Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat

by Hal Herzog

  In short, the local law figured it was preferable to let the pits operate than force the sport more deeply underground. They may have been right. Cockfights involve a potentially explosive combination of testosterone and money. I was afraid only once at a cockfight, and it was at a ragtag event called a brush fight. Brush fights are informal affairs held in barns or in the piney woods, arranged by a few last-minute phone calls, with no entry fee, no paid referees, and no rules against alcohol. The fight was in west Knoxville on a hot afternoon and the beer was flowing. The referee was a spectator who was drafted from the crowd and did not really know what he was doing. Two handlers, who had both been drinking, squabbled over one of the ref’s calls. In a regular pit, they would have been ejected immediately. Not so in a brush fight. The argument escalated until one guy grabbed a beer bottle, broke off the neck, and went for the other handler, catching him in the shoulder. With blood dripping down his arm, the man who had been stabbed grabbed his chicken and stomped off. When I heard him slur, “I’ll teach that asshole a lesson. I’ve got a shotgun in my truck,” I started looking for an escape route. Unfortunately, I had gotten to the fight early and was completely hemmed in by a dozen pickup trucks. However, everyone else was as averse to drunks with shotguns as I was. Within minutes every vehicle cleared out, and I was headed home, sweating, heart beating and hands shaking, thinking that maybe I was not cut out to be an anthropologist after all.

  JUSTIFYING THE UNJUSTIFIABLE

  Most people imagine that cockfighters are low-life scum who peddle crystal meth when they are not gleefully torturing animals. I found, however, that the most psychologically interesting thing about rooster fighters is how boringly normal they are. Nearly all the cockers I have known led—aside from their devotion to a brutal bloodsport—ordinary lives complete with mortgages, wives, children, and day jobs.

  Suzie, a Louisiana animal protectionist I know, worked tirelessly for years to ban cockfighting in her state. Her experience with rural Southern rooster fighters was similar to mine. She despises cockfighting. However, like Baptists who claim to hate the sin but not the sinner, she came to respect many of her opponents. She told me once, “Most of the cockfighters I met were God-fearing, polite, family people who were not out there shooting heroin or snorting coke. I am completely opposed to cockfighting, but that does not mean that cockfighters are evil people.”

  If cockfighters were sadistic perverts, it would be easy to explain their involvement in a cruel bloodsport. But given that most are not, how can they participate in an activity that is illegal and that nearly everyone in America thinks is immoral? The answer is that they construct a moral framework based on a mix of wishful thinking and logic in which cockfighting becomes completely acceptable. In this regard they are no different from any other person who exploits animals—hunters, circus animal trainers, even scientists and meat-eaters. There are several lines of argument that cockfighters use to justify an activity that most people find unjustifiable.

  “The Most Humane Sport”

  Most cockfighters deny that their sport is cruel. They tell you that that the fight itself is only a small part of their sport. They tell you it takes two years to raise a chicken from hatchling to battle cock and that the fight, which is often over in a few minutes, is just a fraction of what it means to be a cocker.

  But what about the pain and suffering? My friend Johnny claims that the steel gaffs have taken the cruelty out of cockfighting. The gaffs, he argues, make it a fair fight because they equalize each rooster’s chance of winning. If it were not for the gaffs, he says, the roosters would batter each other to death with their three-inch natural spurs. My neighbor Paul Ledford laid another argument on me one morning when I asked him over a cup of coffee how much pain was inflicted during a typical cockfight. He shook his head and said, “Chickens don’t feel pain. Chickens are too dumb to feel pain.”

  Sometimes you also hear the opposite argument, that chickens are moral agents who choose to fight each other to the death. According to this thread of logic, it is cruel not to let roosters meet their destiny in the cockpit. In his book Fighting Sports, Captain L. Fitz-Barnard writes, “Where the agents are willing, there can be no cruelty. For the gamecock, the joy of battle is his greatest joy.” Fitz-Barnard thinks that cockfighting is ethically superior to hunting or fishing because the whitetail buck or brown trout you kill does not have a choice in the matter. “Where you have unwilling participants there must be cruelty…no sane person can pretend that the fish enjoys being lured to death, often with live bait; that the fox or the hare likes to be hunted and torn to pieces; or that the birds and beasts prefer a lingering death from gunshot wounds.”

  I don’t buy for a minute the argument that gamecocks choose to fight because they achieve the avian version of self-actualization in battle. No, they fight because their brains are hardwired by thousands of years of intense selection to plunge their spurs into other male roosters. Even if they wanted to flee, the close quarters of the pit make it impossible. Fitz-Barnard’s comparison of cockfighting and hunting, however, does strike an uncomfortable chord. As many as 30% of the 120 million wild birds shot by hunters each year in the United States will fall from the sky wounded and fully conscious. While the lucky ones will be found and killed quickly, millions of others will die lingering deaths. Fitz-Barnard is right: There is much more suffering caused by the legal sport of recreational hunting than the outlawed sport of cockfighting.

  “It’s Only Natural”

  A common variation on the “it’s not cruel” justification for cockfighting is that roosters are instinctive fighters, just like lions are instinctive zebra killers. This is a variation on the naturalistic fallacy. Johnny laid it out for me: “What we do is an act of nature in a controlled situation. That rooster’s going to fight if we are there or not. We make things as even as possible for them to perform an act of nature. We don’t make these roosters fight. That’s what they were put here for. It is their purpose.” (This, by the way, is also the reason most cockfighters I met did not approve of dogfighting. As Eddy’s wife told me, “Cockfighting is not like dogfighting. They have to make the dogs mean. But these chickens are born to fight. They do it regardless of whether you are there or not.”)

  I run across the naturalistic fallacy a lot. In explaining her opposition to animal research, an animal rights activist told me that AIDS was “nature’s way” of reducing human overpopulation. A woman I met at a party recently said to me, “I just don’t get vegetarians. Humans have been eating animals for millions of years. That’s what cows and chickens were put here for.” I did not point out that her justification for eating chickens was identical to Johnny’s rationale for fighting them. I suspect she would not have seen the parallels.

  “The Nicest People You Ever Saw”

  Restrictions on cockfighting were originally based not on concern for animal suffering, but for keeping the riffraff down. The association between with cockfighting and other forms of criminal activity continues today. For example, the Humane Society of the United States links cockfighting with prostitution, identity theft, robbery, Mexican drug cartels, illegal gambling, bribery, gang activity, tax evasion, money laundering, immigration violations, hand grenades, and murder.

  Cockfighters, of course, don’t see it that way. They view themselves as a persecuted band of brothers held together by a common set of values that include hard work, competition, respect for cultural traditions, and love of chickens. They discount the charges of booze, dope, hookers, and money scams. Of animal protection organizations, Johnny told me, “They call us everything—pimps, drug dealers. To them we are the scum of the earth. They are smarter than we are. They know how to paint us to people who don’t understand.” OK, he admits, there are a few bad apples—the cheat who dabs poison on his rooster’s hackles or illegally sharpens the edges of a long-heel gaff. But they are a small minority. As for 99% of cockers, Johnny says, “You will never find a nicer group of people. Where else can you go w
here that much money changes hands on a nod without any controversy? Cockers are gentlemen.”

  The Great Man Defense

  Cockers supplement the “good people” defense with a rhetorical twist social psychologists call reflected glory. The logic goes like this: “If ____ was a cockfighter, it must be OK.” The list of names they insert in the blank includes George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Alexander the Great, Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Hannibal, Caesar, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln, who was reportedly a referee. Genghis Khan and Helen Keller are sometimes added to the list, though I am skeptical about the latter. A long line of British royalty are claimed as fellow travelers by modern cockfighters who often refer to rooster fighting as the “sport of kings.”

  Cockfighting Builds Character

  When Bobby Keener of Greensboro, North Carolina, was asked what kept him interested in cockfighting, he said, “It’s the way that this animal would keep going until he has nothing else to give. How many people would do that? This bird will give you everything he’s got until he’s got no more and then he keeps giving it. It’s what you call gameness or heart. That’s what’s kept me interested in it.” I call this the moral model defense. To a cockfighter, a game rooster is the bravest creature on earth. That’s why the gamecock is the mascot of the University of South Carolina football team. A cocker summed up the moral model argument when he wrote in Grit and Steel, “A gamecock is loyal to his family and himself—and he has the grit to back that loyalty…. It takes grit to be loyal—to your ideals, to your wife, to your husband, to your friends, to your country.”

  “I Love My Chickens”

  For a chicken, a game rooster has it pretty good. Cocks are not usually fought until they are two years old, during which time they lead a life befitting a thoroughbred race horse. For the first eight or nine months, they have the run of the chicken yard. Once they hit puberty, the cocks have to be separated, but because breeders want their birds to get exercise, they are either tethered with a seven-foot “tie out” cord or kept in fairly large cages that allow them to move about. In addition to the organic corn that Johnny bought for them at the health food store, his roosters got hardboiled egg for breakfast and dined on fruit, salad greens, and pearl barley for lunch. Every other day, he would give them hamburger supplemented with cottage cheese. Johnny complains, “We give our roosters the best food, the best housing, the best hens…. And then they call us cruel.”

  Like every cockfighter I have ever talked to, Eddy Buckner is passionate about his roosters. He tells me he loves them, and I believe him. Like Fabe Webb, his eyes sparkle when he talks about his birds.

  “But, Eddy,” I say. “You claim to love these animals. You raise them practically by hand for two years, you spend hours every day handling them and exercising them. But then you take them to the pit on the weekend knowing full well that half of them are going to die before the end of the night, and then you just toss them in a barrel. I don’t get it.”

  “You have to draw the line,” he says.

  “But don’t you get attached to them?” I ask.

  “Sure,” he says.

  “Do you ever name them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever see a cockfighter cry over a dead rooster?”

  “Never.”

  “I still don’t get it,” I tell him.

  ANIMAL ACTIVISTS VERSUS ROOSTER

  FIGHTERS: AN ASYMMETRY OF HATE

  Cockfighters are completely convinced by these arguments—so convinced that rooster fighters have told me with a straight face they would like to bring animal rights activists to a derby so they could see what a great sport cockfighting really is. This idea is, of course, ludicrous. Every animal protectionist I know thinks that cockfighting is cruel, and nothing would ever change their minds. This leads to an asymmetry of animosity—animal activists hate cockfighters more than cockfighters hate animal protectionists.

  Karen Davis, the founder of United Poultry Concerns, the country’s only poultry rights organization, despises rooster fighting. She says that the sport is not about competition, but about male insecurity. The great irony of manhood, she tells me, is that men are scared of each other, that they are afraid that other men will see their touch of female sensibility. To her, cockfighting is a perverse adult version of the playground taunt, “My dad can beat up your dad.”

  When I ask how she feels about cockfighters. Karen says, “A chicken is about as tall as your knee, and they are at the total mercy of these men who tower over little birds and punish their bodies. And the ultimate punishment is putting them in a ring and making them beat each other up. Cockfighters force their violent, bloodlusting impulses on birds. And then they say they admire these animals and love them. I don’t think there is a chicken in the world that would be grateful for that.”

  Is she right? Given a choice, would any chicken in the world volunteer to be a gamecock? Karen has forced me to revisit the question I asked myself while I was chasing the chicken trucks down I-40: Would I rather be a fighting rooster or a commercial broiler? To answer it, we need to look at the sorry lot of the industrial chicken.

  WHAT WOULD YOU RATHER BE, A

  GAMECOCK OR A BROILER?

  The modern broiler chicken is a technological marvel. The chickens I followed down the interstate looked like Cobb 500s, one of the world’s most popular types of meat chicken. The Cobb 500 was developed by Cobb-Vantress, a multinational corporation formed in 1986 as a joint venture between two corporate giants, Tyson Foods and Upjohn. Cobb-Vantress, which has operations in Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa, also produces the Cobb 700, designed for a high proportion of breast meat; the Cobb Sasso 150, aimed at the free-range and organic market; and the Cobb Avian 48, which is advertised as having “high livability” and particularly suitable for “live bird markets seen in some parts of the world.”

  These birds are meat machines. The average Cobb 500 breeder hen will produce 132 chicks by the time she is “depleted” at the age of fifteen months. The chicks’ lives will be much shorter than their mother’s. In 1925, it took 120 days and ten pounds of feed to produce a scrawny two-and-a-half-pound bird. Now chickens are slaughtered when they are six or seven weeks old, at which time they will weigh nearly five pounds. While a Cobb 500 grows nearly five times as fast as your grandmother’s barnyard chicken, it eats less food. Cobb-Vantress projects that soon it will only take a pound and a half of feed to produce a pound of chicken. Even better from an industry perspective, there is less waste on a modern chicken. Once its feathers are plucked, its feet and head chopped off, its guts scraped out and blood drained, 73% of a Cobb 500’s carcass will be “eviscerated yield.”

  Cheap meat comes at a cost. A broiler chicken’s bones cannot keep up with the explosive growth of its body. Unnaturally large breasts torque a chicken’s legs, causing lameness, ruptured tendons, and twisted leg syndrome. According to Donald Broome, professor of animal welfare at Cambridge University, severe leg pain in chickens is the world’s largest animal welfare problem. Arthritis, heart disease, sudden death syndrome, and a host of metabolic disorders are prevalent among industrial broilers.

  The living conditions of the animals destined to become chicken nuggets are Dante-esque. The chicks will never see sun nor sky. Because they are so top-heavy, broiler chickens spend most of their day lying down, often in litter contaminated with excrement. As a result, many will develop breast blisters, hock burns, and sores on their feet. A chicken “grow-out house” can be 600 feet long and 60 feet wide and hold 30,000 birds. The broiler houses are humid, the air laced with ammonia produced by the action of microbes on the accumulated urine and the excrement of tens of thousands of birds. The gas burns the lungs, inflames the eyes, and causes chronic respiratory disease.

  When the broilers reach five or six pounds, it is time for their trip to the processing plant. But first you have to catch them. Crews of low-paid chicken catchers invade the sheds at
night. Wearing masks and throw-away coveralls, they grab the chickens by the feet, five birds in each hand, and stuff them into holding drawers. It can take all night for a team of catchers to load 30,000 chickens into wire crates, during which time each catcher will lift fifteen tons total of flapping, squawking bird. It is nasty work for both people and animals. The catchers get scratched, pecked, and covered with shit. As many as 25% of the birds will be injured in the catching and loading process. My colleague Bruce Henderson, now a developmental psychologist, signed onto a chicken-catching crew when he was in high school. He lasted six days.

  Isn’t there a better way to snatch up chickens? Enter the mechanical chicken harvester. There are several varieties of these behemoths including one with giant rubber fingers. One of the more popular is the PH2000 made by the Lewis/Mola Company of Bennettsville, South Carolina. The machine is forty-two feet long, weighs 16,000 pounds, and can clean 24,000 birds out of a broiler house in three and a half hours. It works more or less like a two-headed dustpan. The machine gingerly sweeps two metal ramps called catch heads through the flock of chickens. They nudge each other on to ramp where they are moved toward a conveyor belt, which transports them directly into wire transport cages for the trip to the processing plant. The Humane Society of the United States says mechanical harvesters are easier on the birds than hand catching. Chickens hate being grabbed by humans and held upside down by their sore legs. They do not seem as stressed as they march clueless into the maw of the PH2000 and are excreted moments later, a bit dazed, into wire transport cages. The company reports that mechanical harvesting results in 60% fewer broken wings and a 99% reduction in broken legs. Despite these presumed advantages, the vast majority of the broiler chickens consumed each year in the United States are still captured by hand.

  Once the transport cages are loaded, the trucks hit the road and take our Cobb 500s to the processing plant, where they will be dumped from their crates, shackled tightly by their legs with metal cuffs, and hung head-down from a conveyer belt. Then, upside-down and wings flapping, their heads will be passed through an electrified water bath. For seven to ten seconds, electricity will travel through their bodies, hopefully stunning the animals. The next stop is the neck-cutting machine where sets of rotating blades sever the chickens’ carotid arteries. Once the chickens bleed out, their bodies will be dunked in the scald tank. An efficient production system with two evisceration lines can process 140 birds per minute. The system, however, does not always work. Some birds are not completely stunned before their throats are slit, and if the neck-cutting blades miss a chicken’s carotid arteries, it will be conscious when it is submerged in the hot water of the scald tank.