Warriors

Cockfighting is shocking in its brutality. Usually when animals fight it's in short bursts of pantomime violence, and it's over the instant dominance is established and the beta male slinks away. Cockfighting is different. I’ve never seen anything which so seemingly validates the Skinnerian behavourialist model of animal psychology. The cocks are like small, vicious robots whose kill-switch has been flicked. From the second the referee releases them they are fixated on killing each other to the exclusion of all else. They never run. They fight without pause or interruption until one is incapable of going on, either because it's so injured and/or exhausted that it can no longer stand, or because its dead. It’s no wonder that cockfighting has long been associated with the martial virtues. The Athenian leader Themistocles supposedly watched a cockfight on the night before his vastly outnumbered forces were to do battle with the Persians following the Spartan defeat at Thermopylae. Legend has him declaiming:

Behold soldiers, they do not fight for their nation, nor for their Gods, nor for their idols, nor for their liberty; only pride animates them to fight, so far as neither would like to suffer defeat, and you - compelled to defend so much - would you not do likewise?

Do a bit of research and be astonished at what a central part cockfighting once played in Western culture, and by how thoroughly this fact has been scrubbed from our collective memories. Cockfighting enthusiast Julius Caesar introduced the sport to the British isles, where it proved so popular that a permanent cockpit was later installed in the Palace of Westminster. The English delighted in astonishingly brutal cockfights, including the 'battle royal' where an unlimited number of fowl were made to fight until one winner remained, and the 'Welsh Main', a 16 bird tournament to the death, held over an afternoon. These diversions only ended during the reign of the killjoy Queen Victoria, who issued a decree banning the activity. Across the Atlantic, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson were all avid cockfighters. Abraham Lincoln once refereed at a cockfight, a duty he supposedly discharged so well that it earned him the nickname 'Honest Abe'. And Ben Franklin championed the adoption of the fighting cock as the national bird, losing out by only one vote to the American Eagle(!). Cockfighting, though expunged from our collective consciousness today, nonetheless lives on in the phrases 'to raise one's hackles', 'to turn tail', 'to be cocky' and even, possibly, the word 'cocktail'.

So what changed? The rise of Victorian hypocrisy, for one thing. I love the irony of the greatest imperial ruler in history getting exercised about cruelty to chickens while her soldiers were wading through rivers of blood in the process of subduing half the world. It's an irony that endures today, when otherwise intelligent people can denounce bloodsports with a straight face, over a meal of animals who arguably endured worse tortures than anything a fighting cock has to put up with. And I can't even begin to make sense of the bizarre polarities of squeamishness and apathy inherent in a culture where Michael Vick goes to prison while Dick Cheney and assorted other unrepentant torturers of humans get top billing on Fox. Perhaps one way of looking at it is that we've systematically devalued the currency of 'honour', in favour of a murky philosophy of utility - after all, we need to eat chicken and protect ourselves from terrorists, and who cares how those goals are accomplished, provided the wet work is done in the dark? Cockfights, on the other hand, are frivolous, and we won't accept the infliction of pain unless its to some concrete higher purpose, in which case we'll seemingly accept it no matter how trivial, stupid or wrongheaded that higher purpose might be. Sometimes I think we've retained all the bad aspects of Victorianism (moral and sexual hypocrisy) while discarding all the good (ideals of honour/dignity/virtue). We can no longer even conceive of the possibility that there might be something to take from this bloody morality play. So each time I've attended a cockfight here I've made a conscious effort to recognise my initial revulsion for what it is, not the physical manifestation of some deeply rooted moral disgust, but rather a conditioned response that's culturally specific to my Western middle-class existence. If you can overcome that reflexive revulsion then you start to understand why Caesar and Themistocles and Washington could see two birds fighting in a ring as epitomising martial courage in the face of death.

Anyway, here is the sign for the Mae Sot cockpit:

Fighters:

Before the fight:

This is the stance the cocks automatically adopt - staring into each other's eyes, hackles raised:

The gentlemen on the little pink stool is the referee. If one of the cocks goes down, he will place it back on its feet in front of its opponent, then ruffle both their tail feathers to encourage them to fight. The books in everybody's hands are betting books, and the little arena is filled with permanent uproar as bets are placed and odds adjusted:

Intermission. The guy on the left is holding a bundle of lemongrass, which he dips in water then rubs against a hotplate on top of a charcoal brazier. The pleasant-smelling smoke helps revive the birds.

Workspace. Clockwise from top you see a cloth in a bowl of water for cleaning the bird, a bowl with a feather in it which is used to clear congealed blood and feathers from the cock's throat, lemongrass in a bowl, and the charcoal brazier:

Plunging the cock's throat with the feather. A lot of the trainers carry this same feather behind their ear. The trainers will also suck blood from their fighter's nasal cavities, a practice that was implicated in the transmission of bird flu.

First aid kit. The yellow liquid in the cup is oil, the spoon is used to feed the bird broth, the thread is to sew up the bird's face:

Sewing a wound:

End of the fight - people call in their bets:

The victor:

Note: Despite an unfortunate emphasis on Freudian psychobabble (hint: they're called 'cocks') I'm indebted to 'The Cockfight: A Casebook' by Alan Dundes, incompletely available on Google Books.