Alan Sipress - The Fatal Strain

The livestock chief of the boy’s home province, Pichit, alleged an even wider cover-up, saying villagers had declined to notify officials that some of their cocks were dying because the birds were so expensive. Tests by the national livestock laboratory ultimately confirmed bird flu in samples taken from the carcass of a dead cock. When authorities learned of the outbreak and ordered that the surviving roosters be culled, the owners resisted. The livestock chief himself was disciplined for failing to prevent the outbreak, and a complete ban was slapped on cockfighting in Pichit and neighboring Phitsanu lok provinces.

Ever since the virus resurfaced in late 2003, cockfighting has played a role in spreading it around Southeast Asia. At least eight confirmed human cases were possibly caused by infected fighting cocks during 2004 alone.

These roosters have proven to be difficult targets for disease control efforts. Owners have frequently hidden their cocks when officials have ordered mass poultry culls. Others have smuggled the birds across provincial and even national lines to elude the dragnet. Each time they are moved, they risk introducing the virus to new flocks. When bird flu was confirmed for the first time in Malaysian poultry in August 2004, animal-health officers blamed illegal imports of fighting cocks from neighboring Thailand. In turn, several other countries banned imports of all Malaysian poultry, and an area of the northern Malaysian state of Kelantan, where the outbreak occurred, was put under quarantine to prevent further spread. The state’s chief minister, Nik Aziz Nik Mat, who doubled as the spiritual head of Malaysia’s Islamic opposition, slammed local cockfighters. He urged them to give up the sport and repent. While some Muslim clerics opposed the culling of cocks and other poultry as un-Islamic, Nik Aziz endorsed the draconian measure but asked that it be carried out away from villagers so as not to antagonize them.

Some animal health investigators have also suggested that cocks exported from Thailand were behind the far wider outbreak of bird flu in Indonesia. In 2002, the year before the virus swept the region, Thailand shipped nearly six thousand fighting cocks abroad, most of them to Indonesia, according to the Kasikorn Research Center in Bangkok. Later, Thailand may also have been on the receiving end. Health officials speculated that illegal cockfighting tours reintroduced the virus from Laos into the northeast of their country after a long hiatus. Thai cock owners, including a government livestock officer whose own roosters later died, had been stealing across the broad Mekong River to pit their birds against Laotian opponents despite an outbreak on the far side of the border.

The allegation by some Thai officials that cockfighting helped seed the regional epidemic leaves the sport’s partisans seething. “The government is telling lies,” Phapart retorted when I asked him about the claim. He insisted the poultry industry and not fighting cocks was to blame. (Some Thais have also objected to cockfighting on the grounds of animal cruelty, but their calls for prohibition have never gained traction.)

To regulate the movement of fighting cocks, Thai agriculture officials suggested a modern, digital fix for this ancient pastime. They recommended inserting microchips into the roosters. But this prescription was no better received than the diagnosis. “That’s ridiculous,” Phapart scoffed. “They move around. They don’t stand still. How are you ever going to put a microchip into them?” He said a microchip could cramp their agility and leave them vulnerable. “When they fight, they get hit in every part of the body. It might create a weak spot. What if they get hit in the chip? They might run away and you would lose your thousand-dollar bet.” Senior Thai officials ultimately agreed with this widely shared critique and dropped the microchip proposal.

They had only slightly better success with their plan for fighting-cock passports. Local veterinary departments began issuing travel documents for each rooster with its photograph on one side and a register of its movement on the other. Every time an owner planned to take his bird across district lines, he was required first to visit a government veterinarian, who would examine it, record the trip, and stamp the passport. These control measures were to be supplemented with random testing of fighting cocks. Phapart said he personally obeyed the regulations but the whole notion made him chuckle. “Many people don’t use the passports,” he explained. “Less sophisticated villagers don’t care. They just keep breeding and pitting their cocks like they always did. They just tell their friends that they’re going to meet up and hold a fight before the police come. They even have someone to look out for the police.”

Phapart urged that cock owners be left to regulate themselves. In this age of cell phones, he said an outbreak in one village is instantly flashed across the district through text messages, and owners effectively quarantine the infected area themselves. No owner would want to see bird flu spread among his own prized roosters.

“The decision makers analyze the situation just on paper,” he said, growing agitated again. “Their feet aren’t on the ground. They don’t really know how we treat the cocks and don’t really share our feelings. We care more for the fighting cocks than the health officers do.”

But for a growing minority in Thailand, the debate keeps coming back to the basic question of whether it is time to ban the pastime altogether. Phapart leaned forward intently and vowed, “They’ll never be able to stop us from doing cockfighting.”

In contrast to the brawny, exquisitely groomed gladiators of the cockpit, the vast majority of Asian chickens are scrawny, sorry creatures. In Indonesia they’re known as kampung chicken, or village chicken. They root around in the dust and slime, often living off discarded rice, fallen leaves, morsels of overripe mango, and whatever else they happen across. So when Indonesians are given a choice between dining on these vagabonds of the backyard and on their plumper distant cousins raised commercially for the market, the response is unanimous, and surprising. “It’s obvious,” Ketut Wardana, a Balinese villager with a shock of dark hair and droopy mustache, confirmed for me. “Kampung chicken is healthier, tenderer, and much more delicious. Our kampung chicken is raised on natural food, not those chemicals like the broiler chickens in the market.”

In Bali, as throughout the Indonesian archipelago and much of the region, a home is not a home without a chicken, or several dozen. They pretty much come and go as they like, sleeping as often in trees and under beds as they do in their own cages. The Indonesian government estimates that 30 million households raise poultry. It is their intimate presence in the lives of so many Asians coupled with the near-total absence of safeguards against contagion that makes backyard poultry farming what the U.S. Agency for International Development has called “the greatest single challenge to effective control of the spread of the virus.”

Wardana raises twenty-five chickens behind the ornately sculpted walls of his family’s traditional compound on Bali’s lush east coast. When he invited me inside the courtyard, the air was fragrant with frangipani blossoms and the grounds tranquil, shaded from the sun’s midafternoon rays by a stand of palms. At his feet, a black hen cackled. “It would be hard to imagine life without chickens,” he said, nodding with a laugh. “Life would lose its flavor without chickens.”

Yet culinary concerns are the least of it. Chickens are central to home economics, he continued, taking a seat on the wooden floor of his bale dangin , the raised pavilion at the heart of most every Balinese compound. They are a way out of poverty. If the family is hungry, they can always sup on chicken. If they’re short of cash, they can hawk them in the market and earn a premium over the price for commercial poultry. When the new school year began and his brother needed shoes for his two children, Wardana sold several chickens to raise the money, and chicken paid the doctor’s bill when his wife got sick. “They’re our living wallet,” he quipped.