Cajun Country: Cock Farms & Fighting
Once a sport of kings and country gentlemen, cockfighting is a misdemeanor in 29 states and a felony in sixteen. Arizona, Louisiana, Missouri, New Mexico, and Oklahoma still allowed it. Although 47 American states have banned cockfighting, the Louisiana Legislature has, instead, created a loophole in the state's anti-cruelty law with the words "For purposes of this Section, fowl shall not be defined as animals." There are at least 500,000 cockfighters in the United States, and due to immigration of Asians and Latin Americans, the number grows every year.

If cockfighting is still legal in Louisiana, if calling it immoral can still get your nose broken, this is why: most blood sports are merely cruel; no bear or badger is willingly baited, and dogs rarely fight to the death. But chickens are different. Egg factories can lose as much as 80 percent of their layers to cannibalism, unless they cut off the birds' beaks; and even on a free range, roosters are seized by blood lust now and then.
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Roasters are tied to individual plaster barrels as they are raised for sale and fighting. Cajun (kajun) music and cockfighting are advertised. Here is what happens at a cockflight:

 "THE COCKFIGHTS WERE HELD in St. Landry Parish, in a huge, rambling wood-frame nightclub, painted bright yellow and set back against a stand of green hardwoods.  The shell parking lot could accommodate hundreds of automobiles and pickup trucks, and the patrons (blue-collar people, college students, lawyers, professional gamblers) who came to watch the birds blind and kill each other with metal spurs and slashers did so with glad, seemingly innocent hearts.

The pit was railed, enclosed with chicken wire, the dirt hard-packed and sprinkled with sawdust. The rail, which afforded the best view, was always occupied by the gamblers, who passed thousands of dollars in wagers from hand to hand, with neither elation nor resentment, as though the matter of exchanging currency were impersonal and separate from the blood sport taking place below. It was all legal.  In Louisiana fighting cocks are classified as fowl and hence are not protected by the laws that govern the treatment of most animals.  In the glow of the scrolled neon on the lacquered yellow pine walls, under the layers of floating cigarette smoke, in the roar of noise that rattled windows, you could smell the raw odor of blood and feces and testosterone and dried sweat and exhaled alcohol that I suspect was very close to the mix of odors that rose on a hot day from the Roman arena." Source: James Lee Burke, Sunset Limited. New York: Island Books, 1998, p. 332.

Based on field work by Ingolf Vogeler in March 2003; created on 25 March 2003.