350 C Lawson in fact, a subset of both informal and formal categories with the almost unique feature of graduation occurring from informal to formal As is seen here further into the testimony from the front line investigator: [My] experience of dog fighting up until the late 90s, early 2000s, we were dealing with the old traditional, old white, English dog fighter They are very, very proud of their bloodlines, so they breed the gameness into the dog That changed really with the Asian population becoming involved in dog fighting from the early 2000s onwards and they didn’t give a damn about the breeding lines, they were just going to fight the thing, if it died, it died They’d go and buy another one from Ireland So there were two distinct fractions there White, traditional dog fighters are probably more 30s onwards, anything up to 50s Their clandestine activities are much more closely guarded than perhaps the Asian communities where it would be very much word of mouth, bringing mates in off the street Whereas the traditional fighters you would need to know someone in there and go through some form of, I won’t say initiation, but checking out of their status before they are let anywhere near You’ve pretty much got to have a dog and want to fight it too or demonstrate that’s your interest The Asians have a much younger bracket with a few 30/40 year olds but mostly 20-somethings In terms of moving from one group to another, this is more so in the Asian community, it has become more of a natural progression—the status dogs being used by potentially young, drug users, dealers, becoming involved in—I’m still never sure if it’s their history from their roots in Pakistan or whether it is just a progression of the street culture really—but that is how it started, it’s status dogs, then moving on to chain fighting or fighting in parks and then to becoming more organised and mingling with the old traditional dog fighters, if you like, who I think in the first place were just selling them their cast off dogs One operation in 2003 looking at dog fighters in the West Midlands, that then knocked on to another dog fighting case months later, was 27 Asians arrested at a venue I’m not sure if that’s when it started but that’s certainly when we became aware of it Since then there is more inter-racial, as it were, fighting Occasionally the higher levels of the Asian fighters might meet with the English fighters although they are still fairly separate (Lawson forthcoming) Harding and Nurse (2015, p 30) contend that graduation from streetfighter to hobbyist or from hobbyist to professional occurs in some circumstances within the UK The evidence for this is based on Harding’s earlier research (2012) conducted with dogfighters who self-reported their progression from streetfighter to a more organised category As such these accounts may be unreliable as they can be vulnerable to the same issues around machismo and status (such as embellishment or magnification) that intrinsically interests