One of my classmates was an American fellow who's current hobby was
cockfighting. He took some friends and I out to a couple of
cockfights one weekend and taught us all about it.
Here's an excerpt of an email I sent home afterwards:
Basically how this works is, you have yourself a nice-looking rooster
that you think is pretty big and mean. So you start training it, by
exercising it every day and hanging weights on it to build up muscle.
Or in my friends case you hire a full-time cock-trainer at the cost of
room-and-board and 10% of any winnings to come live on your farm and
make sure your roosters are kept ready to rumble.
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Fight negotiations
Next you take your bad-ass rooster to a cock fight and start
negotiating with other people to fight theirs against yours. This is
a tricky procedure that can consume the better part of a day. Nobody
wants to lose, so folks are real picky about what rooster they'll want
to go up against. The two of you will squat down to talk and swap
roosters so you can feel the muscles on the potential opponent to
guage its strength. If both parties are satisfied that it will be a
fair fight then they'll decide how much money the loser must pay the
winner and arrange a fighting pit to use.
I'm told that in places like
Malaysia the fights are to the death and the roosters have razor
blades tied to their ankles to insure a nice bloody fight. In
Thailand they let them fight until one of the roosters has tried to
run away 2 or 3 times, and then declare the other one the winner.
A typical fight lasts about 20 minutes and the victory pot is anywhere
from a few thousand baht for a small-time fight to up to 30'000
($700US) or more for one of the fights conducted in a large ring
with a couple hundred spectators.
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Chicken surgery
After a fight the roosters are taken
to little chicken-surgery areas, where they get fixed up for another
fight. There will be one or more guys there who's entire job is
stitching up chickens. We watched these guys work absolute miracles.
Taking a rooster that was covered in blood and had both eyes swollen
shut and having them look almost like they did before the fight within
about 10 minutes. The roosters get stitched-up, washed off and fed
juice laced with stimulants. If they already fought once then
they'll have their beak carefully tied shut to keep them from coughing
up their tongue from heavy breathing during the next fight.
Some
roosters have long careers and others get their eyes pecked out or
lose one too many times and are made into curry by their frustrated
owners.
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Rooster-enhancing drugs
As I've come to discover there are magazines for this sport,
an entire chicken pharmaceutical industry and many respected
professions in the fields of chicken-repair and chicken-enhancement.
If a person started some place simple like being the guy who glues
extra feathers onto the roosters (gives them more leverage when
they're jumping up to kick), then they could conceivably move up to
one day land a position in one of the chicken-triage units.
