had obviously been waiting for us—Ito the owner and his special foreign guests. The small stadium was half full with a hundred or so people, and a picnic atmosphere, a “Sunday afternoon with your kids” feel, although there were almost no women.
Tim took me to the “gaffing” room, where the gaffers were putting on the blades. They were professionals, hired out to each chicken individually, and they had brought cases of forty or fifty different blades, as each chicken had a slightly different foot. It was surprisingly elaborate, more complicated than taping a boxer’s hands: There were supports and underworks that molded to the foot, and aligning the blade along the bird’s natural spur was critical. When the bird struck, the blade had to be correctly positioned to be effective, or else the cock wouldn’t be lethal. The blades themselves were amazing, two or three inches long, tiny razor scimitars lashed securely to the strange foot and then carefully sheathed until the cocks were in the pit—otherwise, the handler might get sliced to ribbons.
The birds were brought into the pit, where they were first annoyed by two bait cocks that wouldn’t be fighting. The handlers then grabbed their cocks’ heads and pulled them back, exposing the necks, and they brought the cocks together and allowed them to take a little nip out of the bared neck, really pissing the cocks off.
The crowd din grew as the betting reached a crescendo, with yelling and gesticulating, hands fluttering like stockbrokers’ on the floor of the exchange. Tim bet with tiny nods to a man in the pit, and then the pit cleared out and the two handlers tossed their chickens gently down, about five feet apart. The crowd went dead silent as the cocks oriented on each other, and then darted forward and leapt up kicking. Often, that was it; one bird would be mortally wounded in that first exchange, and would stumble and then sit down. The referee sometimes picked them both up and reset them, to see which was still game. The longest fight of the day was shorter than three minutes.
After the fights, the gaffers were at work again, this time sitting in the corner with butchers’ smocks on, sewing up the winners in brutal instant surgery; the damaged winners were saved for breeding if they could be kept alive. The dead losers had their blades cut off and were hung in a shed, to be eaten later, the row of plucked dead birds growing as the day went on, with the tremendous wounds from the fight plain to see, like murder victims in a morgue.
The day meandered on, and the cocks died again and again. Just a few threshing bursts, splashing up together in their lizardlike fury, and one staggered, drooped, and failed to rise. I didn’t really get it, although cockfighting is tremendously popular around the world and supposedly the oldest spectator sport, dating back three thousand years. I’d read that Abe Lincoln earned his nickname “Honest Abe” during his days as a cockfight referee.
The next day, Tim and I flew back to Thailand. Driving into Bangkok, I asked Tim a question that had been on my mind. I remembered Escorrega in Brazil telling me about love, and how important that was for dogs, and I wanted to know what Tim thought. How important was the bond between the dog and the handler—how important was love? Tim didn’t spend all that much time with his dogs, his Cambodian yard man trained the dogs and had them kept according to Tim’s specifications because Tim had a full-time job and a family.
“It’s extremely important,” he said, without taking his eyes from the road. “I wish I could spend more time with my dogs, especially right before a fight. You can do a lot with a real tight bond, you can raise them up. If your dog is on the bottom, getting chewed up, you can get in there and raise him up with encouragement. You can turn the whole fight around. There are dogmen that sleep with dogs [in a crate] for the week before a fight to increase that bond. If I could spend more time with them, my dogs would fight better. You should really invest from a puppy onward.”
Tim dropped me off, and I jumped into a cab, winding through Bangkok traffic. Evening rush hour was just peaking and everything was jammed solid, a city-sized parking lot, and the taxi guy laughed with me as I got in, and said, “Thailand number one traffic!”
I was not disgusted by the dogfights, even though I love dogs. The knee-jerk reaction that I get whenever I mention the dogfights, “Oh, I couldn’t watch that, it’s so cruel,” has always struck me as hypocrisy—unless you are a vegetarian, don’t wear leather, and think that what chicken farmers and cattle ranchers do is unusually cruel. It’s telling that cockfighting is still legal in parts of the United States, because animal cruelty laws could be applied to the poultry industry, as well. Ike X said that “the S.P.C.A. uses the ‘scourge’ of dogfighting as a fundraising tool, mostly…and then they save fighting dogs by taking them away and killing them.” And what about breeders that raise puppies for the pet store window, and when the puppies don’t sell, send them to “no-kill” pounds—which in turn pass them along to pounds that put them down?
The fight itself is not cruel. The dogs love to fight—it is what they do, and their tails are wagging. It is a joyful, mad rage that has been bred into them. What is cruel is the life on the chain, being kept from physically bonding with one another or a human owner, and especially the isolation of the keep for a pack animal: That is the cruelty of dogfighting, like solitary confinement for prisoners, like the endless training and denial for fighters.
The losing dog is either killed or given away. He won’t fight again—once he has curred out, there is nothing to be done for him. Tim tried to give away the dogs he couldn’t use, as opposed to killing them—“I don’t like killing dogs,” he said—but they are hard to find homes for and don’t make great pets if they have been fought or rolled. So, usually, a losing dog is killed. Ike X said, “The exception is when a dog is sick or has had a poor keep, or maybe is a little too young—then you pick up before he is broken. There have been quite a few great dogs that lost and went on to win again.”
But often the loser is culled.
Killing them when they lose is rough, but these animals are like chickens or beef cattle. They would not exist if not for man’s intentions. That cows never get to walk but are just pumped full of food and hormones until they are slaughtered seems just as cruel to me. The demonization of dogfighting is tied to the anthropomorphizing of dogs, and that is not an illusion that I subscribe to.
I am not for or against dogfighting; it exists without my approval or disapproval. I was drawn to it because of the close relationship it has with men fighting for sport, and the parallels between the two; and I wanted to understand them both. I had a professor once tell me that man cannot view himself clearly; only less complicated organisms can be completely understood.
It hit me when I read the description of a “game test”: When a dog has been fought to exhaustion, you bring in a fresh dog to face him; and if the exhausted dog is still game, then you keep him and breed him. That quality of gameness is so specific, so valuable. In A History of Warfare, John Keegan makes the point that the evolution to modern combat happened with the Greeks, who would stand and fight and die in the phalanx. Primitive warfare had no such discipline; the fighters would posture, and yell, and throw spears, but not stand in and fight. Giving his warriors a willingness to stand in and die was how Shaka Zulu conquered much of southern Africa, how modern warfare came to be. The British navy, the “hearts of oak,” won many sea battles because of gameness: The British would always fight and loved to fight; they were eager for a scrap. That quality of gameness allowed them to conquer the world. “Never mind the maneuvers, go straight at ’em,” said Lord Horatio Nelson, the British sea commander who won a series of battles that set the stage for England’s domination of the world in the nineteenth century, knowing that aggressive gameness was a strategy in itself. Decisive, competent aggression, sheer willingness to fight, was a tremendous advantage in a sea battle. It is no coincidence that the sports of dogfighting and prizefighting grew together in popularity, with the same fans, as the bloodier sports of bull-and bearbaiting and the tradition of dueling faded.
The appreciation of gameness, then, is probably both cultural and biological. The love of aggression, a willingness to fight regardless of safety or consequences, is a biological key to success, to domination.
Basically, I have been game-testing myself.
I finished up my stay in Thailand at Fairtex, and I found out a lot of things, about old friends who had thrown fights, about the inner workings of the camp, and I finally began to comprehend my own na?veté and lack of understanding—the American in the Orient, who thinks he understands when really he sees only the tiniest bit, the scratches on the surface.
My skills had come a long way; after Hamid and Steve left, I was the best farang in the camp, the only one with decent form. I was way out of sh