Phil Busse

Whether it’s a shadow in the wilderness that can’t be explained, or a strange noise in the dark, Bigfoot is about believing. A smattering of Bigfoot enthusiasts have coalesced into a small but energetic group of believers over the last 15 years. There were 15 bona fide organizations around North America by 1998, with an estimated 2,000 self-proclaimed Bigfoot seekers — almost as many as the number of Bigfoot supposedly roaming the backcountry.

There’s a group of neighbors in Placerville, Calif., who routinely meet and talk about Bigfoot’s whereabouts in Northern California. In Washington, a man named Cliff Crook signed up his wife and son to form Bigfoot Central. Even in Maine (about as far away from Bigfoot in the U.S. as one can get), a group of so-called crypto-zoologists pore over hair follicles, footprints and a grab bag of evidence.

Here in Oregon, the self-proclaimed largest Sasquatch organization in the world, the Western Bigfoot Society (WBS), meets for lunch every Tuesday at the Lighthouse Café in the blue-collar town of Linton, about five miles north of Portland. The numbers attending vary from 4 to 15.

“I don’t know why we started meeting on Tuesdays,” says WBS director Ray Crowe. “I think it started because I had something to do the other days of the week.”

At the lunch meetings, the subject of Bigfoot is almost as elusive as the creature itself, bobbing in and out of conversation about the members’ grandchildren and the Lighthouse lunch specials.

About 10 people are seated around a heavy oak table at my first meeting with the WBS. “I’m not a believer or a nonbeliever,” claims Lloyd, a retired veterinarian. He wears a wide-brimmed hat and has the personality of a kind uncle who pulls quarters from your ear. He goes on to tell me that for centuries, there were rumors about giant black-and-white bears roaming the alpine hinterlands of China. Then, in 1936, the first panda bear was captured. “It was all bullshit until then,” he says. “There is new stuff out there all of the time.”

Lloyd jerks a thumb toward the densely green hills flanking the restaurant. “There are millions of acres of forest,” he says. “You could hide an elephant up there.”

These people are chummy — Bigfoot is both a reason and an excuse for meeting. While the reality of the beast may be a bit hazy, the idea of it remains enough of a core for this motley subculture.

“This is the last, greatest hunt in the world,” says Sam. “It gives us a reason to look at the hills differently.” In 1993, Sam (who prefers not to use his real name) spotted what he believes were three Bigfoot standing in a quarry at the base of Saddle Mountain, near Seaside. But even he has his doubts. “To a lot of people I have to ask: Are you really trying to find this thing or are you just enjoying a mystery?”

Paradoxically, as long as Bigfoot is never captured, these groups will have a reason to exist. Until then, there are no absolute answers for those attending these meetings, only speculative questions: Is Bigfoot a herbivore or a carnivore? Friendly or mean? And, well, does he even exist?

Any gathering of humans develops its own invisible hierarchies and rules for belonging, from sorority girls to NASA. The interior dynamics of the Bigfoot community are no different, with gripes ranging from petty personality conflicts to serious theoretical disputes.

Even the amiable and polite Crowe has his detractors. They believe that putting an open and public face on the Bigfoot community plays too much into the general public’s perceptions about the creature. After years of ridicule, from tabloids claiming that Sasquatch has taken Marilyn Monroe as his bride to Nike using the elusive beast as a foot model for a national television campaign, there is a discernible opinion that the community should shield itself from the public and shape its image. One longtime tracker stopped attending the annual Bigfoot Daze after Crowe organized a wedding ceremony two years ago, where the groom wore a gorilla suit. “He’s playing into the parody factor,” said the detractor, who preferred to stay anonymous.

Knoll, a globally recognized engineer from Edmund, Wash., bemoans that Crowe “just collects information.” To Knoll, who painstakingly tries to filter reliable accounts from the hoaxes and “crazies,” such an approach is undisciplined. “He just presents what he gets and doesn’t analyze it.”

There is no common profile of a Bigfoot enthusiast, but most are earnest, over 40 and financially stable. Many have advanced degrees and enjoy the outdoors. Some have a military background. What’s more, simple “willingness to believe” is not necessarily a ticket to join this group. “There is no clear policy,” concludes one insider, referring to the unspoken rules that govern admission. But clearly, he continues, some people get “cold shouldered.” Among the cold-shouldered are UFO “weirdos” (“they give the whole thing a bad name!” one WBS member exclaims) and the greatest pariahs of the community, “the hoaxers” — those who plant phony footprints in the wilderness or claim sightings. Some hoaxers are simply pranksters; others are current members looking to gain favor from a community that, to a large degree, ranks its members on the amount of information one possesses about Bigfoot.

Last July, a psychologist from southern Oregon, Dr. Matthew Johnson, was hiking with his family along the coastal bluffs of Cave Junction National Monument. Suddenly he heard a low chirping noise and caught a whiff of something rank. He claims the peculiar sound startled him so much, he was almost struck incontinent. Instead, he scurried to a nearby bush and from there, with his trousers around his ankles, Johnson says that he caught an unobstructed view of a 7-foot-tall Bigfoot, which, at the time, was watching his family.

Johnson’s story is the type that fuels the group’s enthusiasm, the seemingly sincere conversion of a nonbeliever. But these sightings also carry a vexing dilemma. Where does this new person fit into the group dynamic, where information and reputation are the measurements of social rank? “All it takes is a sighting to put you at the top of the pyramid,” claims one tracker. “And that pisses a lot of people off.”

Johnson was catapulted to the summit of the Bigfoot community within days. He conducted upward of 100 interviews with newspapers and TV stations. No more than a week after the sighting, he posted a Web site explaining the alleged event. He was, in this community, an overnight sensation.

Two weeks after Johnson’s sighting, someone posted an inquiry on one of the more active Bigfoot chat rooms. The question was subversive: “When did Dr. Johnson register his URL?” The insinuation was that Johnson might have requested the domain name before his encounter with Bigfoot.

A barrage of messages jumped to Johnson’s defense, proclaiming that his Web site was testimony to the new inductee’s desire to help validate Bigfoot sightings. “He wants to create a paradigm shift,” said one supporter. “He wants to get rid of the stigma and get credibility.”

Without proof and despite this outpouring of support, the damage was done; Johnson’s reputation in the Bigfoot community had been sabotaged.

At a mid-July lunch meeting of the WBS, speculation ran rampant. Clearly, even if Johnson was bringing good news, the group was uneasy about a newcomer.

“He started selling T-shirts,” says one skeptical member. Big money is rare in the Bigfoot community, whereas UFO sightings can yield tens of thousands in honorariums at conferences or book deals. The lack of monetary incentive seems to lend credibility to the Bigfoot sightings. Theata Crowe, Ray’s wife, joked that she had only made $7 from her book, “How to Cook a Bigfoot.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” says Theata, “that moves him to the back of the bus.”

“That was Cave Junction’s doing,” Crowe interrupts, referring to the concession stand at the National Park that immediately began selling T-shirts after Johnson’s sighting.

All heads turn to him. “I’ve talked to him a few times now,” Crowe tells the group. He pauses. “I think I believe him.” His statement stops the conversation.

There are two roads to belief, and ever since Galileo proclaimed that the earth was not the center of the universe, these paths have taken different routes. One road is less an actual pathway than a single leap of faith; the true, unflinching believer starts with the premise that God, reincarnation, Santa Claus or Bigfoot exists. From here, true believers cast their belief backward, lining up bread crumbs to show how they reached this point. Unexplained twists of fate, miracles, weird noises in the dark, broken tree branches and the unexplained suddenly add up to a graspable reality.

A handful of members begin to talk at another BFS meeting about some of the people who have cycled through their organization — and why those people aren’t around anymore. One member was upset about a tracker who had borrowed his camper about a year ago for a backwoods Bigfoot excursion. “He must’ve gotten drunk and walked on the roof,” the member said. “The damn roof leaked after he dropped it back off.”

His wife quickly adds: “And, he left the thing without any gas!”

The members at the lunch table then begin to discuss other former members whose credibility fell short of the group’s standards.

“You can tell the guys who will eventually see Bigfoot,” says one member. “They talk themselves into it,” adds Theata, from the far end of the table.

Lloyd, the retired vet, leans toward me and says, “More like smoke themselves into it.” He smiles and winks at me. Although popular conception may categorize Bigfoot enthusiasts as easy-to-please believers, the serious Bigfoot enthusiast spends four to six days a month on the ground, hiking through remote Pacific Northwest forests, pawing river banks for footprints and combing tree branches for shreds of evidence.

A man sitting next to me claims he spends four to five days a month in the Pacific Northwest backcountry looking for Bigfoot. He has thick forearms and says he’s a bear hunter. He finishes his sandwich in a blink of an eye. Four summers ago, he was camping with his son at Squaw Mountain in southern Washington. In the late afternoon, just as the hard edges of the sun were softening, they pitched their tent on a bald spot of the mountain. His son had brought his bugle and was practicing on a perch overhanging the wooded valley below. After a few minutes, they heard a noise from the dense foliage returning their calls. The man grabbed his video camera to capture the sound.

“I know elk vocalization,” he says. “This was something else — something with huge lung capacity.”

Returning home, he sent the tapes to several local colleges. The University of Washington returned the tape, saying that the sounds were inconclusive.

The urge to document Bigfoot has been a central force in the community for the past three decades. In 1967, two amateur Bigfoot enthusiasts, Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin, ventured into the Bluff Creek National Forest, a remote patch of land just south of the Oregon-California border. Only 10 years earlier, the area had been accessible only by a two-day hike. When a logging road was constructed in 1958, the crews allegedly found scores of oversize footprints in the soft sand. A press release referred to the creature’s “big feet,” saddling the elusive beast with its current popular name.

While riding on horseback through the area, Patterson and Gimlin claim to have spotted a Bigfoot. They filmed it walking across a gray sandbar. Lasting a mere 4 seconds, the film shows a languid creature calmly swinging its arms as it moves back into the woods. Shot on an old 16 mm camera, the footage is out of focus and muddy. The image is distant and looks a lot like a person dressed in a gorilla suit.

The so-called Patterson film sparked a powder keg of boyhood fantasies and would-be big-game explorers. Countless amateur scientists set off into the Pacific Northwest woods over the next decade, hoping to snare the first irrefutable evidence that Bigfoot exists. It is the ultimate romantic search, the type that promises to change the way we think, to provide a solid pathway — not a leap of faith — to the Truth. It was an era that molded a new mentality and set the challenge for Bigfoot enthusiasts. Perhaps the person who most shaped this era — one that lasted from the surfacing of the Patterson film until three years ago — is Peter Byrne.

Byrne is a contemporary Indiana Jones, polite, charismatic and well-respected in and out of the Bigfoot community. Byrne had established a top-notch trekking outfit in Nepal long before hiking the Himalayas was a yuppie coming-of-age ritual. Then, in 1960, Byrne moved to the Pacific Northwest. From then forward, he was a Bigfoot enthusiast. In the late ’70s, after publishing “The Search for Bigfoot: Monster, Myth, or Man?” (Pocket Books), Byrne established the Bigfoot Research Project. For several years, this outfit was headquartered in The Dalles, Ore., and became a familiar sight for travelers along I-84. On average, he maintained a half-million dollar flow of contributions each year, from benefactors as diverse as the Boston Institute of Science to former trekking clients. One major contributor, Texas oil millionaire Tom Slick, also currently funds a hunt for giant salamanders in the California desert. “If the Pacific Northwest was the closet of America,” says one current tracker, “then Peter Byrne brought us out.”

Byrne used his reputation as a big-game explorer and respected trekker to lend a certain degree of validity to the Bigfoot community. About half the Bigfoot seekers interviewed cite Byrne as an inspiration. His research methods inspired others to follow suit, giving a certain scientific rigor to the chase.

Then in 1997 Byrne retired from Bigfoot hunting and moved to the Los Angeles area. He left behind a trail of Bigfoot researchers — believers who now had the advantage of online research and communication. At first it looked good for the community, but in fact, the Internet explosion coupled with a marked increase in the public’s appetite for outdoor activities may actually send Bigfoot enthusiasts scurrying back into the shadows.

Late last summer, a Portland chapter of the Audubon Society sponsored a five-day “Bigfoot” camp for 12- to 15-year-olds. The century-old environmental organization, typically more associated with bird-watching and quiet strolls through the woods, used Bigfoot as a sales hook to interest adolescents. The teenagers camped near Mount St. Helens, where there have been hundreds of sightings, and learned tracking techniques, but ultimately the Audubon Society distanced itself from any serious pursuit of Bigfoot. It’s just a way to get kids into the outdoors, said Steve Robertson, education director at Audubon. “We don’t want to give people the wrong idea that the Audubon Society believes there’s a Sasquatch,” he explained.

Many members of the Bigfoot community believe that such half-serious outings threaten to co-opt their personality. For a group of outsiders, who take pride in being as elusive as the creature they are hunting, such acceptance may ultimately corrupt their tightly knit community. This and the rise of the Internet have diminished the need for organizations like the Western Bigfoot Society and annual conferences like Bigfoot Daze. By providing a virtual, year-round swap meet for information and Bigfoot data, the Internet has swiped one of the primary purposes of these Bigfoot organizations and events. A longtime Bigfoot conference in British Columbia was canceled last winter and attendance at last summer’s Bigfoot Daze in Washington was poor. Several speakers failed to show. Another “celebrity” said it would be his last.

“These events are dying,” he claimed, asking that his name be withheld. “There is no need to get together.” Standing over a table of books, tracking records and Bigfoot postcards at a recent Bigfoot conference, Crowe brushes aside such speculation. “No,” he says, “people want something that they can hold onto.”

“Well,” quips one attendee, referring to the potential demise of such events like the weekly Western Bigfoot Society lunches, “at least we won’t have to waste our Tuesday afternoons anymore.”

“We’ll just move on to Loch Ness,” his wife adds.

At about 7 in the morning in late January, as darkness faded into a winter gray, a dozen officers stormed the barn. They expected to find a web of tubing, beakers and other meth-producing paraphernalia, but what they discovered was far more alarming. Except for a large, square mound of dirt ringed by ropes, the barn was nearly empty. But the cavernous interior of the barn was alive with squawking. Along the walls were nearly 30 metal cages, each stuffed with robust game hens.

“We’re a bunch of drug cops,” detective Keith Seanor said about his surprising find. “I didn’t know exactly what was going on, but it looked suspicious.”

About once a year, police in Oregon stumble on the sprawling cockfighting circuits that reach from New Mexico to Washington. Like the drug trade, these networks are well organized and secretive. The popularity of cockfighting in Oregon is unknown, but law enforcement agents estimate the fight circuit will draw around 6,000 spectators during the upcoming spring and summer seasons — about the same attendance as the recent state high school basketball championships.

Fights are held in arenas complete with concession stands, armed guards and bleachers seating upward of 300. Many take place in barns like the one in Junction City. Just a few years ago a major bust on Deer Island, a few miles north of Portland, uncovered a fight with almost 400 spectators. Currently, law enforcement agents say, they are casing a major breeder who sponsors fights on his several acres of land near Gresham.

As the activity is largely associated with Central America, the popular conception is that cockfighters in the U.S. also are Latino. Most of the breeders, however, are rural, white farmers and most of the cockfighters who have been arrested, at least in the Pacific Northwest, are white, small-town dwellers. There is nothing to suggest that a certain ethnicity or even age group is more apt to breed or fight birds.

Without any vehicles to properly confiscate and transport the roosters found in Santiago’s barn — and with no idea really about what to do with the birds — the officers left. They had plenty of evidence to support a search warrant for the next morning, though: razors and vials of testosterone as well as videotapes showing roosters being slashed to death. (According to law enforcement agents, the roosters are injected with testosterone to jack them up for their fights.) But when they returned 24 hours later, the birds had mysteriously vanished back into Oregon’s secretive and closely guarded world of game fighting.

“It would be a needle in a haystack to find those birds now,” Seanor said recently.

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ROOSTERS WITH KNIVES

Two birds stand in the middle of a patch of dirt, separated only by a thin piece of plywood. These roosters are elegant animals — golden brown plumage trimmed with rich black feathers. They both stare at the board, calm, almost indifferent to the encouraging shouts around them. Attached to their twiglike legs are razor-sharp blades hooked like paring knives.

There is a moment of stillness when the board is pulled away and the birds face each other. Then, puffing its chest, one stretches its legs while spreading its wings. In a snap, it looks like the bird has doubled to an intimidating size. The other bird squats low and pulls its body in tight. Then it lunges, beak first, for the exposed chest of its opponent. The fight continues for several minutes until one of the birds is too weak to stand. Pecked, poked and slashed, the loser displays royal feathers matted with blood; it looks as lifeless as a punctured beer can.

It’s a felony to fight roosters in Oregon, as it is in 47 other states. But, oddly, it is not illegal to raise game fowl for fighting. Oregon remains one of the few states where farmers can raise and sell game hens and roosters for this purpose.

Animal rights advocates balk at the inconsistency. Like outlawing the use of marijuana but not its production, they say, such uneven enforcement ignores the roots of the problem.

In January, at the start of the latest legislative session in Salem, freshman Sen. Ryan Deckert, D-Beaverton, introduced S.B. 222, a bill to close the loophole on cockfighting. The law would ratchet up the penalties for cockfighting to five years in prison and ultimately outlaw breeding.

Although it is Deckert’s first term in the Senate, he served two prior terms as a state representative. He is young and well-liked around the Capitol. The bill, Deckert believed, would sail through committees and into a clear majority vote on the Senate floor. It was more of a formality — closing a bizarre loophole in the law — than groundbreaking activism. “In a civilized society,” said Deckert, “having two roosters with knives trying to kill each other is not something we should have.”

Regardless, within days, the bill was dead. Assigned to the Business Committee — of which Deckert is a member — the chairman, Sen. Roger Beyer, R-Molalla, refused to give the bill a hearing, which is regarded as a professional slap in the face. “Now, it’s personal,” Deckert said.

Although cockfighters and game breeders are notoriously clandestine, they also have an impressive track record for quashing any legislation restricting their trade. Kelly Peterson, program coordinator for the Oregon chapter of the Humane Society, points out that when a citizens group tried to place the matter on the ballot in Oklahoma last fall, signature gatherers were harassed and physically threatened. Eventually the group rounded up enough signatures, but then the game breeders filed a lawsuit that sidetracked the initiative. Hogtied by the contentious legal battle, it did not make the ballot. In Oregon, game breeders have hired a high-priced mouthpiece, local attorney Ross Day, to lobby legislators to vote against any bill that would ban breeding.

“Don’t underestimate these guys,” Peterson explains, referring to the state’s game hen breeders. “You don’t hear a lot from them on an average day and then, all of a sudden, they are everywhere.”

At stake is a piece of the industry’s profits — roughly a billion dollars a year globally, according to law enforcement agents and breeders. One breeder in eastern Oregon claimed that he had sold several breeding hens to the father of heavyweight boxer Oscar de la Hoya for about $500 a head. He also said that he had been contacted by a major U.S. airline, which inquired about the logistics of retrofitting a cargo plane to transport game hens. The airline, he said, was planning to begin weekly shipments of game hens to the Philippines, where the sport is widely popular, and legal.

Also at stake is a sport that historians can trace back 6,000 years to Rome, where the spectacle of two birds slashing at each other was used to warm up crowds for the main events. Currently in the United States, three monthly magazines are dedicated to cockfighting and breeding. The oldest, Grit & Steel, has a circulation of more than 50,000 and has been around longer than Time magazine.

But the public’s enthusiasm for animal husbandry and the use of animals for entertainment has chilled over the past 20 years. With Deckert’s bill languishing in the state Senate, the Humane Society turned around in early February and lobbied members of Oregon’s House of Representatives to propose another bill to ban breeding. The Humane Society’s Peterson found an unlikely audience with Rep. Jeff Kropf, R-Halsey, a farmer and a Republican. In turn, Rep. Kropf has cosponsored H.B. 2930, a carbon copy of Deckert’s bill.

Even with bipartisan support, Peterson is cautious about the chances for either bill. The House bill has been assigned to the Judiciary Committee and has been churning slowly through work sessions and hearings. But breeders can be tenacious — they’ve been known to sabotage committee hearings by stuffing 60 supporters into a hearing room that holds only 80, leaving just enough room for committee members and the media. The breeders’ presence can be overwhelming and, as one of the last states to permit breeding, Oregon has emerged as the game breeders’ Alamo.

At the first public hearing on March 29, a few dozen breeders and their lobbyist attended. As representatives saw the faces of the breeders, Peterson sensed a cooling in the determination to ban breeding.

What makes Oregon’s proposed breeding ban such a salient issue is that, unlike the wild dolphins or wolves that animal rights activists seek to protect, game cocks are domesticated animals. For the first time on such a large, coordinated scale, this proposed ban — and similar legislation on the national level — has brought the battle over animal rights smack-dab into the barnyard.

The concentrated effort to absolutely eradicate cockfighting began about 20 years ago. In an attempt to crack down on animal abuse in 1976, Congress amended the Animal Welfare Act to prohibit interstate trafficking of dogs and other animals for the purpose of fighting. But before the new law was finalized, a Southern state senator stepped forward and added an exception for fighting birds.

“There are lines you draw in society and this is one of those lines,” says Peterson, explaining her support for the ban on game fowl breeding. Peterson is at the forefront of the crusade in Oregon, and is responsible for Deckert’s and Kropf’s decision to present their anti-breeding bills. Growing up in rural Lebanon, Ore., many members of Peterson’s family still work in lumber mills and hunt on weekends. After graduating from the agriculture-heavy Oregon State University, she went into sales for Cellular One (now Cingular) — not the typical seeds from which animal rights activists spring.

A few years back, while still working as a sales rep for the cellphone company, Peterson began volunteering as a fundraiser for environmental causes. About a year ago, she jumped full time into the animal rights movement, working with the campaign to pass Measure 97, a ballot initiative that would have placed broad restrictions on animal trapping.

Peterson is part of the generation indoctrinated by magazines like Ranger Rick and “Save the Whales” publicity campaigns — a generation born alongside the modern-day animal rights movement. “I’m living by what my conscience tells me,” she says.

An important thing happened for the animal rights cause when Peterson was a child. For years, animals were largely protected as part of land use laws. National forests and parks were set aside to preserve migratory routes and breeding grounds. But the passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973 marked a significant philosophical change: Instead of holding animals up as a subset of land use protection laws, individual species became the top priority.

Now, ironically, the Endangered Species Act has proved detrimental in some areas of animal rights. Because a lawmaker must petition for a species to be included for protection, animal rights, in a very real sense, have become a popularity contest. Dolphins, for example, have received sweeping legal protections, while ferocious — but severely endangered — great white sharks have been left woefully unprotected.

And here emerges a substantial defense for game hen breeders: They can claim discrimination, that they have been singled out. One breeder from Salem pointed out that Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., who has cosponsored a federal bill to make the interstate transportation of fighting birds illegal, owns a mink farm. What’s more, the breeder said, Smith’s daughter serves on the board of directors for the Pendleton Round-Up, a popular Oregon rodeo. (The breeder refused to provide his name, saying that he was fearful about animal right activists burning down his barn.)

“And what about falconers?” asked the breeder, pointing out that there are about 80 falcon trainers in the state — a number that’s just half that of game fowl breeders — who train birds to kill rabbits and doves. “It just isn’t fair.”

In the ’80s, faced with regulations that would cripple their industry, loggers argued that protecting animals like the pint-size spotted owl would cost hundreds of jobs. A popular bumper sticker read: “A logger only needs the backseat of his truck to make love, why does it take the whole woods for an owl?” It was a plea to lawmakers: Certainly the value of a man’s lifestyle and livelihood trumps the rights of a single species. That argument still gets some sympathy, but by and large it has been losing in recent legislative and legal battles. A fluid job market and the ability to retrain workers for different industries undermined the “jobs vs. animals” case.

The economic argument against game hen breeding took a back seat to the more salable freedom argument. (Breeders kept relatively quiet about the size and scope of the industry that would be shut down.) Their most successful rhetoric echoes civil rights and pro-choice campaigns: Keep your laws off our industry. These are complicated debates precisely because breeders have adopted the very language and philosophy of liberal movements — the same set of ideals with which many animal rights supporters identify.

“Their agenda is to take away liberties of everyone in the United States,” explains Dale Potter, a breeder in eastern Oregon. Potter got involved when a neighbor brought over a few chickens and offered some theories about genetics and breeding. The science captivated him. “It’s like my brains against other breeders’ brains,” he says, referring to the riddle of producing strong game hens.

Like many breeders, Potter thinks the animal rights movement unfairly singles out breeders and, moreover, goes too far with proposed regulations. He characterizes the activists as zealots. “Their agenda is to eliminate all animal usage,” says Potter. “First it’s circuses and from there they constantly try to upgrade. What are they going to do next — regulate dogs and cats?”

The argument that breeders are discriminated against has halted many liberal politicians from supporting outright bans. Unlike the economic argument, which usually bought votes only from conservative representatives, it’s as if the liberal rhetoric has come home to roost.

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GOING UNDERCOVER

Ten years ago, Eric Sakach infiltrated the Oregon cockfighting circuit. He spent two years hanging out at livestock auctions, showing interest in birds and, ultimately, going to fights.

The crowning achievement of his undercover work was a bust on Deer Island. Sakach led a small army of sheriffs, local police and Drug Enforcement Administration agents into a sprawling ranch where three rings were patrolled by armed guards. The agents found nearly $100,000 in cash and arrested 384 people. Even more disturbing to Sakach is that while rifling through drawers at the site’s office, he came across several photographs of himself. After that haunting discovery, Sakach requested a desk job. He’s now the director of the West Coast Regional Office for the Humane Society in Sacramento, Calif.

Sakach is one of only a handful of experts and law enforcement officers with a keen knowledge of cockfighting and breeding; unlike in the drug trade, enforcement agents are few and far between. One Oregon agent with an extensive background in dogfights and cockfights in Nevada recently moved to Lane County to work with law enforcement agents. Another officer with a record of monitoring cockfighters and breeders works with the game division of the Oregon state police, but was recently promoted, taking him a step away from on-the-ground patrolling. Not surprisingly, there is scant funding for cockfight patrols.

“The statistical chance to be busted is not higher than being caught for dealing drugs,” says Sakach. He points out that even as laws restricting fighting and breeding are amassing, the popularity of the sport is swelling — as are the cash bounties to be won. One bird can easily win $5,000 at a single fight. “They are playing the odds that they are not going to get caught,” Sakach says.

Sakach doubts Sen. Deckert’s and Rep. Kropf’s bills will survive the gantlet of committee meetings and lobbyist attacks. A much more likely scenario, he says, is that Oregon will stand alone as the Western state where breeding remains legal and penalties for cockfighting lax. Washington, Idaho and California all have outright bans.

“If that happens,” says Sakach, “you can expect that Oregon will become a magnet for cockfighting.”