Category: Chickens

Everything I know about cock fighting comes from Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Animal Dreams. In it, the main character falls in love with a man who learned cock fighting from his father, and was very good at it. But the main character was horrified, saying that she thought humans should have “more heart,” and that she couldn’t “feel good about people making a spectator sport out of puncture wounds and internal hemorrhage.”

Roosters’ natural instinct is to fight for territory, to fight for their hens, and once they’ve made their point, they stop. The less dominant one backs off. As Kingsolver says, “No animal has reason to fight its own kind to the death.”

That has been our experience with roosters. We’ve always had more than one (due to various circumstances), and they’ve always (more or less) gotten along. For awhile we even had five “yard roosters” who slept up in an Eastern Red Cedar tree, and patrolled the farmyard eating whatever they could find. Two of them disappeared (lots of foxes in the neighborhood), and we ate one, but the two we couldn’t catch hung out together all winter long. Sure, there would be periodic squabbles, but they never lasted long.

That trend continued in our latest chicken configuration, with two Black Australorp cockerels and nine Black Australorp pullets, in a chicken tractor surrounded by an electric net fence. The two boys postured to each other, and sometimes got a little aggressive, but mostly they ignored each other. Then one of the yard roosters discovered he could fly over the electric fence to hang out with the ladies, and we finally gave up and let him stay. We started calling him Beater, because he kept chasing away the two cockerels, but they understood and pretty much avoided him.

But two days ago, when it was time to move the tractor, and the fence was open, the other yard rooster came in, and the two big boys had a real honest-to-goodness cockfight.

Their neck feathers stood straight out, and they flew at each other again and again, sharp talons first. Neither of them were giving up. Beater was defending his right to the hens, and the other one was trying to lay claim to them. No way was I getting in the middle of that!

Finally, though, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes later, Beater stopped fighting. He was making a weird honking sound with every breath, and I’m thinking that he was injured, even though I didn’t see any blood anywhere. The next morning he was dead.

It reminded me of the Kingsolver line about “puncture wounds and internal hemorrhage.” Beater wasn’t going to give up. But he was unlucky, and one of the other’s talons must have gotten him somewhere vital.

Now we have to decide what to do. We could probably catch the interloping rooster at night. And one of the black ones. Roosters who have lived their lives foraging for real food are delicious. And if you stew them a long time, tender enough. It’s not really fair to the pullets to have more than one rooster in with them anyway.

But as strangely beautiful as the fight between the two yard roosters was, I certainly wouldn’t want to watch it as a sport. Cock fighting is illegal in all 50 states and all 16 US territories, yet, according The New York Times, the breeding of fighting birds is alive and well in the United States, and penalties for selling, transporting, and fighting birds varies widely, with some states only fining offenders $50. I’m sure if I really wanted to, and asked the right people, I could find somewhere where it was happening, even here in Kansas. But I won’t.

I’ll stick with watching our own animals, and see what they do naturally.