NEWS: Augmenting Cock(fighting)

Seems a lot of people don't know much about cockfighting, so I'll lay out a quick little overview about it.

The roosters don't fight with their cocks or beaks - they use their spurs. They put sharp metal spikes on them, so it's essentially a sharp metal spur. They aren't razors (at least in "legitimate" fights - there are actually groups and organizations and whatnot for this stuff). The roosters will kick at each other with these spurs and poke little holes in each other. This goes on, round after round (there are rounds...how else could you beat on it? no joke - they do have rounds and they do beat....in fact, beating is the mainstay of this industry), until one of them fails to stand up at the start of the last round.

Now, a losing rooster usually dies, and often the winner will too - depending on how well he fought and how tough he is (these fuckers are tough, trust me).

Technically they ARE bred, but more for strength/size/speed then aggression, because roosters, on the average, DO NOT GET ALONG. Go to a livestock auction and buy a half dozen roosters and toss them in a ring together and they are going to fight wildly. That's just how they are. You'll see more then one rooster on a farm, but you'll know at a glance which one is the dominant one.

As far as how they are raised, typically (especially in Louisiana) they are raised by themselves in small little huts on large farms with hundreds of those little huts. They are fed an incredibly high energy diet (sometimes steroids, sometimes not) and exercised and trained like a boxer.

Now, I'm not necessarily pro-cockfighting, but I find it a little difficult to be against it. This is exploitation of a natural skill. I don't see much of a difference in having roosters fight each other for fun, when boxers do it all the time. Boxers are trained and sculpted to be faster, stronger, and tougher. Someone exploits a poor, desperate kid with an inherent talent for boxing (I'm looking at you Tyson) and no one cares - you do it to an animal and everyone cares.

Draw what conclusions you will about this activity. I wouldn't weep if it went away, nor would I really care if it stayed (I've been to a few in Louisiana, but that was just a drunken quest for something to do in a hick town, and the only interesting thing about the night was the cheap beer and the fact that I won a hundred bucks).

roosters normally fight for dominance over the farm/flock/whatever, once one showed it's dominance things are well, it's just a natural pecking order designed to make sure every rooster and chicken knows it's place.

farm roosters don't go "oh it's on now, i'll see you in the thunderdome" and neither do human boxers fight to the death usually.

Yeah, you very rarely see animals fighting to the death, even in packs like that. So the "Oh, they fight anyway" argument is bullshit, especially given that they have razors attached to their spurs in the wild.

This is one of the things that pisses me off the most about the South. Call on them to, you know, act like it's the 21st century, and you get this reflexive, unthinking, knee-jerk reaction defending it. Never mind that most people probably didn't really give a shit about it before; some damn Yankee's saying don't do it, so, by God, we're going to do it.

The parts of the South that ditch this attitude will grow. The rest will not.