Cockfighting – The Cruel Blood Sport That's Been Around Since Chickens
My wife, Kathy, and I traveled to Puerto Rico for the first time in 2011. The night we arrived, we drove past a cockfighting arena on the way to our hotel and we both said in unison, “Wow, that’s legal here?” We soon found out that not only was it legal, many considered it to be the Puerto Rican “national sport.” The fights would start at noon on Saturday and Sunday and go continuously until midnight. Bird owners, one after the other, would bring their specially bred roosters to the arena where they would face off against each other and engage in bloody battle until one rooster stopped fighting—usually because it was dead.
Cockfighting has always struck me as barbaric. On the other hand, starting the day with a nice boiled egg, or an omelette, or a scramble seems to me to be one of the touchstones of civilized life. It’s almost hard to fathom that both require the same species of bird. So which came first, the cockfight or the egg?
Our prehistoric forebearers had eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner at every opportunity. All it took to eat a delicious meal of prehistoric poached eggs was to be lucky or skillful enough to poach them - from the nests of wild birds. One wild bird worth poaching from was the red jungle fowl, a bird that not only laid delicious eggs, but also laid a lot of them. While most birds would lay a clutch of eggs once per season, the jungle fowl could go into egg production over-drive and produce a bazillion eggs at the drop of a hat. Or more accurately, at the drop of a bamboo fruit. Bamboo plants set fruit only once every 40-80 years depending on the species—and then all the bamboo plants in a stand drop all their fruit simultaneously. The red jungle fowl evolved the ability to synchronize its reproductive rates to match that of the bamboo plants that it ate; when food was abundant after a fruit drop, it became a virtual egg-laying machine. The red jungle fowl, in case you didn’t know, is the wild progenitor of the domestic chicken.
So, you can imagine the lightbulb going off in the brain of some prehistoric hunter-gatherer: “Hey! If I keep a bunch of these jungle fowl in little cages and keep them happy and abundantly fed, I’ll have a continuous supply of eggs! And it’s not just about the eggs! When I fry one of these birds with my secret blend of prehistoric herbs and spices, they’re pretty darn delicious!” And if you are imagining that prehistoric epiphany, you are, apparently, wrong.
Surprisingly, most sources agree that jungle fowl were first domesticated not as a source of food, but because roosters could be pitted against each other in fights. Descriptions of cockfighting for religious ceremonies and entertainment can be found in association with every ancient civilization that had chickens since they were first domesticated over 9000 years ago. Yet, there is no evidence of chickens being routinely used for food until about 400 to 200 BCE—a long, long time after they were domesticated.
Two gamecocks square off in Cai Be, Vietnam (Photo by Tuyen Nguyen - used with permission)
I won’t speculate on what innate weirdness dwells in the human psyche that compels us to domesticate an animal just so we can watch it fight, but it’s obviously a thing. In various times and places, right up to present day, there has been fox hunting, dog fighting, cat burning, badger tossing, bull fighting, bear baiting, goose pulling, and a plethora of other activities that involved violent human-on-animal or animal-on-animal conflict that ultimately ended in the death of the animal – all for the unbridled gratification of an audience of innately weird humans.
Cockfight depicted on an ancient Roman mosaic (Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli - public domain)
And what about the innate behavior of roosters that compel them to kill each other? Guess what? It doesn’t exist in the wild. Red jungle fowl definitely do fight for dominance. But the fights are very stylized - the roosters puff up their feathers and fly and jump at each other for a few minutes until one rooster admits defeat and retreats. Often there is no physical contact at all. And nobody kills anybody. Fights to the death only happen because humans have intervened. Domestic gamecocks have been bred for more aggressive behavior and that aggressiveness is augmented by “training” by the rooster’s human handler. And in a cockfight, the natural instinct of the losing rooster to retreat never comes into play because the only escape from a cockpit is death.
Just as the idea of the immorality of human gladiatorial contests slowly spread throughout the world in the 3rd century, the concept of the immorality of animal fights to the death has also been slowly spreading in recent times. Cockfighting is now illegal in most of Europe, and in 2008 Louisiana became the last of the 50 states in the US to ban it. In December of this year cockfighting will also become illegal in all US territories. The ban on cockfighting in US territories is so unpopular in Puerto Rico that Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello recently traveled to Washington to demand (to no avail) that the island be excluded from the ban.
Attaching a gaff at a cockfight in East Timor (Creative Commons License)
A big part of the cockfighting culture, everywhere, is the betting. In Puerto Rico there are no betting windows like they have in mainland horse racing. Instead, you bet on an individual basis with those sitting around you. It is important to be careful what you say to whom and what hand gestures you use during the fight or you could end up making a bet you didn’t even know you were making. When the fight starts, the men watching (and they are mostly men) start to bet, cheer, and yell, and the beer flows freely - and so does blood. The roosters’ spurs are filed down and replaced by a long, sharp “gaffs,” thus making a spur strike more deadly. Ironically, chicken wings are also for sale.
I did not attend a cockfight while I was visiting Puerto Rico, nor will I ever have any interest in attending one. I enjoyed every moment I spent on the island, though. Kathy and I spent a day touring the island by car with a guide—a tour that included the phenomenal Camuy caves and the huge radio telescope at Arecibo. The guide was beyond impressive—he was personable, knowledgeable, and willing to answer absolutely any question we managed to come up with. When we reached our hotel for drop-off, we were in the midst of a conversation about the complex issue of Puerto Rican statehood vs. independence vs. the status quo. He actually parked the car so we could talk for another half-hour to finish our conversation on this topic. My information about cockfighting came from this gentleman. He, like many Puerto Ricans, raised fighting roosters when he was a teenager—pampered them, fed them special high protein diets, and ultimately sacrificed them to the pit. While I am unambiguously opposed to cockfighting and consider it immoral, I will argue that this man had a deep understanding of the life experience of his fighting roosters. Meanwhile, the average egg consumer is totally ignorant of the brutal, tortured life of a battery-caged hen.
Confronting two cocks for cockfight ritual in Bali (Collectie Stichting Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen - license)
In Vietnam, cockfighting is illegal except during Tet and other special holidays. In Cambodia cockfighting has been banned since 2009. When I visited these two southeast Asian countries in February, gamecocks were ubiquitous. I saw them everywhere, in small villages, river hamlets, and the countryside – often living in their own domed wire cages, and obviously pampered, well groomed, and well fed. Cockfighting continues. The rules of cockfighting in Southeast Asia are different—less brutal—than in North America; the roosters don’t wear gaffs on their spurs, and fighting until one rooster dies is not a requirement. Roosters, however, do die, and the fighting is still brutal.
Two gamecocks stroll through Angkor Thom, Cambodia
One hot and humid day in Cambodia, I came across a cockfight about to get underway. Two men were kneeling on the ground cradling their birds in their arms. The roosters faced each other ready to spring from their handlers’ grip and begin the attack. A boisterous group of men crowded around, pointing, gesticulating, and placing bets. And the action never got underway—because it was a bas relief engraved on the stone walls of the 12th century Bayon Temple in the Ankgor Thom complex. This 900-year-old depiction is an indication of how embedded cockfighting is in the Southeast Asian culture. Making it illegal has simply driven it underground.
Cockfight bas relief - Bayon Temple, Angkor Thom, Cambodia
There are frequent police actions—A 2015 bust in Vietnam resulted in the arrest of 40 people at a large cockfighting facility where the police “found” (confiscated?) “15 fighting cocks…100 motorbikes, dozens of mobile phones, and $24,000 in cash.” A 2017 police raid of a Cambodian “cockfighting den” resulted in the detention of “scores” of people including Thai Phany, the nephew-in-law of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, and the confiscation of 92 fighting cocks. The report states that most people were released after receiving light suspended sentences. Meanwhile, the police slaughtered and ate the roosters. And so it goes.
In June 2015 three men were charged in Polk County (Wisconsin) Circuit Court with ten felony counts of instigating animal fights. 1200 fighting roosters were seized after searching three properties. The charges stem from a cockfight bust in rural Glenwood City, Wisconsin, about fifty miles from my house. In September 2018 US marshals conducting a methamphetamine raid in Pierce County, Wisconsin, 35 miles from my house, rescued 1300 animals from a dog and cockfighting operation. In December 2018, Pine County deputies arrested four men and seized 11 roosters at an active cockfighting facility in Hinckley, Minnesota, around 90 miles from my house. While I’ve talked about Southeast Asia and Puerto Rico, I obviously don’t have to go very far to find cockfighting. It’s out there, and not very far away, whether or not we are aware of it.
And this is the paragraph where I wrap it all up and tell you how we should fix this problem. I’ve got nothing. At best I have questions. Do you think outlawing cockfighting is like Prohibition, and making it illegal won’t help if a large portion of people want to do it regardless of its legality? Do you think that making cockfighting illegal is doomed to fail as long as the cynical double standard exists where torturing chickens for entertainment is illegal while torturing chickens with cruel animal husbandry practices is legally acceptable? I already said that I wouldn’t speculate on what innate weirdness dwells in the human psyche – but what do you think? Are we making some progress? Any infinitesimal progress? Or is that unnamed weirdness so lodged within us that cockfights or their equivalents will exist as long as we do?
