Beyond the single stoplight -- past signs for hot boudin and crawfish pistolette -- an unremarkable metal building sits in a roadside clearing. You'd drive right past it if it weren't for all the cars in the grassy parking lot, maybe 100 of them, many with out-of-state plates -- a remarkable sight in this unbusy little town on a Friday afternoon. You think: bingo hall.

It's not until you step through the doors of the Sunset Recreation Club, in the prairie heart of Cajun country, north of Lafayette, that you confront its gritty business: a dark theater-in-the-round that holds a continuous parade of cockfights.

Men and women -- oil field workers, a surgeon, grandmothers -- shout $20 to $100 bets across wooden bleachers as magnificently thuggish birds fight for owners with nicknames like Lucky 21 and High Teck Red Neck. Razor steel spurs flash under fluorescent lights in a dirt ring surrounded by tall chicken wire. About half the roosters will fight to the death and be discarded in a heap in the back.

It's a world that's disappeared in most of the country -- at least legally -- along with such anachronisms as rum running, freak circuses and medicine shows. A new federal law could mean its time is running out here as well.

Louisiana is one of two states, with New Mexico, where cockfighting remains legal. But the new law, effective May 14, will prohibit carrying gamecocks to or from states where the sport is still allowed.

Praised by animal welfare activists and derided by the game fowl industry, the law threatens to hamstring Louisiana cockfighting, which generates millions of dollars in tourism, trade and wages.

It undoubtedly will affect the largest of the state's more than 70 pits, which today draw cockfighters and bettors from across the nation. High-end local breeders, who export gamecocks for $300 a head to foreign markets in Mexico, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, also will be punished. So will breeders, suppliers and merchandisers around the country, for whom Louisiana is the best last outpost to showcase their wares.

Others are less sure. In a state where freewheeling independence is considered a birthright, Louisiana's cockfighters have survived decades of challenges. In 1982, the sport's supporters stifled opposition when they helped amend the state's animal cruelty law to exempt fowl. It no longer classifies chickens as animals.

"The attitude here is, we're not messing with something that local and that much a part of the culture," said Baton Rouge political observer John Maginnis. "You'll find among a majority of Cajuns there's an intensity of feeling. Their attitude is 'Bug off.' "

Maginnis added, "Dog fighting isn't legal here. We're that civilized."

'We don't even see blood'

Few cockfighters deny their sport is brutal. They just don't think it's cruel. They view gamecocks as splendid natural athletes engaged in a kind of live war game, and they take a vicarious, almost parental thrill from their birds' physical prowess and bravery. Some hard men's eyes water when they pick up their beaten chickens.

"You need to love the rooster before you go to fight," said Kenneth Critchelow, who drives his birds from Kentucky to Sunset twice a year. "If you don't love it, you won't last long. Two years of work can be down the drain in five minutes."

Said Carroll Ibele, a former Mississippi breeder who now makes the curved steel spurs that are attached to gamecocks' legs, "When we're fighting chickens, we don't even see blood. We only see the chick we raised from an egg to an athlete. It's your creation."

As for the bird's almost inevitable demise, Lawson added, "We send them into war knowing what could happen."

The sport is almost all prelude -- the fights usually last only five to 10 minutes, though one longtime cockfighter recalled a five-hour epic.

Breeders buy and develop gamecocks with prized bloodlines, much as horsemen do with thoroughbreds. At around six months, roosters are outfitted with padded gloves and pitted against each other to see what kind of fighters they are.

For the next year or so, the birds are pampered like relative royalty: fed the best feed, exercised religiously, housed in individual open-air huts to protect them from rain and sun. Critchelow compares his farm to "a spa."

But the fight's the thing: derbies in which dozens of owners enter four to seven chickens in winner-take-all round-robins. At big pits like Sunset, with 700 seats, entry fees can exceed $1,000, with pots as high as $50,000.

Before a match, handlers tie steel "gaffs" with leather bands to the rooster's filed-down natural spurs -- like trainers taping boxers' hands -- and enter the pit cradling their birds. They tease the roosters' heads toward each other until neck feathers flare. Then they set the birds a few feet apart and let them loose when a referee -- wearing a black-and-white striped shirt at Sunset -- yells "Pit!"

The birds leap and pirouette and duck and dive. But they're eerily soundless: The only noise is the loud slapping of their furious wings.

When a gaff hits its target and sticks, or when two gaffs get tangled, the handlers rush in, delicately pull the birds apart and wait to restart. Most of the finer points that the crowd responds to are invisible to the untrained eye, lost in a pinwheel blur of flying iridescent feathers.

It can get bloody; refs toss dirt over deep-red dollops that an injured rooster drips across the pit. The longer the fight, the closer man and bird become: Handlers put their mouths over wounds during breaks, believing hot breath aids healing. Others take virtually the rooster's whole head in their mouths, sucking to clear airways through an ailing bird's beak, then spitting out saliva mixed with chicken blood. A fight ends when one rooster refuses to go on, or his neck falls limp and he dies. The handlers shake hands.

Cockfighters say that they're merely accommodating a gamecocks' genetic imperative, that the birds would pummel each other in a barnyard if they weren't dropped into a pit.

"Want to be cruel to a gamecock?" said Jim Demoruelle, a local breeder. "Don't let him fight."

As for the steel blades strapped to the roosters' legs, cockfighters say natural spurs vary in length and hardness and can give some birds an unfair advantage.

'Bambi culture' of cities decried

To many outside cockfighting's tight circle, these arguments are hard to square with the sight of a whipped chicken's blood pooling in a pit, or a wheelbarrow heaped with losing birds being emptied into a Dumpster. The Humane Society of the United States has opposed the sport since 1954.

"It's degrading for people to be involved in these kinds of immoral acts," said Pinckney Wood, president of the Coalition of Louisiana Animal Advocates, which has protested at Sunset. "You can get used to anything. Look what the Romans got used to."

But this sort of talk only makes cockfighters more defensive.

They decry a citified "Bambi culture" that's lost touch with rural folkways. They point to the hypocrisy of people who eat chicken -- and ignore the unnatural life and coldhearted death of mass-produced poultry -- but condemn cockfighters. In this heavily Catholic region, some even question the morality of a society in which, they say, killing babies is legal and cockfighting isn't.

"To me," said Dottie Meche, a Sunset ticket taker, "they should focus on closing abortion clinics instead of worrying about chickens."

The new law sidestepped two of the most common defenses of cockfighting: states' rights and heritage.

Sponsors Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo.) and Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) put the cockfighting provision into a $190 million federal farm subsidy bill. Louisiana Sens. John Breaux and Mary Landrieu, both Democrats who've kept a hands-off policy with cockfighting, voted for the farm bill, saying its importance outweighed their belief that the cockfighting issue should be the domain of each state.

But U.S. Rep. Chris John, a longtime cockfighting backer in Louisiana, viewed the provision as political sleight of hand, a Washington ploy to hobble the sport in a state where the Legislature has repeatedly killed attempts to outlaw it.

"This is a backdoor method of making cockfighting illegal in Louisiana," John, a Democrat, said after the bill passed. "This is a multimillion-dollar industry. It's a family type of business. I'm very sad it happened."

Cockfighting interests are already exploring potential loopholes. Out-of-state breeders have bought land in Louisiana for farms, contracting with locals to oversee them. But others plan to stay away until they see how strictly the law is enforced, not willing to chance the maximum $15,000 fine and one-year prison sentence. Some say they'll simply go out of business.

Nearly all of them have that walls-are-closing-in feeling.

"I'm one of the dinosaurs," said pit manager Lawson.

Fights flourish despite Georgia ban

Nobody thinks cockfighting will simply disappear. It still prospers illegally in many states, including Georgia, where gamecock farms in Hawkinsville and LaGrange advertise in trade magazines like "Grit and Steel." Cockfighting was outlawed in Georgia in 1933, yet busts in rural Georgia counties have sometimes included 100 arrests. As recently as January, authorities raided a cockfight about 40 miles southwest of Macon.

With an anti-cockfighting bill currently in the New Mexico Legislature, the last legal holdout could be Louisiana, where the blood sport's roots seem as deep and enduring as the landscape's swamp cypress. It isn't an exclusively Cajun tradition here, but it does flourish in the largely Cajun parishes, going back generations. Whole clans attend weekend cockfights, the way families in Atlanta make an outing of a Braves' game.

At Sunset one Saturday, a young girl sat in the pit's front row beside her father. He watched the fights while she played with a Game Boy.

"With us, it's always a family thing," said Liz Barras, 39, who with her husband, Dale, and two sons runs the Atchafalaya Club in tiny Cecilia, where Friday night's admission includes a homemade dinner.

"My grandfather did it," she added. "I didn't know it when I was little, but when me and Dale started dating, he took me to fights, and I saw my grandfather there."

Most cockfighters are weary of defending themselves. They just want to be left alone.

"It's a very emotional issue," said Lawson, whose own father punished him as a kid for attending cockfights, and still won't talk to him about it. "Even people close to me, when they hear what I do, they may not be against it, but they don't understand the complete love I have for it.

"What makes that love?" he added, seated in Sunset's empty bleachers, before another day's fights. "There's no answer. You either love it or you don't. It's that simple."