Strict laws force cockfighting further underground

The cockfight was three hours old by the time the Okanogan County sheriff’s deputies rolled up to the blue barn.

Before the deputies’ car stopped, the barn doors suddenly flew open. Dozens of people bolted, dashing through drifts of fresh snow. One man was caught fleeing with a bloodied rooster. Another had nearly $1,800 in his pocket, half of which he later said he had won that day.

Inside the barn, near the orchard town of Brewster, Wash., was a makeshift fighting pit, scales, razor-sharp cockfighting blades, and, in a trash can, five dead roosters.

For a few moments on Dec. 23, the underground world of cockfighting was in the glare of police lights. It has been outlawed in Washington for a century, yet each year there are at least 100 cockfights around the state, supported by about 1,000 breeders of gamecocks, according to cockfighters and police estimates.

The blood sport survives despite some of the stiffest penalties in the country. In 2005, animal-rights activists persuaded lawmakers to make it a felony to raise fighting cocks. Last year, watching a cockfight became a felony.

Those laws, however, are only sporadically enforced. Until the December bust, when four people caught near Brewster pleaded guilty, just one person – an 18-year-old in Pasco – had been convicted under the new felony laws. The four in Brewster were sentenced to about a month in jail, but remain in detention pending immigration hearings and possible deportation to Mexico.

The cockfighting circuit is thriving the most in rural Washington and among immigrant groups from countries – including Mexico and the Philippines — where cockfighting is legal.

But gamecock pens have been found in suburban Mountlake Terrace, and the sport’s most outspoken proponent is a former state legislator, Jack Cairnes, of Kent.

Cairnes said the new laws, however vigorous the enforcement, have scared the insular cockfighting circuit further into secrecy. He said he was scared enough by “the animal-rights wackos” to move to New Mexico in 2005, one of two states where cockfighting is still legal, so he could continue to raise and fight gamecocks.

“Now that I’m out of office, I’m very outspoken,” he said. “I’m tired of being scandalized and criminalized for something that should be neither …

“Why would any rational sheriff want to go out and arrest someone for going out and owning a chicken, with all the other things going on in the country?”

Ray Wakeman, a cockfighting expert with the Washington State Gambling Commission, said he used to drive through rural areas and see roosters, their wattles and spurs trimmed, tethered in huts to foment the birds’ natural aggression.

Now, cockfighters are less visible, but no less active, he said. “It happens a lot more than people realize, and it happens in places that people would never guess.”