02/08/04
IRVINGTON -- Ollie Seaman, 34, walked across the rows of belly-high metal shelters on his farm, each topped by a rooster -- a kelso, a hatch, a roundhead, a claret and dozens of combinations -- all of them the product of 16 years of breeding and selection.
He handles the bird breeding on his five-acre place, he said, and lets cockfighting do the selecting.
Always a few die, crumpled on the floors of the cock pits that are hidden in barns, buildings and back yards.
But it's not those 15 or 20 dead roosters that Seaman wants to talk about. It's the champions, the ones that prevail.
"If they win anywhere from two to six fights, if I like what I see them do in the pit, I make them a brood cock and they never fight again," Seaman said, pointing to the line of 15-by-15-foot wire-and-wood rooms nestled in the back corner of his farm, each a home to one strutting, battle-proven rooster and one hen.
That's the way to build a hard-fighting bloodline, he said. That's also the way to make a little money to compensate for the thousands spent on feed, vitamin supplements, inoculations and whatnot.
The weekend fights -- which take place all over Mobile County, according to cockfighters -- pair birds against each other in an enclosed ring. The birds are fitted with ice-pick-like steel gaffs, strapped over their natural spurs. Spectators usually gamble over the matches.
At these clandestine, illegal bouts, cock breeders often are called by the registration names they give to the fight organizers rather than by their real names.
Seaman was among 40 cockfight spectators who authorities found but did not charge with any crime when they raided a cockfight in Irvington on Jan. 25.
Owning a cock pit in Alabama is a misdemeanor that can bring a fine of $20 to $50, but there's no law against raising the fighting birds, attending fights or entering competitors in them.
Seaman, who is known in cockfighting circles by the registration name "Hurricane City," said he has had his own fighting roosters since he was 18, when he started making a living from his shrimp nets and oyster tongs. He and his father own a shrimp boat together.
They shrimp in the summer and oyster in the winter, like many men on the southern end of Mobile County. A larger number of those men -- more of them than would like to admit it -- also go to cockfights, Seaman said, even if they don't raise cocks themselves.
"I love this hobby. I'm not going to lie. I get a thrill out of it," Seaman said. "Everybody has their thing. For some people, they get that thrill out of hunting, and they spend all the time they can hunting. For other people, it's rock collecting or insect collecting. For me and a lot of other fellows, it's cockfighting."
Seaman is one of hundreds of rooster breeders in south Alabama, according to the United Gamefowl Breeders Association, a nonprofit cockfighting advocacy group based in Ohio.
Animal rights groups fervently condemn cockfighting as a cruel bloodsport.
Cockfighting is legal in Louisiana and New Mexico and illegal in the other 48 states. The Humane Society of the United States, which describes Alabama's law as "the weakest in the nation," last week called on the state's legislators to outlaw cockfight attendance and impose fines for possession of cockfight paraphernalia.
Alabama's present cockfighting statute allows a largely underground industry to flourish, said Wayne Pacelle, senior vice president of the Humane Society.
Indeed, Alabama is the top state for breeding and selling fighting roosters, according to the United Gamefowl Breeders Association.
Alabama breeders every year ship birds worth an estimated $1.5 million, said Charles Corley, 75, of Hueytown, Ala., who founded the Alabama Gamefowl Breeders Association in 1977.
"Cockfighting is practically legal in Alabama, some people might say," Corley said. "But it's not legal enough to have the organized, clean pits like they have in Louisiana, where you can bring in serious money."
Roger Dodge, 39, a cockfighter known as "Gravedigger" who lives in St. Elmo, said he has been to hundreds of cockfights since his father took him to his first one when he was 6. He has traveled to fights all over Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, he said, and was one of those at the Irvington raid last month.
"You see people from every single strata of society at one of these fights," Dodge said. "You see hard-working people like me, you see millionaires, you see politicians."
He said, "You'll see all kinds of folks together in the same room around the same pit."
Bets at Mobile County cockfights range anywhere from $5 to $150, said a council member for a small municipality in the Mobile area who raises fighting cocks but asked that his name not be used.
The betting is relatively informal, he said: A bettor will raise his hand and shout how much he's willing to stake on a particular fight, seeking someone to take him up on it. There may be 150 fights on fight day, he said.
He said the betting is much more extravagant in Oklahoma, where a recent state prohibition on cockfights has sparked protests. One of his adult children won $20,000 on an Oklahoma cockfight, he said.
The local official said he's not the only officeholder who participates in cockfights. At a statewide workshop for other elected officials, he and six others sat around a table, talking about their own cockfighting experiences, he said.
"You'd be surprised at the lawyers, judges, preachers -- preachers! I know at least five preachers who fight cocks," he said. "That's why we don't fight cocks on Sunday. We fight on Saturday."
A Saturday cockfight event in Mobile County will start about 9 a.m., after being advertised by word of mouth, according to Seaman.
Once participants arrive and settle in, the host or hosts organize the first several fights of the day. Betting cranks up, and the opening pair of roosters gets put in the pit around 11 a.m., Seaman said.
The rules are something like wrestling -- it's a matter of one rooster or the other getting "counted out," he said. If one rooster stops fighting, for whatever reason, the referee starts counting to 10. If the rooster fails to "show fight" by the end of the count, the bout is over, Seaman said.
Most bouts end with one rooster severely injured, blind or dead, he said.
According to cockfighting custom in the United States, owners trim down their charges' natural spurs, leaving only the fleshy nub on the backs of their legs. They then fit this nub with a 3-inch metal spur known as a gaff, tied on with leather straps.
The elected official claimed that the needle-sharp gaffs are better for the birds. Cuts from natural spurs, he said, are larger and more ragged and more prone to inflammation.
Seaman said, however, "I'm going to tell you the truth. The gaff kills faster."
The gaff penetrates quickly and efficiently, doing either very little damage or a great deal of it, Seaman said.
"It keeps the bout from dragging out," Seaman said. That, in turn, protects the most valuable property in the ring: the winner. A champion battlecock can be sold for anywhere from $700 to more than $3,000.
Gordon Waller is one person who finds cockfighting to be repulsive. He is executive director of the Alabama Safety Institute, which provides driver education and substance abuse counseling in Mobile and Baldwin counties.
Waller said his father took him to a cockfight when he was 8. He stood on a fence railing and watched one rooster mangle and kill the other in a bloody display that left even the victor limping pitifully, he said.
When he got home, his mother saw that he was extremely upset, and she "let Daddy have a verbal lashing and how," Waller said.
"I never went to another one. And if my father did, he did it in absolute secrecy," said Waller, who grew up in St. Elmo.
He said that since that experience, he has regarded cockfighting as "cruel, disgusting and demeaning to the people who enjoy it."
"It's bloody and brutal. The things go for the eyes," Waller said.
The Humane Society's Pacelle said, "The kind of early exposure to animal cruelty that is a routine part of cockfighting culture is one of its most disturbing aspects. It dulls a child's compassion for the suffering of others."
But Roger Dodge said he's proud to raise his boys, 16 and 15 years old, as cockfighters, the same way his father raised him.
"The social workers might want to come and take my kids from me when I say that, but they'd be wrong to," Dodge said. His boys are respectful of their elders, they say, "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" and "They're at the cockfights with me. They're not running around with their friends getting into trouble," Dodge said.
Both boys are expert handlers, he said.
Eric, Dodge's 16-year-old, said he loves fighting cocks. Some kids are into collecting Yu-Gi-Oh cards, he said. But Eric can tell a speckled kelso from a speckled hatch, and he can keep a rough-and-ready rooster calm while carrying it through a noisy crowd and onto the fighting pit floor.
Though cockfighting is illegal in most places, anyone can subscribe to the four magazines dedicated to cockfighting, then order from their pages $1,000 battlecocks shipped from as far away as the Philippines.
In a December 2003 catalogue, Triple T Manufacturing in Millry, an Alabama town about 60 miles north of Mobile, advertises hand-made gaffs "as deadly as Jessie James."
The annual World Slasher Cup tournament held at the Araneta Coliseum in the Philippines brings thousands of rooster fighters from all over the world. Cocks are fitted with knives for these "slasher" matches.
An Internet search on cockfighting produced thousands of sites worldwide, explaining how to start a cock farm, what to feed roosters to make them healthy and strong, how to protect them from cold weather and from illness, how to breed them for hardiness and aggression.
"Cockfighting is everywhere that chickens are," Seaman said.
Wendell Mareno, who raises fighting cocks in his back yard in Bayou La Batre, said it's impossible to train a rooster to fight: That part is all instinct, he said.
Mareno, known by the cockfighting handle "Stone Cold," was another of the 40 people found by deputies at the event in Irvington.
He said he believes dogfighting is wrong, because dogs are social animals that have to be taught to fight. But he said the roosters will war with one another all day if the owner doesn't keep them tied to their A-frame "teepees" or caged.
He said cockfighters spend weeks before big matches preparing their birds physically and mentally.
Mature, 2-year-old roosters are placed in 12- or 15-foot-tall "fly cages" to build up their wing strength. They learn to be "gentled down" by human handlers. Radios blaring loud music get them used to noise.
Seaman on a recent afternoon was admiring a speckled hatch rooster as it posed and strutted in the rooster barn of his farm, showing off its luminous green-blue tail, its fiery orange throat dappled with white.
"They've got colors that painters just can't capture," Seaman said. "You just can't capture it. Not with paint and not with a camera. You have to see it."
(Register reporter Karen Tolkkinen contributed to this report.)
02/08/04
By KAREN TOLKKINEN
Staff Reporter
With all the ardor that cockfighting inspires in its proponents, it's hardly surprising that a whole mythology has arisen around the activity.
But how much of that is grounded in fact?
President Lincoln was nicknamed "Honest Abe" because of his fairness in judging cockfights.
Not necessarily true, according to David Blanchette, spokesman for the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, which runs the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and historic sites.
"We can't say with 100 percent certainty that he did not judge a cockfight, but we have never found evidence to say that he did," Blanchette said. "A lot of people latched onto the cockfighting rumor."
They do have evidence that he judged horse racing, the spokesman said.
"And there was another way he got the label 'Honest Abe,'" Blanchette said. "When he was a storekeeper and he short-changed someone, he had a reputation for walking many miles to bring them their change."
During the Civil War, Union and Confederate soldiers would call an informal truce to fight cocks.
"If somebody could find an instance where it happened, I don't think it would be all that shocking, given that fraternization took place," said University of Alabama Professor George Rable, a scholar of the Civil War-era South. "The officers tried to stop it (fraternization), and it didn't quite work."
Soldiers would trade things -- Southern tobacco for Northern newspapers, for instance, Rable said.
Still, it seems unlikely that they would have engaged in cockfighting, given that the meat in soldiers' diets tended to be salt pork and salt beef, Rable said. Any chickens around would have to be filched from nearby farms, which did happen, he said.
And if filched, chickens' life expectancies would not be extensive.
"They would end up on the captain's dinner table," he said.
Cockfighting paid for an early 20th century Demopolis bridge.
Cockfighting didn't necessarily pay for the bridge, but a huge auction of roosters helped foot the bill, said Kirk Brooker, director of the Marengo County Historical Society.
In 1919 the county launched an internationally publicized effort to raise money for a bridge across the Tombigbee River. It was the last link in the eastern United States for a road connecting Savannah, Ga., to San Diego.
Actress Mary Pickford and comedian Fatty Arbuckle donated roosters, according to historical accounts. Gen. John J. Pershing sent one. So did President Woodrow Wilson and leading politicians from France, England and Italy, who were holding a peace conference at Versailles in the wake of World War I.
President Wilson participated, despite his fear that "Fighting fowls would be a poor symbol from the 'Big Four' at the Peace Table," according to an article in the quarterly Alabama Heritage magazine.
Sponsors sold buttons saying, "Bridge the Tombigbee with cocks." The night before the auction, attendees celebrated with jazz dancing, a ball and, yes, cockfights, the magazine said.
The auction raised just $45,000 of the $75,000 needed for the bridge. State and federal funds made up the difference, and the bridge opened in 1925.
It was demolished in 1980, and a new bridge was built. However, the Alabama Legislature decreed that any bridge to cross the Tombigbee River at that point should be called the "Rooster Bridge."
Source: http://www.al.com/news/mobileregister/index.ssf?/base/news/1076249833103450.xml
02/08/04
When the Humane Society of the United States announced a lobbying campaign last week to toughen up Alabama's cockfighting law, south Alabama lawmakers were unimpressed.
Operating a cockpit in Alabama is a misdemeanor offense, carrying a $20 to $50 fine and no jail time. It's perfectly legal in Alabama to attend fights and to buy, sell and own cockfighting paraphernalia, such as the needle-like gaffs attached to the roosters' legs to make the fighting more deadly.
The legislators said raising the penalties of cockfighting likely will not be a high priority this year or anytime in the foreseeable future. And law enforcement officials contacted by the Mobile Register said they rarely enforce the law that's already on the books.
State Rep. Spencer Collier, R-Irvington, said he has "other legislative concerns" that require more attention than entering a squabble with cockfighters in Alabama.
"It's inhumane, but we've got more dire concerns in Montgomery right now," said state Rep. Jim Barton, R-Mobile. "We're talking about cutting teacher benefits and whether we can afford textbooks. Cockfighting isn't even on the radar screen."
Wayne Pacelle, vice president of the Humane Society, said he recognizes Alabama's revenue crisis but said legislators still can find time to pass a tougher cockfighting law.
"We face the attitude that cockfighting isn't a priority all the time," Pacelle said. "But when this issue actually gets put to the people, the people usually vote to protect animals from cruelty."
In Oklahoma, for instance, the Humane Society and others successfully lobbied the Legislature for a statewide vote on cockfighting in 2002. Voters that November passed the bill statewide, but it failed to carry 57 of Oklahoma's 77 counties. Cockfighting supporters went to court and obtained injunctions to prevent the enforcement of the new law in 27 counties. The issue still is tied up in court.
The Humane Society's announcement followed recent busts of two alleged cockfights in Alabama. On Jan. 17, DeKalb County authorities raided a cockfighting pit near Collinsville that drew more than 250 people from five states. One person, accused of owning the pit, was arrested.
Mobile County Sheriff's deputies raided another cockfight in Irvington on Jan. 25. If convicted, Larry and Beverly Tillman, who were arrested in the local bust, each face a maximum $50 fine. The 40 or so other people who attended the fight weren't charged, because Alabama has no law against attending a cockfight.
Pacelle said he is rallying the various Humane Society groups in Alabama, which together have about 79,000 members, to formulate a lobbying plan.
Ideally, they'd like to see laws as strong as Florida's: a $5,000 penalty and up to five years in jail for holding a cockfight, attending one or even possessing fighting paraphernalia. Florida has the nation's toughest anti-cockfighting law, Pacelle said.
"In Alabama, the cruel act of cockfighting will cost you far less than a speeding ticket," Pacelle said. "We want to change that."
Alabama's cockfighting law is enforced fitfully at best.
Mobile County Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Wright, who handles the office's animal cruelty cases, said she can't recall prosecuting a chicken fighting case in recent years. The office has concentrated on stamping out dogfighting, she said.
Bayou La Batre Mayor Stan Wright said he doesn't allow cockfighting in his city, because it's against state law.
"But I've been to dozens of cockfights in my life," Wright said. "We all have down here. It's just part of living here."
His police officers don't actively seek out cockfights, Wright said.
"We have a serious prescription drug problem in this town we're trying to get under control. We have more important things to do than go after cockfighters," Wright said.
Mobile County deputies only respond to complaints about cockfights, said Sheriff's Department spokeswoman Christina Bowersox. They don't go out looking for cockfights to bust, she said.
Collier, who is also the local spokesman for the Alabama State Troopers, said, "Our police officers have more important things to do than go after cockfighters."
Federal officials, however, have promised to start vigorous enforcement of a federal law banning the interstate shipment of fighting birds. The law provides a fine of up to $15,000 and up to one year in jail. Cockfighters in Louisiana claim the enforcement will severely damage its $1 billion a year industry.
Alabama is the nation's top state in breeding and selling fighting roosters, according to the United Gamefowl Breeders Association. Alabama cock farmers ship $1.5 million worth of roosters every year -- more than any other state, said Charles Corley, founder of the Alabama Gamefowl Breeders Association.
The Humane Society calls the state's battlecock economy a breeding ground for other crimes -- not only gambling, but drugs and gun-running. Pacelle claims that in 250 busts the organization has followed over the past few years, 150 involved criminal activity other than gambling. The popular drug at cockpits is the stimulant methamphetamine, he said.
"That's more common in the Midwest than in the South," Pacelle said.
Alabama cockfighters said gambling always happens at their matches, small-time bets usually under $100. But they maintain that their hobby is otherwise squeaky clean.
"This group of people that got caught fighting on Sunday down there in Irvington deserved to get caught. Sunday is not the day for that, because it's the Lord's day," Corley said.
"We're a group of God-fearing people. You can take your wife and child to most cockfights, and you won't even hear a coarse word spoken."
When a reporter pointed out that cockfighting and gambling themselves are illegal in most states, Corley said that even godly people "don't have to obey unjust laws" as long as they "respect their fellow man and don't harm others."
In Louisiana, where it is completely legal to fight and operate cockpits, the United Gamefowl Breeders Association claims cockfighting is a $1 billion-a-year industry. Corley said Alabama lawmakers should not only ignore the Humane Society's anti-cockfighting call but go the opposite direction and legalize it completely.
"Alabama could stand to have the tax revenue from a business like that," he said.
Three south Alabama "cockers," as men like them call themselves, sat at a kitchen table in Bayou La Batre eating fried shrimp and mashed potatoes, talking law and philosophy.
"Now, tell me exactly how what we do is worse than what they do in chicken slaughterhouses every day," said Ollie Seaman, a shrimper and oysterman who owns a five-acre cock farm in Irvington. His friends Wendell Mareno and Roger Dodge nodded. All three men had been present at the Irvington cockfight busted by Mobile County deputies Jan. 25.
"We'll kill a dozen or more cocks a year," said Mareno. What are a few dozen compared with the millions of chickens that are raised inside tiny cages, with the tips of their beaks snipped off to keep them from pecking at themselves and other chickens, then slaughtered every year? Seaman asked.
The answer, according to Pacelle of the Humane Society, lies in understanding each activity's purpose.
"Certainly, the Humane Society is in no way saying that industrial poultry practices are humane. We want them to be more humane," Pacelle said. "But poultry factories slaughter chickens for food production, while cockfighting is done for pure amusement."
William Rivas-Rivas, spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of animals, had a different perspective. PETA advocates a completely vegetarian diet, claiming that all human use of animals is cruelty.
"We agree with them. Cockfighting isn't any worse than the poultry industry," Rivas-Rivas said. "But you can't use the abuse of the meat industry to justify cruelty for the sake of entertainment. When we recognize that this cruelty exists, we can see that every time we sit down at the dinner table we have an opportunity to reduce suffering in the world."
Source: http://www.al.com/news/mobileregister/index.ssf?/base/news/1076249754103450.xml