Among the several thousand spectators that evening, I see only one woman. She is near the front in designer glasses, a tight T-shirt, and fashionable jeans and clearly is a confident and experienced gambler. A dozen Hawaiians in matching yellow shirts emblazoned with the words “Summit Farms” sit together in the bleachers. In the preferencia are a scattering of pale Americans in Dockers pants and polo shirts along with Filipino men in button-downs and expensive shoes. Luzong watches my gaze. “They are senators, congressmen, presidents of corporations, and big businessmen there,” he says. “A lot more than gambling is happening right now. Business deals and political decisions are being made. Powerful men are building camaraderie. Being here can really help your political career.”
The cup is the high-end of global cockfighting. To enter a single bird in the competition costs $1,750, more than half a year’s salary for the average Filipino. Wealthy owners often have more than just the money; they have dedicated farms and full-time trainers caring for hundreds of fowl that could sell for well over a thousand dollars apiece. On top of that, they purchase expensive feed and supplements. “Our sales last year were eighty million dollars,” says Luzong of Thunderbird. “And we’re just starting to promote medicines.” Vaccines, antibiotics, vitamins, and supplements are all part of the modern game fowl’s life. Traditional methods of revving up your bird for a fight, like slipping cayenne up its anus, have given way to pricey steroids and other powerful drugs.
Like American baseball or the Tour de France, modern Filipino cockfighting is caught in a tangle of corporate sponsors and performance-enhancing drugs. The brightly lit concession stands, the blaring canned music, and the rows of clean toilets in the restrooms give the event a depressingly modern feel. Still, the people in the cheap seats are the working-class men whom you would find at any Canadian hockey game, British rugby match, or Brazilian soccer contest. The real draw, though, seems to be in the gambling outside the ring rather than in the combat inside.
Luzong insists that cockfighting is a much less corrosive form of gambling than what takes place in the flashy casinos springing up across Manila. “Here, you only choose between two birds; you have a fifty-fifty chance,” he says as another shower of peso notes sprinkles through the air at the conclusion of a match. “You can cancel your bet before the roosters are released. When the birds are released, there is no human intervention. And you can leave whenever you want.”
There are, of course, other stories. There is the young villager who spent all his hard-earned money saved in an overseas job while in a cockfighting stupor. A family lost its small plot of land because of an ill-placed bet. And children may be treated only half as well as a father’s prized cocks that enjoy a carefully planned diet, constant attention, and even piped-in music and air-conditioning. For the millions packed into Manila’s sprawling slums, cockfighting offers a fast way up the socioeconomic ladder or a quick tumble into indigence.
Such high stakes have an extraordinarily long history. Filipinos raise “large cocks, which from a species of superstition, they never eat, but keep for fighting purposes,” Antonio Pigafetta wrote five centuries ago. “Heavy bets are made on the upshot of the contest, which are paid to the owner of the winning bird.”
Pigafetta was among Ferdinand Magellan’s crew when they became the first Westerners to cross the Pacific Ocean and appear on Filipino shores. Cockfighting was popular in sixteenth-century Spain, but it was already an obsession in the Philippines. When the hungry and exhausted crew arrived in 1521, locals paddled out in boats to offer “sweet oranges, a jar of palm wine, and a cock, to give us to understand that there were fowls in their country,” Pigafetta recalled. That bird likely was raised to fight rather than to be eaten.
Magellan quickly wore out Filipino hospitality by embroiling the expedition in a local conflict. He was speared to death. Pigafetta was one of only eighteen men on board the sole remaining ship, the Victoria, as it limped back to Spain. That might have been the inglorious end of the Spanish in the Philippines, but as Pigafetta’s vessel worked its way through the Indian Ocean and then up along the West African coast, Hernán Cortés was finishing off the great Aztec Empire in Mexico. A decade later, Francisco Pizarro and his soldiers took on the Incan Empire in the Andes of South America. Spain soon was in control of vast stores of gold and silver from the New World, and enormous mines worked by Native Americans produced astonishing wealth at a horrifying human cost.
Spain needed a stronghold close to the markets of China and the Southeast Asian islands like Sumatra, which had the spices, silks, and other luxuries craved by increasingly prosperous Western consumers. China was closed to foreigners. Their merchants, however, wanted New World silver and gold. The Philippines, sitting astride the major sea routes in the western Pacific, proved a strategic military and economic base for the wealthiest European nation to consolidate its position in the East. The first three attempts at colonization ended disastrously, including one organized by Cortés himself. But the fourth succeeded, and by the end of the sixteenth century, Spain had a commercial treaty with China and a well-fortified port in Manila. Spanish galleons laden with New World silver mined by Native Americans sailed from Acapulco to Manila. There they could trade with Chinese merchants. That lucrative trade lasted for nearly three centuries and depended heavily on Spain’s control of the Philippines.
Governing a colony consisting of hundreds of islands with dozens of ethnicities half a world from Madrid posed a challenge to the distant Spanish rulers. Copying what they had done in the New World, friars and civil administrators in the 1600s set up a feudal-style system across the colony. Scattered populations were concentrated in towns so that natives could be monitored, taxed, and used as a labor force. The ingrained passion for cockfighting in the Philippines offered Spanish administrators both an important revenue source and a way to control the population. Spiritual wealth through Christianity and earthly wealth through cockfighting proved key levers in drawing the native peoples of these islands into towns and generating the tax revenue that made this Asian beachhead pay for itself. Even today, almost every Filipino village has three main structures—a church, a town hall, and a cockpit.
Visiting foreigners were appalled by the enthusiasm the locals had for the sport. “The sight is one extremely repulsive to Europeans,” sniffed one nineteenth-century German traveler. “The ring around the cockpit is crowded with natives, perspiring at every pore, while their countenances bear the imprint of the ugliest passions.” He was shocked by the “incredibly large sums” wagered, and blamed the country’s rampant theft, highway robbery, piracy, and any number of other ills on “ruined gamesters.”
The passion for cockfighting spread via the Acapulco trade to Spain’s empire in Latin America. Though the sport had been popular in Spain since Roman times, it was the Filipino fever that swept to what is now Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela. Filipino fighting birds were exported all over the world. According to some historians, the wandering fowl of Florida’s Key West arrived from Cuba but came from Spain via Manila and the gamecock trade.
As early as the 1700s, the Spanish government regularly sold licenses for Filipino cockpit operations to the highest bidder. Cockpit licenses combined with game-fowl sales may have generated more money in the nineteenth-century Philippines than tobacco, the colony’s single most important export. In 1861, Madrid’s revenues from these licenses topped a hundred thousand dollars annually. That year, a special ordinance from Madrid permitted cockfights on Sundays and feast days, after the conclusion of high mass and before sunset. “It being a vice, the laws permit it only on Sundays and holidays!” one outraged American evangelical complained later. “This condition is a heritage of Spanish times when the friars and priests owned many of the cockpits as well as one tenth of the improved land,” he charged. “They wanted their subjects to work during weekdays and to come into the poblacion”—the center of a Filipino town—“to early mass on Sunday morn
ing, and spend the remainder of the day at the cockpit, gambling away all the money they had; getting themselves deeper into debt to the Spanish overlords.”
That policy ultimately backfired. José Rizal, the guiding spirit of the Filipino rebellion against Spain, was no fan of the sport. In his moving 1887 book Touch Me Not, he compared it to opium smoking. Rizal was a European-educated poet, sculptor, doctor, and polyglot who despised what he considered a backward tradition. “To the cockpit went the poor man to risk what little he had in order to make money without working,” Rizal wrote, “as well as the rich man who went to amuse himself with the money left over from his parties and the thanksgiving Masses.”
He recognized, however, that these regular events that took place in virtually every town across the colony’s hundreds of islands could serve as both inspiration and a cover for revolutionary activities. Cockfights provided Filipino men a place to meet freely and regularly in large crowds, while the combatants offered an example of the courage required to take on the behemoth that was Spain. Rizal recalls a moment when a favored rooster loses a match to a scrawny underdog. A roar goes up from the crowd. “So it is among nations,” he wrote. “The small nation that achieves a victory over a larger one tells and sings of it forever after.”
Spanish officials executed Rizal in 1896, and he became a martyr to the cause of independence. Cockfighting is forbidden by law on the anniversary of his death out of respect for that sacrifice. Three years later, the country that sought freedom from one empire found itself embroiled in a bloody guerrilla war with another behemoth. The United States annexed the Philippines before the nascent nation had a chance to assert its independence. Cockfighting was seen by the new conquerors as one more reason to deny Filipinos self-determination. “How can a people who allow themselves to be known by the barbarous sport of cockfighting be allowed to govern themselves?” asked W. A. Kincaid, the president of the Philippine Moral Progress League.
Kincaid was an American lawyer who held meetings around the provinces “with the object of inculcating a hatred for the vice,” according to a 1900 report to the U.S. Secretary of War. This was a time when the sport was still widespread, popular, and mostly legal in the United States itself. Filipino politicians who wanted to land on the good side of their new rulers responded to the shifting winds. “Cockfighting has spread to such an extent that it is no longer mere sport or amusement for the people, but now constitutes a veritable vice followed by . . . crimes, the ruin of families, and an inexhaustible opportunity for exploitation,” wrote Isabelo Artacho, the U.S.-installed governor of Pangasinan province, in the same report. “A law should be enacted restricting this form of gambling to the greatest possible extent at once.”
Cockpits quickly became magnets for American Protestant missionaries looking for a crowd and for converts. Meanwhile, the U.S. government distributed English-language textbooks criticizing the tradition as a crude, outdated, and dangerous activity. The ultimate weapon in the fight was the favorite American pastime. “Baseball is a tremendous factor in educating the vigorous Philippine lads not only in the play they instinctively yearn for, but in the teamwork which is needed to eliminate some of the unfortunate features of the older civilization,” one charitable organization noted in 1916. The most unfortunate feature, of course, was cockfighting. Japanese invaders arriving in 1941 also tried to stamp out the practice, which they viewed as barbaric. These efforts at moral improvement had little effect.
As other nations over time criminalized the sport, Filipinos defiantly kept it as their own national pastime. When the American author Wallace Stegner visited in 1951, baseball had not cured the nation of its long-standing tradition. “You don’t know Filipinos until you have seen some little fellow who has trained a chicken for months put it into the ring against another’s rooster,” he wrote. “He bets everything he owns, steals his wife’s savings, sells his children’s shirts to raise a peso. If he wins, glorious; if in one pass his rooster gets its throat cut, then you will see how a philosopher takes disaster.” That stoicism remains part of cockfighting’s tenacious culture; no loser that I witnessed at the World Slasher Cup—and there were thousands every few minutes—expressed anger, frustration, or regret.
The tradition’s staying power outlasted even the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who imposed martial law and jailed dissidents as he looted the country for two decades starting in 1965. Fearful of large gatherings of men who might plot against his rule, Marcos attempted to restrict the sport in the mid-1970s. Under pressure from his advisers, he backed down. His wife, Imelda, is said to have once sponsored a cockfight in which the winner drove away in a new Mercedes-Benz. The only successful ban imposed on the sport is a law forbidding cockfights and liquor sales on Election Day and the commemoration of Rizal’s martyrdom.
By the 1990s, the growth of cities like Manila and distractions like satellite television and shopping malls threatened to push cockfighting, with its rural roots, into obscurity. Then, in 1997, the central government passed cockpit-licensing control to local authorities. “That opened the floodgates to more cockpits and more fights,” says Luzong. “There is both good tax money and under-the-table money.” Although elected officials can’t own a cockpit license, their friends and relatives can. The flagging sport rebounded as local governments took advantage of the revenues. Two million Filipinos directly benefit from cockfighting through the rings, hotels, restaurants, and shipping companies, Luzong says. “If you stopped it, there would be big economic problems,” he adds. “It probably employs more people than the government.”
That is a wild exaggeration, no doubt, but looking at the thousands of eager gamblers in the Smart Araneta Coliseum, it does not seem ludicrous. And the business is one way to draw wealthy foreigners. Gambling-mad Asia is much richer today than at any time in the past. Chinese tourists crowd casinos in the humid Cambodian towns that border Thailand. The island of Macao touts itself as the “Monte Carlo of the Orient,” and even Muslim Malaysia boasts a massive mountaintop gaming complex with more than six thousand hotel rooms. Cockfighting enthusiasts don’t have the same political or economic muscle as developers with expensive resorts.
The modern casino industry sees as a threat any game that can be played without need of hotels, restaurants, and malls. Collecting revenues from remote village cockpits can be difficult for governments. The contemporary Western view of cockfighting as a barbaric practice also makes it a hard business to defend, and animal-rights organizations in South Asia are slowly gaining influence. As a result, cockfighting in the region where the chicken was first domesticated is in a defensive crouch.
The Philippines today is to cockfighting what Switzerland is to secret bank accounts, a safe haven where you can operate without government interference. Wealthy Malaysians and Indonesians come here to gamble, and Americans come to sell their fighting birds. Cockfighting in the United States is against the law in every state, but it exports more game fowl than even the Philippines. “Most Americans are breeders who come here to promote their birds,” Luzong explains, nodding toward the VIP bleachers. “There are fewer diseases there. And the birds are tougher.” Some sources say that American birds made their debut in the Philippines as early as the 1920s, brought by U.S. soldiers as American officials were attempting to stamp out the sport. Filipino birds are easy to spot, since they resemble red jungle fowl, while the American varieties are typically larger and a single color.
The United Gamefowl Breeders Association in the United States claims thousands of members, who raise hundreds of thousands of gamecocks. Since they can sell for a thousand or even twenty-five hundred dollars, it is a multimillion-dollar business. Animal-rights activists claim the organization collects money to defeat anticockfighting legislation, a charge that association representatives deny. Luzong says that about one hundred Americans are in town for the World Slasher Cup, and most are breeders more than gamblers. He ducks my request for an introduction, and the fe
w I approach give me a wide berth. They have good reason to be fearful. Police arrested game-fowl breeder Wally Clemons and seized two hundred roosters on his Indiana farm a few years ago after he gave an interview with Pit Games, a Filipino cocker magazine. American cockers understandably like to keep a low profile.
In the Philippines, by contrast, there is little organized opposition to cockfighting. The country’s Animal Welfare Society steers clear of the issue. Any lawmaker’s attempt to include chickens in cruelty laws is quickly squelched. In 2008, a small demonstration of people, including one man wearing a chicken suit, gathered outside the Araneta to protest animal cruelty at the World Slasher Cup. They were quickly hustled away, but Luzong was alarmed, and spearheaded a campaign using print, television, and Internet media to put cockfighting in an unassailable position.
Warming to his argument, he dismisses Western animal-rights activists as simply the latest version of morality-pushing imperialists from a century ago. Like bullfighting in Spain, he argues cockfighting is an essential piece of national identity. The sport has survived greedy Spanish administrators, hypocritical U.S. interlopers, ruthless Japanese troops, and the country’s own thieving dictators. Unlike Western factory chickens that are pumped with feed and slaughtered within two months, game fowl are highly valued and well treated and live for at least two years before they enter a ring. “Then they travel in an air-conditioned Suburban and fight in an air-conditioned arena,” he adds, slapping the seat in front of us. “They are probably the luckiest birds in the world.”
Some 15 million game fowl die annually in Filipino rings. Winners typically carry the dead home for the family dinner. Those killed during the World Slasher Cup are buried in a mass grave. To Luzong, the competition is no different from dog shows. “Dogs are trained to do tricks. Roosters are trained to fight. They are both trained to win.” After all, he says, roosters have an instinct to kill, and like humans, they are natural warriors who like to compete and win. When I suggest that the killing trait is one selected by humans—after all, red jungle fowl more often run than fight—he shifts gears. Cockfighting channels aggression in a less destructive manner than war, he says quietly. “You can see we are very loving people.” He opens his arms to take in the scene. “Maybe it has made us milder because we are able to let the birds do the bad things for us.”
Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? Page 11