"If these chickens could vote, they'd want to be here, not at
Foster Farms," Arlin Strange says as a few hundred members of the putative
electorate mill about his feet. "Here they're guaranteed two years of pampered
life, and they're looked after as individuals."
We're standing near the
center of Strange's 22-acre spread in the town of Hickman, which he compares
favorably to the vast Foster Farms poultry factory a few miles away. Around us
the roosters, each staked by a 6-foot tether to the ground in front of its own
fiberglass coop, keep up a chorus of urgent crowing.
These are no
ordinary fowl cooped up in tiny cages or scratching away in a neighborhood yard.
Strange's roosters are show birds, as colorful and various as hothouse orchids.
As he describes his business, he picks up a compliant bird and cradles it firmly
in the crook of his arm, displaying its characteristic plumage: a rust-red
cascade of satiny feathers down its neck known as a shawl; a spray of iridescent
blue-green tail feathers; a stance, or "station," upright and proud like that of
Chaucer's Chanticleer.
"I've been raising chickens for 50 years," says
Strange, 74, depositing the bird on the ground and speaking with the fatalism of
a man who considers his way of life under assault by armies of the ignorant.
"That was when I went to my first rooster fight. I've wanted to own these birds
ever since."
He has placed his finger on the issue. Although most game
birds raised in California are destined for show, breeders admit that many are
sold for the fighting ring. (Cockfighting is a misdemeanor in California, but
it's legal in several states and in many countries around the world.) Public
disapproval of cockfighting makes it easy to hang a wide range of other sins on
the breeders. Over the years, as owner of one of the state's largest game fowl
ranches, with 2,000 birds, Strange has borne witness to many campaigns aimed at
demonizing the gamecock trade as a harbor for drug dealing, cruelty and, most
relevant for the moment, disease.
The spark for the latest campaign was
October's eruption of exotic Newcastle disease in Southern California. The
poultry virus has led to the enforced destruction of more than 3.1 million
California chickens, most of them commercial egg-layers; triggered a quarantine
prohibiting the movement of chickens out of eight southern counties; and
undermined a $3.5-billion-a-year industry.
The poultry industry, which
has long looked down on game breeders, has been all too happy to blame them for
the outbreak. "This is fighting cock season," Bill Mattos, president of the
California Poultry Federation, told me from his Modesto office, and Newcastle
"is mostly spread by fighting cocks, or people who go to fights and track it
around."
Breeders consider this a prototypical industry slander. "There's
no derogatory statement that's too bad for them to pass on to game fowl people,"
grouses John "Bucky" Harliss, spokesman for the California Assn. for the
Preservation of Gamefowl. Although he acknowledges that the state's estimated
10,000 game breeders can't compare with the commercial poultry sector -- Foster
Farms alone employs more than 10,000 workers -- he argues that they make a
significant economic contribution through their investments in feed, veterinary
services and the like.
Harliss argues further that the game breeders have
stood in the vanguard of the battle against Newcastle. As early as October, his
organization began distributing warnings and advice about the disease via its
newsletter. In December, the group voluntarily canceled its entire 2003 slate of
poultry shows to discourage the movement of flocks around the
state.
Indeed, the commercial ranchers' rhetoric also is frowned upon by
professionals charged with fighting the disease. They believe the latest
outbreak originated in Mexico, where it is endemic, and reached the U.S. via
smuggled parrots or free-flying birds such as pigeons.
"When there is a
failure in the poultry system, there isn't much to be gained trying to figure
out who to blame," Dr. Francine Bradley of UC Davis, one of the state's leading
poultry specialists, told me.
Strange, like other breeders, believes that
Newcastle is the latest pretext for the kind of assault on gamecock breeding
that can't be thwarted by the fierce Great Pyrenees dogs that patrol his grounds
by night: His enemies' real agenda is to wipe out cockfighting.
He
admires a sport that outsiders consider disgraceful and inhumane. Over his
lifetime he has attended hundreds of rooster fights, he estimates
unapologetically. What strangers do not appreciate, he says, is that although
attaching knives and razor-sharp gaffes to roosters' legs to make them more
effective killers may be an expression of human culture (the implement of choice
apparently varies by national taste), the fighting itself reflects the animals'
natural instinct.
"I'm not denying it's brutal," Strange says. "But both
combatants are willing to fight to the death. You compare that to pheasant
hunting or fishing, in which only one party is willing."
UC Davis'
Bradley agrees with this assessment of chicken behavior. "You don't train them
to fight; they're hatched that way," she says. "They're naturally pugilistic and
that drive is incredibly strong."
Strange understands that the nexus
between his business and the sport is what brings him tribulation as well as
profit. His best customer is a Mexican businessman who buys 600 roosters
annually, presumably for fighting. The businessman comes to the farm several
times a year, personally selecting 100 birds at a time and paying as much as
$200 for a 2-year-old, which yields $90 in profit.
Public animus toward
cockfighting has encouraged repeated attempts to stamp out all game bird
breeding. As president of the state game fowl association in 1989, Strange spent
months in Sacramento fighting off a bill to criminalize the possession and
breeding of game birds. Right now the Legislature is considering a proposal to
elevate cockfighting to a felony from a misdemeanor. (The sponsor is a senator
from a commercial poultry district.)
But "fighting's cultural ties are
too strong to legislate it out of existence," Bradley says. "And when it comes
to fighting catastrophic disease, we need to know where all the flocks
are."
Strange is irked that commercial breeders don't recognize that he
also suffers economically from the quarantine and other fallout from the
Newcastle infestation. "I make my living raising game chickens," he says. "But
nobody wants California chickens to cross their state lines." Experts have told
him that even if the disease is brought under control soon, the quarantine might
persist for a year.
He leads me into a yard furnished with a couple of
dozen breeding cages, each hosting a splendid rooster and one or two dowdy
hens.
"There's lowlifes in the chicken business," he says. "But tell me a
business where there aren't any."
Turning his attention to the chickens,
Strange brightens up. He points out the finer qualities of the rooster,
including its size, plumage and station; ticks off the pedigree of the hen; and
speculates about the genetic prospects of their offspring. For the moment,
economics, disease and the intolerance of humane society officials fade into
irrelevance. All that's left is husbandry.
*
"This pair will make
a beautiful bird, I believe," he says.
Golden State appears every Monday
and Thursday. Michael Hiltzik can be reached at golden.state@latimes.com.
