Alan Sipress - The Fatal Strain

The spectators had crowded the lowest rows and were now hanging on every thrust and parry. Dozens leaned forward into the ring, their arms dangling at times within inches of the action. They scrutinized the rivals for a glimmer of doubt or weakness, a slight hesitation or momentary loss of heart that could presage final retreat sometime later on. The betting swelled, with the crowd barking out side bets across the ring almost as fast as they could jot them in their pads.

Two hundred baht. Five hundred baht! One thousand baht! Two thousand baht!!

When the referee called an end to the first round, the two owners rushed into the ring, swept their roosters up into their arms, and hustled them away. There was much to be done during the break.

On adjacent patches of dirt, the two owners followed the same, urgent regimen. First they scrubbed the blood from the birds. Clutching soggy rags in their bare hands, they firmly washed the roosters’ faces, followed by their necks, stomachs, and legs, repeatedly wringing out the bloody cloths on the dirt. Next they slipped the birds painkillers to help get them through the final round, prying open their beaks and popping in pills with their fingers. Each owner then grabbed a spare feather and inserted it into his cock’s mouth, twisting it in the throat to help clear blood and mucus. They withdrew the feather and ran it between their fingers, squeezing the slime onto the ground. Then they repeated the procedure.

As we joined the small circle of onlookers, Phapart explained that bruising and internal bleeding can become so painful that an owner must nick the swelling with a knife and suck out the blood with his mouth. Some owners have been known to remove excess mucus the same way. They do what it takes to keep the cocks in the game. “If the beak breaks loose from the mouth during a fight,” he continued, “you can reattach it with a small net wrapped around the head and then begin fighting again. If a claw breaks off, you can bandage it. If the wing feathers are loose, you can glue them back on.”

In the boxing matches of the West, prizefighters often rely on a “cut man” in their corner to help stanch bleeding from around the eyes so they can tough out another round. Since roosters are no better at battling blind, cockfighting has a similar craft. On this afternoon, the eyes of both birds were swelling shut. So in the final minutes of the break, the two men produced needles and thread and deftly stitched their roosters’ eyes open.

The referee summoned the competitors for the second round. Their owners, now smeared with blood and mucus and bird droppings, returned the patched-up cocks to the ring. There, they resumed the brawl where they had left it.

When the climax came, toward the end of the round, it came quickly. The white rooster had been stripped of more and more feathers and ultimately of his confidence. The spectators immediately noticed this tentative turn, and the sound of cheers and jeers swelled in the bleachers. Those few who were still seated jumped to their feet.

The black-and-gold aggressor continued his pursuit, pressing his advantage, pushing his foe up against the side of the ring. Attacking over and over. The white rooster was broken, its spirit finally crushed. In a wholly unfamiliar act that betrayed his very nature, he scampered away in retreat. A holler rose from the crowd.

This unforgiving competition is an acute form of natural selection. Losers perish in the ring or become supper for their owners. Winners prevail to fight another day and, if they win enough, go on to father the next generation of fighters.

“This the best way to breed,” said Apichai Ratanawaraha, an agriculture professor at Bangkok’s Thammasat University and a scholar of this blood sport. “You get the best of the best. Because Thai people in the countryside have selected their birds this way for generations, the fighting cock breed in Thailand may be the best in the world.”

Cockfighting spread centuries ago to Europe and onward to the Caribbean and Latin America. The fighting cock has transcended cultures as a symbol of virility and manhood. But the sport’s roots are in Asia.

Apichai told me that the peoples of East Asia have been raising chickens as gamecocks for just as long as they have been raising them for food: about 7,500 years. It was in Southeast Asia that mankind first domesticated chicken, most likely in Thailand itself. The poultry found today on farms across the world are descended from the region’s red jungle fowl, wild pheasants with golden bronze plumage draping the necks, wings, and backs and with black chests and tails that shimmer blue and green. The male of the species is much larger than the female, with a fleshy red wattle on his head and, during breeding season, an intense dislike for rival suitors. Early farmers found that pitting the males against one another made for a welcome diversion from the slog of subsistence agriculture, a way to unwind during the weeks after the harvest was finally in. “Cockfighting,” Apichai claimed, “was the first sport for human beings.”

Archaeologists around Southeast Asia have repeatedly uncovered relics portraying the pastime. Bronze artifacts discovered in Thailand’s Kanchanaburi province near the Burmese border depict cockfighting from 1,700 years ago. The sport also appears on the sculpted walls of the magnificent Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia, one of the grandest finds of modern times. Along the exterior of Angkor’s twelfth-century Bayon Temple, a three-tiered mountain of stone that rises at the heart of the complex, are extensive bas reliefs depicting the everyday life of the Khmer people nearly a millennium ago. Among the images of women peddling fish and giving birth, and of men hunting, kickboxing, and playing chess, is a scene of cockfighting that would be instantly recognizable anywhere in Southeast Asia today.

In Thailand, cockfighting assumed a special place in the national culture during the reign of King Naresuan, an accomplished military strategist and avid breeder of the late sixteenth century. When Naresuan was a still a boy, the armies of Burma overran the Thai kingdom of Ayuthaya and took him prisoner. They carried the nine-year-old prince off to Burma as a royal hostage to ensure the fealty of his father, the king, but allowed Naresuan to take his favorite rooster. In captivity, he pitted the bird against those of the Burmese prince and, as Thais tell the tale, vanquished them all. “Not only can this cock champion a money bet,” Naresuan told his jailers, “it can also fight for kingdoms.” The Burmese returned him to the vassal state of Ayuthaya at age sixteen in a prisoner exchange. During the following years, Naresuan became a renowned warrior, campaigning to drive the Burmese occupiers from Thai lands and declaring the restoration of the Ayuthaya dynasty. The Burmese dubbed him the Black Prince. On his father’s death in 1590, Naresuan acceded to the throne and reigned for fifteen years, extending the Thai domain to unprecedented frontiers. He adorned his palace gates with images of the cock. Monuments to the king still depict him surrounded by his roosters. The fighting cock became a symbol of national resistance. Even today, one of the most sought-after breeds is the Gai Leung Hang Khao, a fierce black-feathered bird with gold around its throat like a necklace and a long white tail; a cock that traces its ancestry back to the one Naresuan had carried into exile.

After Naresuan, the sport took a firm hold on the Thai imagination. The woven bamboo baskets of fighting cocks became ubiquitous in the front yards of peasant villages across the country. And it remains a pastime for the elite, with the most coveted breeds selling for $10,000 or more and up to $250,000 in bets changing hands at top matches. Thai celebrities and entertainment moguls have rallied to the cause of cockfighting as the tradition came under fire from public health specialists. The country’s most prominent devotee and outspoken partisan is a long-haired pop icon named Yuenyong Opakul, the godfather of Thai country rock ’n’ roll. Yuenyong rose to the top of the charts penning edgy songs about social injustice and performing them as the singer and lead guitar player of his band, Carabao. He cashed in on his fame as the spokesman for a Thai beer company and then launched his own brand of energy drink, called Carabao Dang, which quickly claimed a significant share of the market. Then, after bird flu erupted in Thailand in late 2003, Yuenyong emerged as vigorous defender of cockfighting, clashing with the government over its demand that roosters in infected areas be culled, defying a ban on vaccinating the birds against the virus by immunizing his own. (Thai officials worried that any poultry vaccination could undercut the confidence of foreign markets in Thailand’s massive chicken exports.) Ever the rebel, Yuenyong included the song “Vaccine for Life” in his CD Big Mouth 5: Bird Flu , which reportedly sold at least a hundred thousand copies.