Bloodsport
Cockfighting in America
Russell Cobb

By the time I finally found my way to the Mid-America Game Club outside of Muldrow, Oklahoma, David Chavez’s roosters had swept the afternoon derby. Chavez, a lean Kansan by way of Juarez, Mexico, looking somewhat like Lee Van Cleef in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, had four victorious cocks this crisp December day. During the lull between the afternoon and evening fights, Chavez and his three handlers lounged in the smoke-filled arena, sipping domestic beer in Styrofoam cups. The cage in the middle of the arena looked like a smallish boxing ring littered with dirt, feathers, and blood.

I had arrived at one of the few remaining cockpits in Oklahoma to witness the sport with my own eyes. Here a legal battle royal is underway to decide the constitutionality of a November 2002 referendum banning cockfighting. It hadn’t been easy: my life had been threatened on an online cockfighting discussion board when I asked for information about cockfighting, I had been led down apocryphal state roads by an Oklahoma tourism official, and given wrong dates and times by cockpit owners.

Oklahoma was (and technically still is) one of only three states — Louisiana and New Mexico are the other two — to allow cockfighting, and the debate over the sport had turned the state’s normally dull politics on its head. Although the ban had passed by 54 percent, it was rejected by 57 of the state’s 77 counties and a state judge placed a temporary injunction on any enforcement of the new law. So while cockfighting might be in legal purgatory, the sport continues, even as the debates over it grow shriller. To cockfight or not to cockfight has become a referendum not just on the sport itself, but on the state’s moral compass and external image. Cockfighting, like the Grapes of Wrath some seventy years earlier, has forced Okies to confront their deepest fears and anxieties about race, class, and violence.

There has been widespread speculation since November that a last-minute mobilization of cockfighters failed to defeat the referendum, but somehow succeeded in upsetting the ultra-conservative Republican candidate for governor, Steve Largent, who had called cockfighting “a barbaric practice.”

Largent seemed like a shoe-in for two factors: as a US congressman he had been one of the most visible members of the Christian Coalition and, perhaps more important, he is an NFL Hall of Fame wide receiver. Football and Christianity are a powerful tandem in Oklahoma, and to a lesser extent, national politics: JC Watts, Tom Osborne, and Jack Kemp are but a few representatives who parlayed success on the gridiron to Capitol Hill. When I asked Ken McNeeley, owner of the Mid-America Game Club, if cockfighters could take some of the credit for beating Largent, he got serious: “You don’t have to ask that,” he said. “You know we beat that SOB.”

To Largent and Republican Governor Frank Keating the answer to the vexing State Question 687 was simple: cockfighting is an abomination, a cancer on the face of the Heartland. “Cockfighting is cruel,” Keating said shortly before the election, “it promotes illegal gambling, and it’s simply embarrassing to Oklahoma to be seen as one of only a tiny handful of locations outside the Third World where this activity is legal.” The comparison of Oklahoma with the “Third World” resonated on more levels than Keating could have anticipated.

While cockfighting has been a shadowy subculture in the United States since at least the turn of the century, it has experienced a revival in part due to the influx of Mexican immigrants to the South, where cockfighting culture is most ingrained. This has led to an unlikely coalition between these new immigrants and rural, poor or working class whites against the conservative mainstream.

“The way I feel about it is, you have one Mexican cocker, he brings seven of his buddies to a fight. A white guy brings two, maybe three,” said Sam, an Oklahoma rooster farmer near the Texas border, “It’s good for the sport.” Contrary to the image that the anti-cockfighting lobby tried to present, cockfighters, for the most part, seem to accept and even welcome diversity — as long as they agree with their sport. “Who cares what color you are,” another one said, “the question is: do you fight chickens?”

“We’re a live and let live bunch,” McNeeley told me, only to warn me about “queers, lesbians, and vegetarians … funky people in the cities with hair down to their ass and rings in their nose.”

It wasn’t only the subtle racism of Keating’s statement that hit home for many cockfighters. In a state with a 15 percent poverty rate that ranks Oklahoma as the eighth poorest in the nation, cockfighters believed that they were being pegged as lazy, vice-ridden, poor white trash.

Cockfighting has, in other words, become an allegory for class warfare. In an interview with NPR, Janet Pearson, the Tulsa World’s editorial page editor admitted that the newspaper’s stand against cockfighting had more to do with class and identity than with the actual sport. “To us, as an editorial board, the image issue was really paramount. I mean, it just seemed like a backward activity.”

Inside the Pit

The cockpits themselves, according to the anti-cockfighting lobby, led by the Humane Society and the Oklahoma Coalition Against Cockfighting, are dens of iniquity full of drugs, prostitution, cruelty, and gambling. Yet, somehow, the atmosphere in Mid-America felt only slightly more decadent than bingo night for seniors at the VFW. Kids drank huge sodas and ran circles around the pit, men discussed cocks’ blood lines in the jargon of genetic engineers, and David Chavez and his handlers returned to business, readying their roosters for a long evening of cockfighting.

To Hayden Hise, a 77-year old veteran and retired referee of the sport, cockfighting is anything but backward. “Cockfighting is an art and the best cockfighters are extremely dedicated to the sport,” he said while grabbing two roosters and setting them on scales for an evening bout. Hise fought and raised cocks for 44 years before acquiring his current post as Mid-America’s announcer and cockfight supervisor. He is sharp and friendly; he is the only cockfighter who dares to look this non-cockfighter in the eye. He is articulate, too: unlike most cockfighters, who justify the violence of the actual fight by reverting to a “natural law” argument, Hise is aware of the deep bonds between human and cock. Man has bred the rooster over the past 2,000 years to become more aggressive, quicker, and stronger, Hise says. Everyone knows that the rooster is a natural fighter, he says, the difference is his handler: “A good handler can bring a dead rooster back to life,” Hise claims. The psychological connection between the cock and the handler can be the difference between life and death. “I’ve seen plenty of fights where the handler gives up and the rooster just dies.”

If this is true, then the notion that cockfighting is “barbaric” becomes much more complicated. Cockfighters are quick to argue that they treat their animals with much more dignity and respect than your average chicken farmer. “What’s really cruel?” Sam asks me, refusing to give his last name. “A guy who takes care of his roosters for three years, or these farms packed with chickens that they electrocute after a few weeks?”

While some of the arguments cockfighters put forth to legitimize what is, in fact, a blood sport do seem far-fetched, this is an irony in the debate over chicken fighting lost on no cockfighter. Just across the border in Springdale, Arkansas sits the corporate headquarters of Tyson Foods, the world’s largest poultry producer, a $7 billion a year business.

Tyson operates what in official parlance is known as Concentrated Animal Feedlot Operations — more commonly known as “factory farms” — all over Arkansas and Oklahoma, and has been labeled by Multinational Monitor as one of the “World’s Ten Worst Corporations” for its use of child labor. Conditions in Tyson’s farms, or any large-scale poultry farm, are notorious: hens are densely packed in cages so that they can’t move, while their beaks are sawed off to prevent them from pecking one another to death. As if the child labor and animal abuse charges weren’t enough, none other than the Oklahoma Attorney General (not an office known for animal rights crusades) recently threatened to sue Arkansas for contaminating its rivers with phosphorous, a by-product of poultry waste.

Yet as the debate continues, and I hunker down in the middle of Muldrow with David Chavez and his handlers, who are diligently fastening on an inch-long blade to a rooster cradled in one of the handler’s arms, politics gives over to the visceral sensation of impending mortal combat. This rooster, his white heckles and black plumage shining, closes his eyes as he is prepped and messaged for the upcoming fight. Will he end up in Mid-America’s ROOSTER trash bin or on a Kansas farm as a 12-year-old prize battle cock? I could watch and find out, but it is midnight already and home is a long way from Muldrow.