Cockfighting battles for survival

SUNSET - It is a bright Sunday morning in Louisiana and in a cavernous steel barn, two men with baseball caps are carrying a rooster each into the centre of a large pit covered by a cage of wire mesh. The men briefly bring the birds together, like boxers touching gloves before a bout, and then they step backwards and place them on the sand-covered floor.

There is a pause then a flurry of wings as the birds leap high at each other, pecking and kicking with heels bearing long steel spikes. The crowd erupts with a roar, men waving wads of money at each other, shouting bets for US$100, US$200 or US$500. The birds kick and spit, often becoming entangled so they lie helpless on the sand, their blood-spattered chests beating furiously.

This is the Sunset Recreation Club in Sunset. The town is considered the cockfighting capital of the United States, and site of some of the most prestigious cockfighting in the world. On most weekends between December and July, hundreds of enthusiasts from across the US descend upon this blink-and-you'll-miss-it town to watch the roosters fight, often to the death.

After campaigns by animal rights campaigners, cockfighting has been banned in all but two US states, Louisiana and New Mexico. Emboldened by their success and polls which show a large majority is opposed to cockfighting those campaigners are targeting these final redoubts of the sport. Cockfighting is fighting for its life.

"It's just a question of finishing them off," John Goodwin, a campaigner with the Humane Society, said. "It's a throwback to a more primitive era ... "

Such an onslaught has thrown the cockfighting community on to the defensive. Even in the two states where it is legal, cockfighting is a secretive, semi-covert activity. The president of the Louisiana Gamefowl Breeders Association, Emmanuel Massa, refused to talk to the Independent because "all media attention is bad". And yet people with links to cockfighting kept talking about Sunset and the crowds who drove hundreds of kilometres to this little town in the bayous just to participate. If you really wanted to understand cockfighting and why people so loved the sport, they said, you would have to see it for yourself.

Sunset is in the heart of Cajun country, 16km north of Lafayette which is considered the capital of Acadiana. Acadiana has historically been the home of the independent-minded Cajuns, descendants of the French-speaking Acadians who settled south-west Louisiana after their expulsion by the British from Nova Scotia, or Acadia, in 1755.

It is a place of few fixed points or certainties. One constant is the 600-seat Sunset Recreation Club, which has existed since the 1940s. On a recent Saturday night, the parking lot was full of cars and utes. Drivers had travelled from Oklahoma, Alabama, Florida, Texas and the Carolinas. Inside, a huge, convivial crowd of men in jeans and camouflage jackets were drinking beer and watching TV. Elsewhere there were women and children.

At the rear of the building, through a darkened entrance, came a noisy wave of frantic cheering. Through that doorway was where the real action was taking place. Getting inside involved getting past Butch Lawson.

The likeable Lawson, 54, has been involved in cockfighting since he was eight. His father, who believed cockfighters were "rogues", allowed his son to raise the birds but not to fight them. Lawson's flouting of his father's rules often got him into trouble but gave him a love of the sport that remains. He has managed the club since 1990, travelling from his home in Montgomery, Alabama, most weekends.

His passion for cockfighting is matched by his contempt for those trying to put him out of business, so-called "humaniacs". He said the activists were hypocrites, whose campaigns were nothing more than a front to raise money from "little old ladies sitting at home with their pet dogs".

Lawson's friend, Joe MacSkinner, editor of Grit and Steel, one of three magazines devoted to cockfighting, regularly invoked God when he defended cockfighting. Opponents believed animals had the same rights as humans, he said, but the Old Testament made clear that man had dominion over animals.

Wasn't cockfighting so very obviously cruel? One of the men said: "It's not cruel, those birds fight naturally.

"You could put two roosters at either end of a football field and they'd run towards each other and fight."

Clifton Bryant, a sociologist at Virginia Tech University who has written extensively about cockfighting, said the demographic of cockfighters resembled that of Main Street America from 50 years ago. "They're more likely to be rural, to be married, more likely to go to church, less likely to be divorced, to be veterans, more likely to be conservative," he said.

"I often think of them like the people in a Norman Rockwell painting. These people often have an instrumental relationship with animals; they still slaughter a pig for pork, they still shoot deer for meat. Remember, it was only when Walt Disney came along that people started to think that animals were like humans."

While the people at Sunset were under no such impression, they were adamant that the owners took great care of their birds. "I'd like you to come back early tomorrow morning so you can see the owners,"Lawson said.

The next morning, the Sunset club was a terrible cacophony of crowing roosters. Men were emerging from sheds around the club where the birds are kept overnight. One man, Sam Sherlock, 31, from South Carolina, was proudly standing next to a cage in which he had a wonderful-looking red and gold rooster. He said it was worth US$3000 ($4200) and it was for breeding purposes only. But Sherlock had brought other birds to fight in what had been a three-day "derby" with prize money of US$54,000 ($75,650).

Once inside the pit, it was difficult to agree with those who maintained cockfighting was not cruel.

Before they fight, the birds' heels are strapped with one of several "weapons", a long or short knife, essentially a razor blade up to 3 or 4cm, or a steel spike known as a gaff.

These are the weapons that inflict the horrendous injuries on the birds and which kill - at least on the evidence of that morning's events - anywhere up to 15 to 20 per cent of the roosters. The dead birds were thrown into a wheelbarrow.

Few birds fight more than once. The gaffs penetrate lungs, blind the birds or cripple them, while the knives make huge, deep incisions. In an extraordinary scene away from the pit, two men in green hospital scrubs from Tallahassee Memorial Hospital were performing surgery on wounded roosters using the same surgical items one would find in an operating theatre.

It seemed that however badly the birds were hurt, they fought on.

But, if it is cruel, does it mean that cockfighting should be banned?

Its defenders say the benefits of allowing cockfighting to continue legally in one or two places outweigh a ban.

It is hypocritical, they say, for urban dwellers to bemoan the loss of rural communities while supporting a ban that would take away business from places such as Sunset as well as removing one of the social lubricants that binds such communities.

Even opponents admit there is a network of illegal cockfighting pits throughout the US that operate despite the bans. Such a network exists, the people at Sunset insisted, even in Britain, where cockfighting was officially banned in the 19th century.

- INDEPENDENT