Before any of you try stopping cockfighting in East Timor, the Philippines or any other culture that engages in it, how about try and stopping the industrial farms where livestock are born, fed, and raised in uncomfortable (an understatement) conditions JUST to get slaughtered for food? How bout the dogfighting, seal clubbing, hunting, horse racing, fishing, whaling, leather industry, bull-fighting and a host of other abuses towards animals that first world societies tend to take for granted! Yeah you probably can’t because they’re all so deeply entrenched so you all take your ire on an “easier” target - cockfighting, something that these roosters will do WITH OR WITHOUT human intervention. If you think about it, the blades are a blessing in disguise because it actually ends the life of the loser chicken as soon as possible! I’ve also seen what people do in slaughterhouses to livestock and its clear that the livestock in slaughter houses SUFFER FAR MORE than a rooster that dies in battle! At least the rooster went down fighting, not a helpless victim! Besides these “animal rights” activists and groups don’t exactly have a great track record in caring for lost animals in their impounding lots - a lot of them have been neglected, abused or killed while in their custody! And what do these “activists” do to confiscated roosters when after they’ve been “rescued” - they just KILL them! Simple as that! An owner of a fighting cock would NEVER dream of doing that! Not to mention various human rights problems that seem to permeate even the “most enlightened” societies, something I don’t feel the need to elaborate on!

I will say this, being a person who’s grown up around the cockfighting scene! It is NOWHERE near as inhumane as the other examples I’ve mentioned above! If you visit a random cockfighting farm in my part of the world, I can guarantee you will NOT find a single instance of the fighting cocks being abused or neglected in any way. We don’t hit them, in fact I’ve heard stories (including from a HS classmate of mine from Germany) of the roosters beating and scratching bloodily their human trainers! In fact they treat them like family, perhaps even better than many people would treat their dogs in the western world! They get GREAT FOOD, ALL the vitamins and minerals, clean water, shelter, showers, and all kinds of care that BEST pet owners the world over would give their pets! Sometimes the owner would scrimp on himself to provide the roosters their needs! And if and when they lose, they are most likely to give them a royal burial!

So before you guys spout away vs cockfighting, why don’t you take a look at your own society first and have a go at the inhumane practices towards animals and the human rights issues that happen in it! AFTER that’s been cleared out (which I DOUBT would happen anytime soon) then you can clamor for us to ban the sport! But before that, those calls are NOTHING more than Cultural Imperialism at its ugliest!

yaya/