An appeal to cockfighters

By Thomas Pool

This is an appeal to cockfighters, not to condemn you, but to ask you to think again about something you may have accepted for most of your life.

Some of my closest friends are cockfighters. We simply avoid the subject. I know them as good men, devoted husbands and fathers, men whose ideas about right and wrong are much like mine. That is precisely why I believe cockfighting deserves another look.

I know what it is like to participate in something for years without really examining its morality.

I am a veterinarian largely because I have always loved animals. Yet for many years I was also an enthusiastic wingshooter. I killed and ate hundreds of ducks, pheasants, quail, and doves. What I did not allow myself to think about were the birds I wounded but never recovered. We probably failed to recover at least as many wounded birds, and they died slowly from shotgun wounds hours or days later.

I simply did not think about it. Not deeply.

Then I became a practicing veterinarian. I saw firsthand the fear and suffering of injured animals, and eventually I could no longer reconcile that suffering with my enjoyment of wingshooting. So I stopped.

I am not a vegetarian, and I am not arguing that killing an animal is wrong. Nature itself teaches otherwise. Animals survive by consuming other living things. My sons and I still hunt pigs, which we eat. But we only take head shots and, to my knowledge, we have never wounded a hog. Every one of our scoped rifle shots is a kill.

The moral distinction, to me, is suffering. Death can be necessary. Pain sometimes cannot be avoided. But causing unnecessary pain for entertainment is something different.

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A lion killing its prey has no alternative method available. We do. And once we possess the ability to avoid unnecessary suffering, don't we also acquire some responsibility to do so?

That question lies at the heart of cockfighting.

Animals do not need human rights. A rooster does not need freedom of speech, religious liberty or the vote. But animals unquestionably experience pain and fear. So what moral principle allows us deliberately to inflict severe pain on them when there is no necessity for doing so?

Is it intelligence? Surely more intelligent human beings do not have a greater right to be free from torture than less intelligent ones.

Is it because animals belong to another species? If a vastly superior species arrived on Earth tomorrow, would their superiority make it morally acceptable for them to torture us for amusement?

Power does not create moral permission.

Proponents insist that cockfighting is traditional. Are you sure? Whose tradition? There were no chickens in our islands until the Spanish conquerors brought them. The Spanish crushed all resistance, but it was not a fair fight. They had steel weapons, steel body armor and firearms. They introduced many things to these islands, like influenza and venereal diseases, and cockfighting was another.

The cockfighting tradition celebrated here is the tradition of the men who dominated the native people of these islands for 230 years. Now cockfighters strap razor blades to the roosters’ legs, often addled with amphetamines and steroids and cheer as they slash each other to ribbons. The loser is usually thrown onto a pile of other struggling, wounded chickens and left to die slowly. Or sometimes neither chicken survives. I see no need to honor and continue the brutal tradition of the men who brutalized these islands.

Whatever its history in our islands, the question before us today is simpler: Should human beings deliberately place two animals into combat, equip them to inflict terrible wounds and watch their suffering for entertainment and gambling?

Forget for a moment what your father did, what your grandfather did, what your friends do or what I say. Ask yourself that question privately.

Cockfighting cannot survive solely through the participation of cruel men. There simply aren't enough of them. It survives because many decent, honorable men participate in it without examining the contradiction between their own compassion and what happens in the pit.

I understand that contradiction because I lived my own version of it.

For years I never seriously considered the birds that flew away wounded after I pulled the trigger. When I finally did, I changed.

I am asking cockfighters to do nothing more than I eventually asked of myself. Look directly at the suffering. Forget the tradition, excitement, money and social expectations for a moment. Then decide whether causing that suffering unnecessarily is consistent with the man you believe yourself to be.

Good men can reconsider bad habits.

And sometimes good men decide to end them.    

Dr. Thomas Pool, Guam's longtime territorial veterinarian, retired in May 2022.

 He is now the senior veterinarian with Animal Wellness Action and a vocal

advocate against cockfighting in Guam. Send feedback to guamvet@gmail.com

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