Three House committees will gather on the chamber floor Tuesday for another
round of debate about banning cockfighting.
The Senate tabled a similar bill earlier in the session after hours of
passionate testimony from people on both sides of the issue.
The hearing of the Agriculture and Water Resources, Consumer and Public
Affairs, and Judiciary committees begins at 2:30 p.m.
At issue is House Bill 559, a proposed cockfighting ban sponsored by
Albuquerque Republican Ron Godbey.
New Mexico and Louisiana are the only states that permit cockfighting.
Fowl Play
By Josephine Lee
The chicken in red gloves feints, ducking a vicious
right from his blue-gloved opponent. He feints again--too late. He's pecked, and
squawks in alarm. Then, in a maneuver that shows he's got the stuff of a true
prizefighter, Red presses in close and tucks his head up and under his
opponent's breastplate, thereby gaining safety and buying time. He's smarter.
But Blue is stronger. It's still any chicken's game.
The crowd--mostly farmers--goes wild. This is no ordinary
cockfight. Missing are such traditional hallmarks as disjoined necks, gouged
eyeballs, punctured lungs and lush sprays of blood. Here the strapping-on of
metal spikes or razors to the chicken's feet and head is prohibited. The cocks,
for further protection, wear gloves covering their bony spurs.
Welcome to Thailand's Native Chicken Academic &
Demonstration Center, an hour's drive south of Bangkok. Bankrolled by
billionaire Dhanin Chearavanont, the center, with its computerized scoreboards,
air-conditioned box seating and seminar rooms, is but one part of a plan by
Dhanin, 63, to preserve and advance cockfighting--not just for sport, but as a
springboard to promote Thai exports of chicken meat. You could call it the
holistic approach to poultry.
At present, Thai fighting chickens stay home. Their tasty meat
and high resistance to disease make them ideal domestic pets. Compared with
their U.S. counterparts, Thai roosters are elegant and graceful: broad chests,
lean, foot-tall physiques, rich plumage and red crowns. Their ancestry dates
from the 16th century, when King Naresuan (1555-1605), a talented military
strategist and brave warrior, conceived a yen for cockfighting and bred the
birds for that purpose.
Today such fights are a central feature of rural festivities and
the weekly open-air markets where Thai farmers gather to trade and do business.
Unlike fowl farmed industrially, fighting breeds roam free, eating off the land.
They're low in cholesterol. They get no hormones, antibiotics or chemicals, says
Dhanin.
Dhanin's company, Charoen Pokphand (the CP Group), is the
largest agribusiness conglomerate in Asia. Headquartered in Thailand, the group
produces $9 billion worth of animal feed, broiler chicks, layer chicks, baby
pigs, breeder pigs, fresh eggs, shrimp, fish and ducklings annually. It was the
first Asian company to use vertically integrated, Tyson-style farm-to-market
production techniques, both for hogs and poultry. Not quite half its revenue
comes from farms and mills in China.
An organic upbringing is not accorded to the run-of-the-mill
broilers produced by CP in its factorylike chicken coops. But Dhanin aims
eventually to offer Thailand's free-range, chemical-free fighting fowl as a
specialty item.
For the present, his goal is to give farmers an incentive to
protect the fighting cock's health and unique genetics. Some farmers have
crossbred their native birds with others from the Philippines, Cambodia and
Vietnam. Result: Pure-bred Thai fighters are becoming something of a rarity.
There is danger, too, of males dying (along with their genes) in cockfighting's
traditional death matches. The genes are precious, since just 10% of males
exhibit the aggressive behavior needed for combat. When these birds die, their
harems (typically up to 12 hens each) go to lesser males.
In 1998 Dhanin began drawing up new rules for cockfights,
borrowing heavily from the sport of boxing. "If it is humane enough for humans,
it should be humane enough for the chickens," he says. Veterinarians check for
the use of hormones and steroids, and the contest is limited to only five rounds
or a maximum of one hour (unlike the traditional 12-hour death bout). A cock is
judged to have lost if he runs away or emits the telltale squawk of submission.
The match ends if there is a broken beak, continuous bleeding, too much swelling
or the blinding of an eye. In these kinder, gentler fights, cocks walk away
alive--albeit bearing a few bald, raw patches pecked clean of feathers on their
heads and torsos.
"We want to keep the birds alive and healthy," says Paiboon
Buranaragsa, the head veterinarian of Dhanin's Thai Indigenous Chicken
Conservation & Development Association. Dhanin, who bred chickens as a
boy, takes keen personal interest, tweaking designs for nesting coops and
suggesting diet choices of crickets, tadpoles and worms. Since 1999 he has given
100,000 cocks away to serve as a breeding stock. He may be the only billionaire
who tends chickens in his own yard.
So far only 20 out of the 1,000 licensed cockfighting venues in
Thailand have agreed to adopt the new rules. But Dhanin has not yet brought all
his influence to bear. He has enlisted the support of Thailand's departments of
agriculture and development, arguing that the export of fighting chickens can
help Thai farmers better their economic standing. The livestock department
agrees. It estimates farmers who breed fighters earn as much as $558 a year from
poultry, ten times the average farmer's take.
Source: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/fo/20030303/bs_fo/829b9aabceeebbab681ad747b7a44811
