Alan Sipress - The Fatal Strain

“Before it got into humans, I knew it was coming, but other people said I was crying wolf,” he recounted. “After the first case, I said, ‘Let’s use direct scientific information to stop the outbreak.’ So it was averted.”

Guan now finds himself playing a prophetic role again. To anyone who listens, he says the moral of SARS is clear. The flu virus must be controlled in birds. Whatever it takes, the microbial agent must be extinguished before a readily transmissible flu strain jumps to people, because once it does, global spread is inevitable. There won’t be time to stop it.

But he laments that his counsel is again being shunned. Only now, with the flu virus so widespread, it could be too late.

“I did my job,” he said, rising to light another Mild Seven. “I can face God and say, ‘OK, God, this mission I did. I gave all this advance warning. I provided evidence. I did everything a scientist could do. The remaining job is for governments and politicians. And each person must pay the price if they go against the laws of nature.’”

The pair of Thai fighting cocks, long-legged and elegant, stalked each other around the dirt ring, feinting and probing for an opening. They puffed out their broad chests, flaunting their foot-tall physiques. Then they each settled into a brief crouch, face-to-face, beak to razor-sharp beak. As they spread the majestic plumage around their necks, electricity coursed through the arena with anticipation of first blood.

Generations of breeding had brought the prizefighters to this moment of steely, instinctive, hard-wired aggression, nurtured and shaped by hundreds of hours of training.

They attacked as one, lunging at each other through the air, colliding in midflight with the muffled thud of meat on meat and the frantic flapping of ruffled wings and tails.

Spectators leaped from their concrete-block bleachers, surging against the edge of the ring.

Feathers flew. Blood oozed from the wounded eye of one combatant, a lean, handsome rooster with rich black plumage and golden brown along the neck and back. Even more was flowing from the throat of his adversary, an equally graceful creature with a white body and black trim along the wings and tail. His neck was quickly staining red.

Cries swelled in the bleachers as the spectators doubled and redoubled their wagers like frenzied traders on the floor of a stock exchange. Phapart Thieuviharn, a lifelong cock breeder with intense brown eyes and straight black hair speckled with gray, shifted anxiously on the edge of his seat, clutching the notepad on which he had scribbled his bets. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of dollars in Thai baht would ultimately change hands once one of the roosters finally surrendered to its injuries.

But Phapart and 125 other spectators were wagering more than their banknotes. They were gambling with their lives. In the years since bird flu began racing across Southeast Asia, cockfighting has repeatedly been implicated as a killer. It has sickened cock breeders and enthusiasts from Thailand to Vietnam and spread the virus on to Malaysia and perhaps even to Indonesia through the smuggled exports of prized fighting birds.

Cockfighting has long been a prominent feature of rural Southeast Asia, intertwined with its history, a spectacle for kings and peasants alike. For centuries, it seemed to pose no human threat but was just one more tradition that wove together the lives of man and bird into the fiber of daily existence. Villagers shared their homes with their chickens, peddled poultry at live markets, and integrated wildfowl into religious rituals. But these traditions, benign for humans if not the birds, have lately acquired a sinister edge. They have proven largely impervious to the admonitions of public health officials, who have urgently warned that the practice could unlock flu’s devastating potential.

In fundamental ways, modernity has recast this corner of the world, unleashing dramatic economic changes that have magnified the potential for a pandemic strain and weaving the region into a globalized planet now exposed as never before to viral threats born of Asia. Yet Asia’s past could also be mankind’s undoing if age-old conventions give the virus entrée into the human population. Time and again, the intimate contact between fighting cocks and their doting breeders has proven a fatal attraction. Even for spectators at the cockpit, the brew of rooster blood, breath, and mucus that sprayed the ringside could be lethal.

Yet flu seemed of little matter on this sultry Sunday when Phapart had agreed to take me to the fights. We had driven about forty miles from his home in the northern Thai province of Phayao, where the sport had been banned because of public health concerns, to neighboring Chiang Rai province, where it was still allowed. But gambling was not. So local villagers thought it prudent to build their arena away from the main roads, far from the inquisitive eyes and outstretched palms of law enforcement. We turned off the paved road and headed down a long, unmarked dirt track that stretched deep into the emerald rice paddies until we reached a clearing. Though barely midday, the dirt and grass lot was already filling up with dusty pickup trucks. A young man collected fifty cents from Phapart. By midafternoon, the attendant would net about two hundred dollars in parking fees.

We walked over to what Phapart called the stadium. It was actually a whole cockfighting complex, a cluster of open-sided sheds with thatch and corrugated metal roofs. The main events were held in the central arena, a twenty-foot-diameter pit with red padding along the sides surrounded by three rows of concrete bleachers and a fourth fashioned from bamboo. Side matches were staged in three smaller rings without any seating. Food stalls peddled Thai noodles, soup, and other simple dishes.

The matchmaking had already started. Several dozen men, looking for action, had carried over roosters in woven bamboo cages and set them down near the entrance. There they sized up the competition, judging the other birds for weight and size, the other owners for the depth of their pockets.

A middle-aged farmer in a plaid work shirt had struck a match with a teenager in a red soccer T-shirt, and they shook hands on the first bout. Their birds, the black rooster with golden brown patches and the white rooster with black trim, each weighed in at about five pounds. Their base wager, sure to escalate over the course of the bout, would open at thirty-three hundred baht, or slightly more than eighty dollars. The fight organizer wrote their names on a blackboard outside the main arena, Golf Chai versus Mae Yao, and dispatched them to their corners.

For fifteen minutes, they prepped their fighters. Like trainers at a boxing match, they massaged the roosters to loosen their muscles. They wiped down the birds with moist towels warmed on a portable gas stove. The white rooster had somehow lost a wing feather. So his teenage owner, determined that his bird be properly accoutred, produced a spare white plume and glued it in place.

The spectators, mainly men from surrounding districts, filed into the arena, claiming spots on the bleachers. Those on the far side were silhouetted against brilliant sunshine. But beneath the metal roof, the ring was shady and cool. The stadium workers distributed small note-pads to the crowd so they could record their bets, and the scribbling began even before the referee barked the fight to a start. With a few words of whispered encouragement, the owners released their impatient, agitated birds into the ring.

The roosters strutted and stalked, and then they struck. Over and over they flung themselves at one another. They craned their lissome necks, red crowns high, and jousted with their beaks. They jabbed and kicked with the daggerlike spurs on their legs. Resolute and reckless, beautiful and brutal. First blood was just that, only the first. This fight was scheduled to go two rounds, twenty relentless minutes each, and toward the end of the opening round, their fine, well-groomed feathers were growing ragged and red from combat.