Oregon Is Trying To Ban Simulcast Dog Race Betting — Which States Still Allow It?

Live greyhound racing has been all but wiped out in the United States.

It’s illegal in 44 states. It’s technically legal in five states in which there are no active tracks. Only one state — West Virginia — still hosts greyhound races.

But while the sport is widely panned for animal cruelty and live racing is almost gone in the U.S., that doesn’t mean betting on greyhound racing is gone.

Simulcast betting on dog races is legal today in 16 states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming.

It may be shocking to see 16 states still allow betting on dog races, even if those races don’t occur within state lines. Some states still offer simulcast betting due to financial benefits for their smaller racetracks and off-track betting facilities. Or, in other cases, state laws simply haven’t been updated to reflect shifting public sentiment or animal welfare concerns — and banning simulcast betting gets the back-burner compared to live betting.

However, that list of 16 is really 13. Simulcast betting bans in Arizona, Arkansas, and New Hampshire will go into effect in the coming years. 

And now Oregon lawmakers are trying to follow suit.

House Bill 3020 would make all types of betting on dog racing illegal in Oregon. It has already passed the House. On April 17, it unanimously passed through the Senate Labor and Business Committee.

“The governor asked me to do anything I can to stop taking greyhound wagers,” Connie Winn, director of the Oregon Racing Commission, told committee members on April 17, “and that’s why we have this bill.”

Oregon is key piece of greyhound industry

Although it shuttered its last remaining greyhound racetrack 21 years ago, Oregon is still central to the simulcast dog race betting industry in the U.S. It and North Dakota serve as the two central advance deposit wagering (ADW) hubs for greyhound race betting in the country.

GREY2K USA, an anti-greyhound racing advocacy group, estimates $144 million was wagered on simulcast greyhound racing via the ADW hubs in Oregon and North Dakota in 2023.

In addition to outlawing simulcast dog race betting in Oregon, HB3020 would bar ADW hubs in Oregon from accepting wagers on dog races. (These ADW hubs also accept wagers on horse races, the majority of their business.)

There are eight ADW systems currently in Oregon. Two of them — AmWest and Twin Spires — accept simulcast dog race wagers via their Oregon hub. According to a report compiled by the ORC, only 1.78% of Twin Spires’ 2023 wagers were on greyhound races. That number was 4.6% at AmWest.

Looking at race betting activity only among Oregonians in 2023:

• 17.9% of online wagers were placed on greyhound races, 82.1% on horse races
• 22.4% of wagers at off-track betting facilities were on greyhound races, 77.6% on horse races

Winn said she knows of a pair of OTB facilities where greyhound races make up closer to 40% of the wagers.

“People in Oregon love to wager on greyhounds. They absolutely love it,” Winn said, adding that the races Oregonians bet on mostly take place in West Virginia, Australia, England, or Ireland. “Out of every state in the United States, we’re number three for the amount of people that wager on greyhound racing. I don’t know why. It just is.”

‘We’ll find a way to deal with that’

The financial impact note for HB3020 projects a $200,000 loss in licensing fees every two years. It also discusses how two ADW systems in Oregon currently accept dog race wagers, and that if both of those systems leave Oregon as a result of HB3020, that could result in a loss of $2.3 million in revenue every two years, which would take $450,000 from the general fund each biennium. 

With the knowledge of this financial impact, HB3020 has two companion bills that preemptively establish ways to backfill revenue losses from the ORC — which supports the bill despite the revenue hit.

“We are going to make sure they’re held whole and harmless during this transaction,” Rep. David Gomberg, testifying in support of the bill, said.

Added Winn: “We’ll find a way to deal with that.”

The bill’s effective date isn’t until Jan. 1, 2027, mainly to provide as much time as possible to figure out how to remediate financial impact on the ORC.

HB3020: ‘A good bill to help dogs’

Carey Theil, executive director of GREY2K USA, told committee members the largest ADW system in Oregon told him it wouldn’t leave Oregon if HB3020 passed.

Most of Theil’s testimony revolved around animal cruelty issues attached to greyhound racing, which have fueled the industry’s dramatic decline the past few decades.

He said the ORC conducted a report on the greyhound racetracks where Oregonians bet on races in 2024. That report found 10,542 injuries at those tracks, plus animal welfare violations, positive drug tests, and race fixing.

“From our perspective, this is an industry that’s cruel and inhumane,” Theil said. “I won’t belabor that point but just to be clear, there are many injuries involved in this industry, the dogs endure lives of confinement, there’s a particularly cruel training practice called live lure training in which greyhounds are given small animals to tear apart.

“This is a good bill to help dogs.”

Theil also attempted to minimize the financial impact from “a dying industry.”

“To put context around that, at the Oregon off-track betting parlors that were mentioned earlier, betting on greyhound racing just year to year — 2024 to 2023 — was down by 15.5%,” he said. “So gambling on greyhound racing in Oregon is significantly declining.”

In a written testimony submitted to the committee, Leslie Csokasy, board director of the National Greyhound Association, refuted claims of animal cruelty in greyhound racing and said her “career has been dedicated to understanding canine welfare.”

“Contrary to misconceptions, the risk of injury in greyhound racing remains extremely low, with an incident-free rate of 99.5 percent of individual starts,” she wrote.

She also highlighted how some OTB facilities in Oregon get a significant chunk of their revenue from simulcast dog race betting.

“Eliminating this revenue stream would force these businesses to find alternative sources of income,” Csokasy wrote, “which is not a simple or immediate solution.”