Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat

by Hal Herzog

  Mr. Holcombe told me that if I wanted to learn about game chickens, I needed to talk to Fabe Webb, a legend among western North Carolina cockfighters. I gave him a call, and, to my surprise, he invited me over. A big man in his seventies, with red hair and a ruddy face, Fabe lived half a mile up a rough dirt drive in a small white house surrounded on three sides by the Pisgah National Forest. You could not see his place from the road, but you could hear the birds a long way off. He had dozens of gamecocks, resplendent animals—some deep maroon, almost purple, with iridescent green hackles; some pure white; others black with orange necks—all individually housed in wire cages.

  Fabe loved to talk chickens, and I began to drop by regularly. He would take me through his chicken yard, explaining the bloodline of each rooster, tossing a bit of grain here and there, clucking to his birds. Every now and then, he would point out a battle-scarred old gamecock, perhaps with only one good eye, and Fabe would puff up a bit, like one of his roosters, and say, “Now that one’s a six-time winner.” The truth was that Fabe had given up cockfighting years before I met him, though he still went to an occasional derby, sat in the bleachers, and bet on a couple of matches.

  I was completely baffled. How could a person who loved birds so much participate in a brutal and illegal bloodsport that always ends in death? I brought up this apparent contradiction one afternoon while were sitting in his kitchen sipping some of western North Carolina’s finest homemade corn whisky. Fabe offered to take me to a fight. He said he wanted to show me that cockfights were not the bloodbaths that city boys like me thought they were. It never happened. I kept putting him off, until one day, I read in the paper that Fabe had died. I think it was a heart attack.

  Shortly after Fabe’s death, I was called into the office of the dean of the college that had hired me as a temporary instructor. He offered me a permanent job, but said that if I wanted the position, I would need to finish my PhD in psychology. All of a sudden, watching the chickens that I bought from Mr. Holcombe went from a casual pastime to my ticket to the tenure track. After reading up on poultry behavior, I convinced my advisor that I should write my dissertation on chickens. I was particularly interested in breed differences in the behavior of baby chicks, including gamefowl chicks. Two months later, I was running a minihatchery in my basement. I did not have any trouble getting fertile Rhode Island Red and White Leghorn eggs from the university’s poultry science department, but getting my hands on purebred gamecock eggs was another matter. After contacting friends of friends of friends, I located a couple of Tennessee rooster fighters who were happy to oblige. And one of them, a man named Jim, invited me to tag along to an upcoming derby over in North Carolina. This time, I went.

  FIVE-COCK DERBY IN MADISON COUNTY

  The fight was at the pit near the abandoned Ebbs Chapel School in Madison County; from the outside, it looked like a big barn. We paid the admission fee, and Jim went over to talk to some of his buddies while I tried to make myself invisible. The air was hazy with cigarette smoke and heavy with the smell of coffee and hamburger patties frying on the grill at the refreshment stand. A hundred and fifty or so people were sitting in the bleachers or milling around. Among the spectators was a man in a wheelchair sitting next to his wife and son, who looked to be about twelve years old. Above the general din of conversation, the voice of the pit owner boomed over the PA, instructing the handlers awaiting the next match to bring their roosters to the main pit.

  Each of the handlers was carrying an odd-looking rooster. They looked strange because their combs and wattles had been removed and the feathers on their backs and sides trimmed so the birds would not overheat during the fight. One rooster was deep red. His opponent was black with pale yellow hackles. Like high school wrestlers, the cocks were matched for weight. Gaffs, the curved pointed steel blades that make cockfights deadly, were attached to the stubs of the natural spurs on the legs of the chickens with leather and waxed string. As was customary back then in Appalachia, they were fighting long heels—two-and-a-half-inch gaffs—rather than the shorter gaffs favored in the North or the slasher blades worn only on the left foot that Filipino and Hispanic cockfighters prefer.

  A bald guy in the bleachers yelled out to no one in particular, “I’ll lay a 25-to-20 on the Grey.” A younger man sitting across the pit pointed to him and said, “You’re on.” Jim nodded toward a handful of men hanging quietly together in a corner. He told me they were the high rollers who made big bets among themselves.

  The referee was a fifty-year-old black man they called Doc, who by day was a school janitor. He gave the signal: “Bill em up.” The handlers cradled their birds in their arms and brought them together in the center of the pit, a round arena about fifteen feet in diameter surrounded by a three-foot wire fence. Once the cocks saw each other up close, the adrenaline kicked in, their hackles flared, and they went for one anothers’ eyes. After the birds pecked at each other’s heads for a few seconds, the handlers separated them and retreated behind the long-score lines drawn in the dirt. The handlers squatted down, holding their birds, waiting. Doc yelled, “Pit ’em!” The handlers released the roosters and the fight began. All I saw was a blur of feathers.

  Ten minutes later, the red cock’s handler tossed his rooster’s limp body into a barrel of dead chickens. By the time bets were paid off, two more roosters were readied for the next fight, as I heard Doc say, “Pit ’em!”

  I dragged myself home at three in the morning and tossed and turned all night. I was trying to figure out what it all meant. Bob Dylan has a line that goes, “Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is—do you, Mr. Jones.” That’s how I felt.

  The next morning at breakfast, I told Mary Jean that I was going to shift gears and become an ethnographer for a while. I was certainly not the first researcher who had tried to make sense of rooster fighting. Most of the others have been anthropologists looking for underlying meaning—totems, myth, and symbolism. In 1942, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead wrote of cockfighting in Bali, “The evidence of regarding the fighting cock as a genital symbol comes from postures of men holding cocks, the sex slang and sex jingles, and from Balinese carvings of men with fighting cocks.” The British anthrozoologist Gary Marvin interpreted the Spanish cockfight as a celebration of manhood, and Prince ton sociologist Clifford Geertz argued that the function of rooster fights in Bali is to confirm the status hierarchy among the men in rural villages. More recently, in an essay titled “Gallus as Phallus,” University of California anthropologist Alan Dundes argued that a cockfight is actually a “homoerotic male battle with masturbatory nuances.”

  While I found these quasi-Freudian notions interesting, they provided no insight into the question I was interested in—how could such apparently normal people be involved in an activity that most Americans, myself included, viewed as an exercise in sadism? But to figure out the paradox of why these seemingly good people do seemingly bad things, I had to learn about their sport. I had to step back and assume the mantle that neurologist Oliver Sacks called an “anthropologist from Mars.” Over the next two years, I racked up a couple thousand miles driving the back roads of east Tennessee and western North Carolina, interviewing cockfighters, photographing their kids and roosters—usually together—and gathering data, checklist in hand, at clandestine rooster fights. Along the way, I learned a lot about how people think—and avoid thinking—about the way we treat animals.

  THE CULTURE OF COCKFIGHTING: A PRIMER

  Pitting roosters against each other is one of the oldest and most widespread of traditional sports. The chicken as we know it was domesticated from several species of wild Asian jungle fowl about 8,000 years ago. Wild jungle fowl are inveterate fighters; humans were probably staging bouts between roosters from the time they began keeping chickens around for meat and eggs. Cockfighting originated in Southeast Asia and soon diffused to China, the Pacific Islands, the Middle East, and eventually to ancient Greece and Rome, where young men were required to attend coc
kfights to learn the meaning of courage. The sport took hold in Europe, becoming especially popular in Spain, France, and the British Isles. Columbus brought chickens—and probably cockfighting—to the New World, where it spread rapidly through North and South America.

  To understand cockfighting, you must start with the chickens. Cockfighters are obsessed with bloodlines. They talk endlessly about the merits of crossbreeding, linebreeding, and inbreeding. They can tell you about F1 and F2 generations—just like your high school biology teacher. I visited breeders who would pull out notebooks that went back decades. They knew who sired whom and which hens produced good shufflers and cutters. Now they keep these records on computerized databases.

  There are hundreds of strains of roosters. They have great names: Blue Faced Hatches, Kelsos, Arkansas Travelers, Allen Roundheads, Madigan Grays, Butchers, Clarets. When breeding their battle cocks, rooster fighters are looking for the perfect combination of three traits. The first is cutting—the ability of a cock to deliver accurate strikes to its opponent’s body, to puncture the lungs or heart. The second is the ability to put power behind the blows. But by far the most important trait, the one that gets breeders misty-eyed, is what they call true grit, or more commonly, gameness. I ask Johnny, a third-generation cocker, to tell me how I could explain gameness to my animal rights pals. “Gameness,” he said, “is their heart. Their desire to fight to the death. Your barnyard rooster is cowardly. It can’t take the steel off the gaff. Gameness is the drive to beat the opponent. It is so instilled in the true game rooster that he is going to give everything he has, to his last breath.”

  While cockers are as concerned with bloodlines as the members of the Westminster Kennel Club, all of them will tell you that good genes are not enough to make a great fighting cock. The roosters must also be raised right. Johnny’s stance on the poultry version of the nature-nurture debate is that a roosters’ fighting ability boils down to 85% genes and 15% conditioning. Several weeks before a derby, cockfighters put their roosters on a prefight diet called the keep. Every cockfighter has his own secret system. Johnny would give his roosters vitamin supplements during the keep and allow them to spend a few hours every day foraging for bugs on fresh grass. Some cockers start adding a pinch of strychnine to their rooster’s food during the keep; they think it thickens a rooster’s blood. Others dose their roosters with antibiotics, testosterone, or stimulants. (Johnny tried Dexedrine a couple of times but he gave it up when he found the drug made his roosters act crazy in the pit.)

  Cockers think of their birds as athletes, and they have developed physical conditioning regimes to develop stamina and quickness. Johnny would work his birds in the morning and then again in the afternoon. He had a padded exercise bench where he would put them on their backs so they would learn to right themselves quickly, and he would practice “flirts” by flipping them backward to develop their wing and back muscles. Like iron pumpers at a Gold’s Gym, Johnny’s roosters had an exercise for each muscle group, and he kept track of each rooster’s daily reps as he put it through its paces. In the weeks before a big derby, he would spend six hours a day conditioning his animals.

  EVEN COCKFIGHTS HAVE RULES

  Every sport has rules, and each of the world’s cockfighting cultures has its own traditions that govern how fights are conducted. In Andalusia, for example, metal gaffs are not attached to the roosters’ spurs, so Spanish cockfights are usually not lethal. The most common type of cockfight among cockers in the American South is called a derby. In a derby, each cockfighter enters a preset number of roosters in series of round-robin matches. The basic set of guidelines, referred to as Wortham’s Rules, have been in place since the 1920s and are still used in cockpits from the hills of Kentucky to the plains of west Texas.

  The rules are complicated—you don’t just put the roosters together and let them have at it. During fights, there are two handlers, two chickens, and a referee in the pit. The referee controls the action. The handlers, who often are not the actual owners of the birds, bring the roosters close enough to peck at each other’s faces. Then they place the birds on the ground eight feet apart, facing each other. On the referee’s command, the roosters are released. Instantly and silently, they charge toward each other in a flurry that Clifford Geertz described as “a wing-beating, head-thrusting, leg-kicking explosion of animal fury so pure, so absolute, and in its own way so beautiful, as to be almost abstract, a Platonic concept of hate.”

  Within twenty or thirty seconds, the gaffs usually become entangled in the body of one or both roosters, and they collapse to the ground in heap. The referee signals the handlers to step forward and disentangle their birds; the handlers have twenty seconds to get their birds ready for the next pitting. A good handler knows the anatomy of injuries and, like the corner man in a prize fight, can bring a hurt animal back for the next round. He may put a little water on the cock’s face, or blow on its head to settle him down, or just put him on the ground and leave him alone so the bird can sling a blood clot out of his throat. At the end of the rest period, the fight resumes. And the process repeats until there is a winner.

  Sometimes a rooster will win a cockfight by killing its opponent outright or by beating it up so badly the opposing handler throws in the towel. But more often, the victor is determined by a complicated set of rules called the count. Above all, cockers value a gamecock’s drive to fight no matter if its lungs are punctured, its spine shattered, or its vision growing dim. The count system helps ensure that the gamer rooster, the one that keeps fighting when all seems lost, wins. When a rooster stops attacking because he is injured or exhausted, the opposing handler says to the referee, “Count me.” If the other rooster does not attack for four successive pittings, the rooster whose handler “has the count” is declared the winner. But if the bloodied and battered rooster makes the slightest effort at aggression, even a weak peck toward its adversary, the count starts over. A typical gaff fight lasts about ten minutes, but sometimes a rooster will get in a lucky blow and hit a vital organ and it is over in seconds. On the other hand, a single fight can go on for an hour or more. To keep the spectators from getting bored, long fights are moved to a secondary or “drag pit” which frees up the main arena for a pair of fresh birds.

  In recent years, the influx of immigrants has affected cockfighting just as it has many other aspects of American culture. The weapon of choice of the new breed of cockers is the knife. These artificial spurs, unlike ice pick–shaped gaffs, have razor-sharp edges. Filipinos like the long knife, which looks like something you would use to dismantle a porterhouse at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. Mexicans prefer the short knife, which has a one-inch blade honed on both sides. Old-timers aren’t keen on these new developments. They claim the knife makes it easy for a less courageous rooster to win a fight by way of a lucky blow.

  Cockfights are not nearly as bloody as you would imagine. Eddy’s wife, a food service manager, describes the first time he took her to a fight at the Del Rio pit. “I was surprised. It was not the blood and guts I thought it would be. And the restrooms were clean. So was the kitchen and the food was good. They made everything from scratch.”

  She is right about the gore. The wounds inflicted by the steel gaffs do not bleed much on the outside, and the cock’s feathers conceal most of the seepage. In addition, a game rooster’s blood is more efficient at clotting than the blood of other types of chickens. In the parlance of cockfighters, game roosters can “take a lot of steel.” Cockers have a lexicon of injury. A rooster that has had its lungs punctured emits a creepy rasping sound called the “rattles.” When a cock flops around with spinal cord damage, it is said to be “un coupled.” I once took the carcass of a rooster that had been killed in a fight to the state veterinary pathology lab for autopsy. The pathologist, it turned out, had been involved in cockfighting when he was growing up in Oklahoma. When he cut the cock open, he counted nineteen holes in its body. The fatal blow was to the throat.

  Fights are usually straig
htforward affairs; almost all the losers die and almost all the winners live. But every now and then, the unexpected happens. A rooster may refuse to fight and just walk around aimlessly with a bewildered look in his eye. Occasionally a cock will humiliate its owner by turning tail and running around the pit, squawking. Then there are the man-fighters, cocks that spin around and go for their handler instead of the other rooster. One night I saw a Grey nail a handler in the thigh with both gaffs, two-and-a-half inches of ice pick. The man turned ashen and collapsed.

  Notch one up for the chicken.

  One of the biggest surprises of my foray into the clandestine world of rooster fighters was how open it was. Most Appalachian cockfighters made no real effort to conceal their involvement in their sport, even though it was against the law. As I drove around the region, I would see fields containing hundreds of gamecocks, some tethered to barrels, others in little wooden houses that looked like Boy Scout pup tents, all of them in full view of rural roads or even interstate highways. How did they get away with it?

  Simple. In the 1970s, being a cockfighter in Appalachia was about as illegal as being a litterbug. True, cockfighting was against the law in both North Carolina and Tennessee, but it was a misdemeanor, and local sheriffs generally turned a blind eye. On the rare occasions when raids occurred, the participants were invariably slapped on the wrist and given a $50 fine. No one ever went to jail. Sure, some sheriffs were on the take, but others figured it was better to have the fights in established pits where it was in everyone’s interest to be on good behavior. These pits had implicit codes of conduct to avoid altercations: no drinking or drugs around the pit, don’t welsh on bets, the referee’s word goes. Pit owners also did their best to avoid trouble with their neighbors. The owner of the Ebbs Chapel pit would take donations at the Saturday night fights for the Baptist church up the road.