Casino Wildlife
Feathered, furry and occasionally human—Frank Legato discovers that casino visitors comes in many forms.
There have been a lot of stories lately in the casino news that have involved various critters.
There was that story last year of Viola, the elephant that broke free from a circus in Montana and ended up at a nearby casino. (She liked playing Buffalo Keno.) Then there was the item early this year about the nut-ball from Canada who grabbed Peachy the Flamingo from her habitat at the Flamingo casino on the Strip. (He ended up taking selfies with the bird in his room.)
This month brought us two more stories involving critters in casino resorts. Las Vegas police arrested a woman who repeated the Canadian’s caper, only at the Venetian, with a duck. According to the charges, a woman casually climbed into the fountain at the resort and grabbed a juvenile duck named Daffy (I know, original), and carried the duck off like it was her pet.
The case was handed to the Las Vegas Metro Police Department, which caught the woman on surveillance cameras and followed her out to the Strip, providing real-time updates to responding officers. Evidently, she was tossing Daffy back and forth between her hands and spreading the duck’s wings, eventually injuring one of the wings.
She was actually surprised when they arrested her, and was “uncooperative and belligerent,” according to one report. She was booked for malicious torture/injury to an animal.
This lady is much more despicable than the Canadian flamingo-fun guy, and, in my opinion, someone should hook her up to a giant contraption that will spread her arms like she did with the little duck. Yeah, the rack. Do they still use that?
Kudos to the Las Vegas Metro Police, though. Wow. They initiated a high-tech surveillance operation with multiple cameras and constant communications—for a duck. It must have been a slow day at the precinct.
The other casino critter story this month involves not domesticated fowl, but wild rodents. A family of seven adults and four children from California’s Madera County booked a room at the Nugget Hotel Casino Resort in Sparks, Nevada. The head of the family called the front desk to report they found a live bat flying around their hotel room.
I’d love a transcript of that call to the front desk (“Yes, there’s a bat in our room. No, not baseball, I mean a flying rodent!”), but from what I’ve read, bats are a frequent pest in Northern Nevada.
Yikes. I can’t imagine reaching to plug in my cellphone and seeing what I would no doubt interpret as Dracula flying around my lamp.
Anyway, hotel employees caught the bat, took it outside and released it. Hospitality first, right?
Not quite. The family is now suing the hotel for $15,000 in damages they incurred plus punitive damages. The suit alleges the hotel was negligent because they didn’t test the bat for rabies before releasing it. Ten of the 11 family members went through four rounds of rabies vaccination shots apiece, incurring $15,000 in costs. No one was bitten by the bat, but the family says they were advised by health officials to get the shots.
As you may have guessed, I have many questions involving this case. First off, who books seven adults and four children into a room at the Sparks Nugget? I’m guessing it had to be so cavernous that bats were bound to be flying around the corners.
Secondly, what’s the hotel protocol in these situations? Is there a Bat Squad? (Maybe with headquarters in a Bat Cave?) Is there a laboratory at the hotel to test bats for rabies? And if you want to use it, do you contact the hotel’s concierge? Who were the health officials that told them to get vaccines? Do they work for the hotel too?
I’ve never seen back-of-the-house hotel design that includes scientific labs and health facilities, but maybe I just haven’t been paying attention.
I’ll keep you posted on this case, and any other developments involving critters in casinos. Meanwhile, human critters have been the subjects of casino crimes lately as well. San Diego police just busted an illegal gambling den on El Cajon Boulevard. There were 23 slot machines, and the cops seized cash and drugs as well.
Images of the scene show machines illuminating a chaotic setup of cheap folding chairs in what the local NBC news station called “a relatively sorry-looking tableau.”
You know, there’s just no pride of ownership anymore in illegal gambling dens. Geez, straighten out the chairs. Between the slot win and the drug money, you’d think they could spring for upholstered slot stools.
Put in a guy playing guitar. A buffet. Something.
Well, at least there were no bats.
