3:38 – 3:46 Direct link “They’re time consuming and they take a while to investigate, but in the end, I think it’s worth it.”
- Cooper 9:18 – 9:33 Direct link “I’ve seen them feed birds a lot of different things including cocaine and meth, methamphetamine, to get them hyped up for that, just that… the few seconds or moments in the fighting ring to be able to fight the other bird.”
- Cooper 4:43 – 5:18 Direct link “We work very, very closely with animal control throughout the state. The element of gambling is always going to be present, whether it’s dog fighting or cock fighting. And so that’s where we come in. And so we work together to go from the beginning to the end and animal control. They have their issues that they investigate and then we kind of piggyback off that, finding the gambling nexus and then we go that route for charging them for professional gambling.”
- Moore 11:40 – 12:11 Direct link “Dogs are a lot easier to conceal. I have dealt with cases where they were concealed on top of apartments, roof tops, they were concealed in basements. They were stacked about five crates high. The dog fighting, it’s easier to conceal and we’ve heard of fights happening where people will rent out Airbnb rooms. They’ll have a fight there and clean everything up and then leave. No one knows any different.”
- Moore 5: 37 – 6:11 Direct link “They look at it as a business for a lot of them, this is their livelihood. This is how they make their money. And for them it is their business. A lot of times whether it is cock fighting or dog fighting, we are seeing, you know, prostitution, drug deals, you know, gambling and it’s a family event. So we’re also seeing a lot of children at these events which ultimately desensitize them to it.”
- Moore 18:30 – 19:04 Direct link “The birds are a little bit easier to point out. If you see multiple birds on a property that are housed individually, while it may not be a hard red flag, it is something that animal control or law enforcement should at least put eyes on to ensure that everything is, you know, being handled the way that it should be. So that’s the big indicator for cockfighting in general.”