Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? Page 12

  Luzong looks at his watch. It is past 10 p.m. and I sense he’s eager to get home to his family. They have no interest in cockfighting. “My children, they only see a chicken already cooked.” He sighs, heaving his bulk out of the small plastic seat. “One time I slaughtered one and they couldn’t bear it.” We work our way through the crowd and into the deserted lobby. Methods, traditions, rituals, and specific beliefs differ, as do the continents, languages, and centuries. But it is all the same. The chicken does the bad things for us. It dies to save us from ourselves.

  The rooster’s comb is the bird’s most distinctive feature. It serves as a heat radiator, a warning to potential rivals, and a come-on to hens. In the male red jungle fowl, the crest is red and serrated and called a single. Among chickens, however, there is an extraordinary variety, including the rose, the cushion, the buttercup, the pea, the walnut, the V-shaped, and the silkis. Each has its own specific history. The flamboyant buttercup mutation can be traced back to a breed developed by a medieval European royal family that ruled Sicily and Normandy. The smaller pea comb is practical in cold climates, since it retains more heat. Combs can come in gray and bright blue.

  Leif Andersson at Uppsala University realized that this physical feature, so altered by human selection, could offer clues to the bird’s early domestication. Roosters with rose combs, for example, are known to have more difficulty fertilizing females than those with single combs. Andersson wondered why people would pay that steep price simply to alter the bird’s headgear so that it looked like a little French beret. He and a team of nineteen collaborators used new genetic tools to identify the actual alleles involved in making combs. Alleles are those parts of a gene located in a specific position on a chromosome that is, in turn, a single piece of coiled DNA. Andersson and his team discovered that to create the rose comb, a gene jumps to another location, which disrupts the mechanism that ensures healthy swimming sperm. The study could conceivably help researchers understand low fertility in human males.

  The rose comb’s advantage is that it is more difficult for a rival to grab in the cockpit. Andersson realized that the wattles dangling from the cheeks of a rooster tend to be smaller in game fowl than in red jungle fowl or other domesticated varieties. The research provided direct genetic evidence that humans have long altered the chicken so that it is more likely to win in a fight—even at the cost of low rates of reproduction.

  Red jungle fowl will fiercely defend their hens and chicks against larger adversaries, but the wild bird is just as likely to flee when confronted with danger. Breeding game fowl therefore required selecting for those birds that would stay and fight and had a physical advantage over their rivals. Some scholars speculate that cockfighting began in South Asia as a religious practice. A clan or village may have pitted its sacred roosters against another group’s bird. In northern Thailand, for example, the faun phi ceremony honoring ancestral spirits entails cockfighting of a religious nature that may reflect ancient practices.

  If cockfighting was a major driver in domestication, then the chickens’ spread throughout South Asia and then to other parts of the world may be firmly tied to the sport. Today’s American game-fowl breeders likely had ancient counterparts who traveled long distances with their valuable animals, bringing not just the chicken but the gambling practice to other societies.

  One of the earliest recorded cockfights took place in China in 517 BC. The match was held in Confucius’s home province of Lu during the philosopher’s lifetime. By then, cockfighting was already a royal sport with elaborate protocols; the chicken had been in central and northern China for at least nine centuries. The birds were outfitted with metal spurs, and one was sprinkled in mustard to make it slicker and more difficult to grab. The match between two rival clans ultimately led to a war. “Thus from which disaster was born started in the foot of a cock,” an ancient text relates.

  The earliest unequivocal evidence of cockfighting in the West comes from this same era. In a tomb just outside Jerusalem, excavators found a small seal that shows a rooster in a fighting stance that was owned by Jaazaniah, who is called “the servant of the king.” A man of the same name—Jaazaniah, the son of the Maakathite—is mentioned in both the biblical book of Kings and Jeremiah as an army officer after the Babylonian attack on Jerusalem in 586 BC. That battle ended with the leveling of Solomon’s temple and captivity for its elite in Babylon. The artifact seems to date from this period. Another seal with a fighting cock belonging to Jehoahaz, named as “the son of the king,” may come from the same era, but its provenance is unknown.

  Philistines in the nearby port of Ashkelon on the Mediterranean coast at that time were likely breeding fighting cocks, since excavators have found numerous rooster remains with well-developed spurs. By then, they were making use of the hens as well, since their bones reveal that they were using the high levels of calcium necessary to produce large numbers of eggs.

  Cockfighting retained a quasi-religious role in both China and the West in the early centuries before Christ. A Chinese Daoist work from about the fourth century BC tells the story of the time and effort involved in raising fighting cocks for the king, in a kind of parable of patience in developing spiritual readiness. At the same time, in ancient Greece, Athenians gathered in the theater dedicated to Dionysus to witness cockfights as a reminder that two battling roosters inspired Greek troops before they fought and beat a larger Persian force. The birds adorned the high priest’s chair at the sacred theater dedicated to the god of wine and song.

  Over time, spiritual combat transformed into a more secular event, perhaps as bullfighting began as a ritual and gradually turned into more worldly entertainment. In the early centuries AD, cockfighting was a regular pastime for many villagers, soldiers, and aristocrats in the Old World’s two great empires, Rome in the West and the Han dynasty in the East. The sport became a place for men of many classes to meet, take financial risks, and watch male animals demonstrate raw courage.

  By the early nineteenth century, pitting two roosters in a fight to the death was almost universally practiced, except in western and southern Africa, where it oddly never took root. In India, British officers matched their gamecocks against Muslim princes’. An English visitor to China noted in 1806 that a thousand years after the Tang dynasty, “one of their most favourite sports is cockfighting,” adding that it was as commonly practiced among the upper classes as it was in Europe. There were many regional variations; some cockers used long spurs, some short ones, and others fought the birds with their natural spurs. But cockfights were typically places where men—and they were almost always just men—could rub shoulders regardless of race or class. A European visitor to early-nineteenth-century Virginia marveled that black slaves bet as avidly as their white masters at a match.

  No one enjoyed the sport more than the English, who likely were pitting their birds before the arrival of the Romans and possibly absorbed the practice from Phoenician merchants. Cockpits were once as common in British villages as they are in the Philippines today. King Henry VIII built the Cockpit-in-Court in his main residence at Whitehall Palace in London in the sixteenth century, an era when most manor houses had their own pits, trainers, and feeding and fighting strategies for hundreds and even thousands of birds. James I was a cocker fan. And as William Shakespeare knew, the Globe Theatre was first and foremost a battleground for chickens rather than a stage for actors. “Can this cock-pit hold the vasty fields of France?” asks the chorus in the prologue to Henry V. The cheap seats in the Globe, called the pit, were where the roosters fought. ­Occasionally, many birds were let loose in a pit until only one was left alive, the origins of the phrase battle royal. The diarist Samuel Pepys, who went to a London match in 1663, spotted a parliamentarian betting with bakers and brewers, “and all of these fellows one with another in swearing, cursing, and betting.”

  Pepys felt sorry for the roosters and appalled by the losses incurred by poor men, but others w
ere inspired. One early-seventeenth-­century book asserts that cocking made men more courageous, loving, and industrious. “It is wonderful to see the courage of these little creatures, who always hold fighting on till one of them drops, and dies on the spot,” the author Daniel Defoe wrote in 1724. A Scottish writer in that era proposed a “cock war” that would substitute conflict among humans for a match between royal courts, ending Europe’s bloody struggles. At Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1780s, as many as a thousand roosters died during a week of matches.

  William Hogarth’s 1759 engraving, ironically inscribed Royal Sport, shows a chaotic London cockpit with a blind lord, pickpockets, and a hodgepodge of riffraff watching two roosters circle each other as a scandalized French gentleman surveys the savage scene. Cockfighting bans in the United States, Europe, and other industrial nations today focus on the cruelty of forcing an animal to fight to the death. Ho­garth’s scene reveals other concerns. The issue exposed in his drawing is not animal cruelty but human folly, dissolution, and greed. When Parliament banned cockfights in London in 1833, the reason was not to protect the birds but to halt criminal and disorderly behavior.

  Those British parliamentarians, like American missionaries in the early-twentieth-century Philippines and today’s Indonesian legislators, feared large groups of men from different social groups gathering to drink and gamble for hours on end. In rural areas such behavior might attract little notice, but in a rapidly industrializing economy it was seen as unproductive and potentially subversive. In the new cities—nineteenth-century London, twentieth-century Manila, twenty-first-century Jakarta—the poor are segregated from the rich, factory life demands promptness, and gambling is a sign of moral weakness.

  “The old story about the rise of animal rights is a heroic and straightforward tale about Victorian Brits coming to their senses after countless millennia of slavery and animal cruelty,” says Robert Boddice, a young British historian who has studied the movement. It wasn’t that cockers were cruel to animals, but that such people lacked refinement. In the industrial era, gentlemen were not to mix with the lower classes, and working men should be by definition working. Upper- and middle-class women were often at the forefront of cockfighting bans in nineteenth-century Britain and America, as they were in the push for prohibition. Gambling and drinking often meant poverty and abuse for the women left at home, and prevented advance up the new social ladder.

  The British Parliament banned cockfighting across England and Wales in 1835, and two years later Princess Victoria became a patron of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. As queen, she put the royal into the organization’s name in 1840. Cockfights continued, but they moved to more discreet locations frequented mainly by working-class enthusiasts, and most aristocrats abandoned the sport. Though cockfighting lost its status and its legality long ago, foxhunting was permitted until 2005.

  Americans were slower to give up the legal cockfight. It rivaled horse racing in its popularity, particularly in the South. After dining in Williamsburg with the Virginia royal governor in 1752 to discuss military matters, George Washington watched what he called a “great main of cocks” in nearby Yorktown. That same year, the capital’s College of William & Mary banned its students from attending such events, a sign of their attraction. In recognition of the sport’s popularity, modern-­day Colonial Williamsburg keeps two gamecocks—­Hankie Dean and ­Lucifer—though they are not allowed under Virginia law to fight.

  The Virginia General Assembly had made cockfighting illegal in 1740, though cockers continued to import game fowl from abroad. Georgia followed suit in 1775 and the Continental Congress inveighed against the sport. In the new United States, cockfighting began to be viewed as a remnant of British barbarity, but its popularity persisted. There was a fleeting moment when a gamecock might have been part of the official seal of the new country. In 1782, a twenty­-eight-year-old artist named William Barton included a game fowl on the top of his proposed seal. In the end, however, Congress chose a design featuring an eagle.

  Thomas Jefferson avoided cockfighting and horse racing, according to accounts by his slaves. The military hero and Tennessee politician Andrew Jackson, however, was an enthusiastic gambler and cocker, and his presidential opponents used that against him. “His passions are terrible,” Jefferson told Daniel Webster in 1824 as Jackson was vying for the presidency. Jackson insisted during his campaign that he had turned over a new leaf and had not attended a cockfight in thirteen years. Abraham Lincoln was reluctant to oppose the sport. He is quoted as saying that “as long as the Almighty permitted intelligent men, created in his image and likeness, to fight in public and kill each other while the world looks on approvingly, it’s not for me to deprive the chickens of the same privilege.”

  Enthusiasm for cockfighting continued to wane during the nineteenth century. Mark Twain watched a match and marveled that spectators “lost themselves in frenzies of delight.” He called it “an inhuman sort of entertainment” but added that “it seems a much more respectable and far less cruel sport than fox-hunting—for the cocks like it; they experience as well as confer enjoyment; which is not the fox’s case.” Women’s groups attacked it along with liquor and other forms of gambling, and states began to pass laws banning its practice. By the 1920s, cockfighting was associated with gangsters and rumrunners, though it remained widely practiced in rural states like Oklahoma. The media magnate William Randolph Hearst, who pioneered the sports page, campaigned successfully to ban it in California.

  Not until 2008, when Louisiana passed a law against it, did the last legal cockfight in the United States take place. In most states today it is a felony, although it remains popular in Appalachia and Hispanic communities. In Tennessee’s Cocke County, for example, on the mountainous border with North Carolina, the sport remains commonplace if covert. Two large cockpit operations were raided in recent years as part of wider corruption investigations by the state. Thomas Farrow, who led one of the key sting operations, told a reporter that “it was like setting up a counterintelligence operation in the heart of Soviet Russia during the Cold War. There were no friendlies,” he said. “During the day, everyone goes to church and goes to work, and it’s like a Norman Rockwell community. But when the sun goes down, they all turn into vampires.”

  In 2013, a Tennessee state Republican lawmaker named Jon Lundberg tried to strengthen the state’s cockfighting laws that currently make it a misdemeanor subject to a fifty-dollar fine. His attempts to put it on a par with dogfighting—a felony that involves a fine and jail time—failed. Shortly after the defeat, when I talk to him in his Nashville office near the state capitol, he is upset with opponents who argued that cockfighting is a Tennessee tradition that was enjoyed by Andrew Jackson and therefore shouldn’t be demonized. “Slavery also is a Tennessee tradition that was upheld by Andrew Jackson,” he notes drily. The lawmaker worries that the lax laws make his state a magnet for organized crime. “We’ve created an economic draw, but I don’t think this is something that we want to draw people to Tennessee.”

  More than a century and a half after Jackson was criticized for his “passions,” cockfighting briefly was at the center of a bitter 2014 primary fight between U.S. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and his Tea Party opponent Matt Bevin. McConnell supported a farm bill that increased penalties for participating in the sport, a move that the president of the United Gamefowl Breeders Association predicted would “destroy” McConnell’s political future. Bevin attended a pro-cockfighting rally a few months later and said that “criminalizing behavior, if it’s part of the heritage of this state, is in my opinion a bad idea, and I will not support it.” His attendance and comments raised a national outcry, which intensified when a video of a campaign talk surfaced in which he describes tying the feet of chickens and swinging them over his head as a child prior to chopping off their heads. “Sometimes a foot would pop off,” he added in a jocular tone, to the nervous laughter of the cr
owd.

  In Manila, when I ask Luzong about New World cockfighting, he shakes his head sadly and confirms that the sport in Mexico, Colombia, and the United States increasingly is tied to the drug trade and crime syndicates, further blackening its already poor reputation around the globe. Like any blood sport, cockfighting has always been associated with men who like to gamble and drink, and as long as there have been cockfights, there have been poisons, magical spells, and any number of dirty tricks employed to beat rivals. But today, high-tech drugs and big bucks are the rule.

  On the outskirts of a slum in Caracas, a gamecock breeder named Lorenzo Fragiel tells me that an unsettling change is taking place in the Venezuelan capital, which has a dozen rings within the city limits. “There’s no longer a brotherhood of breeders,” says Fragiel, a lean mechanic with a bristly black mustache. “People used to keep tabs on one another—it used to be friendly.” The matches are more violent outside the ring. “There can be fights and broken glass,” he adds with a shake of his head. “There’s a lot of drinking.” Ring owners charge an entrance fee and cock owners must also pay a fee per match and a fee for the referee, but the real money is in selling beer.

  Fragiel keeps thirty-five fighting cocks in a spacious coop at one end of his little farm, each with a roomy cage. There is a good breeze, the floor is covered in clean sawdust, and there is no trace of the burning ammonia smell typical of most mass chicken operations. Some of the birds have livery like red jungle fowl. One variety called Bolos lacks a tail, and another—Papujos—has small feathers growing out of its cheeks. Both traits protect a bird in a fight. He has been breeding and fighting cocks since his godfather gave him his first bird at age twelve, three decades ago. “It’s not a moneymaking operation,” he says with a smile. “This is a passion.”