Cracking Down on Cockfighting

"The cockfighting industry in St. Landry County is a $12 million industry, in a place where there are very few industries and it's very difficult for people to make a living here," Guillory says. "We eat billions of chickens every day. What we're talking about is putting the interest of chickens over the interests of people."

Guillory says he knows of 600 local families affected by the loss of the industry, working in feed stores, raising roosters and preparing them for battle, and veterinarians who treat their injuries. Chickens raised for consumption, on the other hand, live in "hellish conditions, in stench and chemicals," Guillory adds. "If you come out to look at where a fighting chicken is raised, it's a totally different life. It's the difference between being in prison and being free."

Such sentiments are losing ground nationally, however, especially as the public better understands the carnage involved in cocking. Sometimes the knives on the back of a cock's legs get stuck in the bird's opponent, requiring the referees to call for the handlers to pull the roosters apart, says John Goodwin, manager of animal fighting issues at the Humane Society of the United States. That doesn't necessarily mean the melee is over, however. A cockfight ends only when one bird stops trying or dies.

Circulation at the three magazines that cater to cockers is dropping, thanks to increasingly tough regulations and a growing awareness of the sport's links to drugs, gambling and the spread of avian diseases, Goodwin says. Grit and Steel magazine offered new subscribers a chance of winning a free fighting rooster last month in a contest to stave off declining readership.

"In 2003 in the Southwest there was an outbreak of exotic Newcastle disease that spread throughout the region by the movement of fighting roosters," Goodwin says. "You've got several hundred roosters spraying blood on each other. Half die; half live. If one of them goes into a cockfighting pit carrying the virus, another is going back to the farms alive."

Cockfighting was largely unnoticed until the late 1990s, Goodwin says, when his organization and others started working to pass state-by-state legislation to ban the sport. It was legal in five states then and a felony offense in 17.

Cocking remains prevalent in the mostly Southern states that punish it as a misdemeanor, Goodwin says, estimating that 20,000 to 30,000 people still participate in the sport nationwide.