Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (13 page)

Cooper's team has intriguing hints that the domesticated chicken first joined the Lapita package at an early stage, in the Philippines. All four of those unique genetic subgroups in haplotype D were found in one modern chicken from the little southern Philippine island of Camiguin. A Filipino graduate student has five hundred modern samples and ten ancient ones from around the archipelago, which he hopes to connect to birds on the mainland of Southeast Asia or in Indonesia. That could help pinpoint an origin of the mysterious early Polynesians.

Since haplotype D is associated with game-fowl breeds from Japan to the Philippines to India, cockfighting may have been a major factor in the spread of the chicken beyond its home turf. The possibility that the chicken's ability to fight may have trumped its meat-and-egg ca
pacities in ancient times intrigues scientists. No people on earth have bred the gamecock as avidly as Filipinos. Since the sixteenth century, the island chain has been known as the home of some of the world's greatest varieties of fighting birds. Even today in the Philippines, cockfighting remains as central to traditional life as bullfighting is in Spain. Forgotten or disdained in much of the industrial world today, the sport was likely a catalyst in the chicken's spread around the world.

5.

Thrilla in Manila

So lively an Emblem of true Valour is the well bred-Cock, that he is not to be parall'd amongst the many Creatures which the wise Creator of all things has been pleased to make Man the Lord and Master of.

—Robert Howlett,
The Royal Pastime of Cock-fighting

T
he World Slasher Cup is the Super Bowl of cockfighting, a five-day series of 648 matches held in a coliseum in downtown Quezon City in metro Manila. Outside the sleek chrome entrance, a thirty-foot-high inflated rooster sways in the hot breeze, advertising a formula feed. Next to the event poster featuring two cocks in combat is a bill announcing the fiftieth Miss Philippines contest, displaying a beautiful woman in a teal-blue low-cut dress. Ice Capades just finished a run and Dionne Warwick will be coming soon. But for now, the ­twenty-thousand-seat arena is devoted to the Filipinos' favorite traditional pastime and humanity's oldest spectator sport after boxing.

In 1975, this was the site of the famous bout pitting Joe Frazier against Muhammad Ali for the title of world heavyweight champion, the legendary Thrilla in Manila. In the annual Slasher Cup competition, two gamecocks, each armed with a long, curved steel spur,
will battle to the death. Big screens make it easy to watch the combat even from the upper tiers. When I arrive there are four men in the ring, two of them calmly squatting, each with a cigarette between his lips and a chicken between his legs. The other two are referees. Thousands of spectators, all men, are standing and shouting, making distinctive hand gestures to one another around the vast space. The noise is deafening.

Suddenly, the squatting smokers release the birds, and the roosters approach each other at a wary angle, reptilian hackles rising like rainbow-colored umbrellas from their necks. As they explode forward with the speed and aim of heat-seeking missiles, the clamor outside the ring abruptly halts. Feathers, legs, and a flash of steel fill the screens. The only sound is the vibration of pounded air from hard-flapping wings. In less than a minute it is over. The white-­feathered victor sends up a triumphant crow next to the still body of its dead opponent. Losers pay up their bets in a rain of folded peso notes as the loudspeaker blares the pop tune “Eye of the Tiger.”

“Here in the cheap seats, they are betting ten to a hundred dollars a match,” says Rolando Luzong, my cockfighting guide. We are sitting halfway up, where the crowd thins out. “But there in the ­
preferencia
”—he points at the VIP bleachers next to the ring—“they are betting a thousand to ten thousand dollars.” Hundreds of thousands of dollars are passing hands with each of the 648 matches. The owner who scores the most points at the end of the meet will get a check for thirty-five thousand dollars and a laudatory article and picture in the sports sections of the Manila papers. The real money, Luzong tells me, goes to breeders profiting from selling individual winning birds to sire lines of future champions, and to the companies hawking steel blades, supplements, shampoos, and special feed for the tens of thousands of gamecocks throughout the country and beyond.

Luzong makes his living from cockfighting, not as a gambler or breeder but as a journalist, website developer, public-relations specialist, and industry consultant. In his bright-red shirt advertising Thunderbird feed, he's an unabashed promoter of a sport that is illegal and reviled in half the world. Middle-aged with jet-black hair,
a deep slouch, and a belly as round as his face, Luzong came late to the business. Pushing thirty, he landed a job writing for a game-fowl magazine and discovered that he was less interested in the gambling aspect than in the peculiar names of bird varieties—Roundhead, Butcher, Sweater. Luzong later spent a decade at Manila's Roligon Mega Cockpit as public-relations chief and then as general manager. The pit is the world's largest, an enormous stadium near the airport.

As we sit through another match, he explains the rules. First, potential rivals are compared and weighed to ensure an equal match. Then the artificial spur is fitted and tied like a boxer's glove to each bird's left foot—the natural bony spur is amputated while they are young—and carefully wrapped in a protective covering. The ring manager and the game-fowl owners agree on a betting figure for the winner, and each fighter is assigned one side of the ring. These are the inside bets. The bird most favored to win is on the side called Meron (with a hat) and the other is on the Wala (without a hat). This comes from the tradition of one owner wearing a hat while the other goes bareheaded to ensure that spectators know which owner's bird they are betting on. In the twenty-first-century Smart Araneta Coliseum, the words are spelled out on large electronic signs hanging above the boxing-match-sized ring.

Only four people are in the ring at one time—two handlers, a referee, and an assistant referee. In the two thousand or so village pits around the Philippines, a handler usually is also the owner. In the high-roller world of cockfighting, however, specialists are hired. Once in the ring, they typically work the cocks into an angry and agitated state using another bird brought for this express purpose. Spectators then have a chance to judge where to put their money. Once the inside betting is completed, betting managers around the ring spread their arms—they are called Kristos in this overwhelmingly Catholic country because of their crucifixion-like stance—and solicit bets from the crowd.

This was the din I was hearing just before the first match. That noise builds as individuals bet with the Kristos or among themselves using well-known hand signals that specify the number of pesos
being wagered. Meanwhile, in the ring, the blades are unwrapped and the birds are released. All betting ceases the moment they engage. “The fastest one I've seen lasted eight seconds,” Luzong says as a rooster dives on its opponent in the ring far below. If a match lasts ten minutes, it is considered a draw. But most are over in a couple of minutes. If a cock goes down for the count, the referee will pick them both up. If one pecks but the other doesn't, then the pecker is the winner. If both die, the one with the most pecks wins.

In nearly every case, only one bird leaves the ring alive. There is not much blood to be seen, even with the big-screen videos providing up-close action shots. Occasionally, a cleaning crew mops up dashes of crimson. Dead losers are unceremoniously carried away while injured victors are taken to a makeshift triage station in a room behind the bleachers where veterinarians apply painkillers and stitch up those birds that might one day enter the ring again. But it is a rare bird that returns to fight more than twice. Serial winners are highly sought after to sire a new line, and the lucky owner can expect fame and fortune. “If you win three times, you will have as many girls as you want,” Luzong tells me.

Until a game fowl is a serial winner, however, it has no name. If your bird wins, you get a single point; a draw gets you a half point, and a loss none. The contest is about the human rather than the animal. Like the metal contestants in shows such as
BattleBots
or
Robot Wars
that were popular a decade ago, the bird is simply an extension of its owner.

Among the several thousand spectators that evening, I see only one woman. She is near the front in designer glasses, a tight T-shirt, and fashionable jeans and clearly is a confident and experienced gambler. A dozen Hawaiians in matching yellow shirts emblazoned with the words “Summit Farms” sit together in the bleachers. In the
preferencia
are a scattering of pale Americans in Dockers pants and polo shirts along with Filipino men in button-downs and expensive shoes. Luzong watches my gaze. “They are senators, congressmen, presidents of corporations, and big businessmen there,” he says. “A lot more than gambling is happening right now. Business deals and
political decisions are being made. Powerful men are building camaraderie. Being here can really help your political career.”

The cup is the high-end of global cockfighting. To enter a single bird in the competition costs $1,750, more than half a year's salary for the average Filipino. Wealthy owners often have more than just the money; they have dedicated farms and full-time trainers caring for hundreds of fowl that could sell for well over a thousand dollars apiece. On top of that, they purchase expensive feed and supplements. “Our sales last year were eighty million dollars,” says Luzong of Thunderbird. “And we're just starting to promote medicines.” Vaccines, antibiotics, vitamins, and supplements are all part of the modern game fowl's life. Traditional methods of revving up your bird for a fight, like slipping cayenne up its anus, have given way to pricey steroids and other powerful drugs.

Like American baseball or the Tour de France, modern Filipino cockfighting is caught in a tangle of corporate sponsors and ­performance-enhancing drugs. The brightly lit concession stands, the blaring canned music, and the rows of clean toilets in the rest­rooms give the event a depressingly modern feel. Still, the people in the cheap seats are the working-class men whom you would find at any Canadian hockey game, British rugby match, or Brazilian soccer contest. The real draw, though, seems to be in the gambling outside the ring rather than in the combat inside.

Luzong insists that cockfighting is a much less corrosive form of gambling than what takes place in the flashy casinos springing up across Manila. “Here, you only choose between two birds; you have a fifty-fifty chance,” he says as another shower of peso notes sprinkles through the air at the conclusion of a match. “You can cancel your bet before the roosters are released. When the birds are released, there is no human intervention. And you can leave whenever you want.”

There are, of course, other stories. There is the young villager who spent all his hard-earned money saved in an overseas job while in a cockfighting stupor. A family lost its small plot of land because of an ill-placed bet. And children may be treated only half as well as a father's prized cocks that enjoy a carefully planned diet, constant atten
tion, and even piped-in music and air-conditioning. For the millions packed into Manila's sprawling slums, cockfighting offers a fast way up the socioeconomic ladder or a quick tumble into indigence.

Such high stakes have an extraordinarily long history. Filipinos raise “large cocks, which from a species of superstition, they never eat, but keep for fighting purposes,” Antonio Pigafetta wrote five centuries ago. “Heavy bets are made on the upshot of the contest, which are paid to the owner of the winning bird.”

Pigafetta was among Ferdinand Magellan's crew when they became the first Westerners to cross the Pacific Ocean and appear on Filipino shores. Cockfighting was popular in sixteenth-century Spain, but it was already an obsession in the Philippines. When the hungry and exhausted crew arrived in 1521, locals paddled out in boats to offer “sweet oranges, a jar of palm wine, and a cock, to give us to understand that there were fowls in their country,” Pigafetta recalled. That bird likely was raised to fight rather than to be eaten.

Magellan quickly wore out Filipino hospitality by embroiling the expedition in a local conflict. He was speared to death. Pigafetta was one of only eighteen men on board the sole remaining ship, the
Victoria
, as it limped back to Spain. That might have been the inglorious end of the Spanish in the Philippines, but as Pigafetta's vessel worked its way through the Indian Ocean and then up along the West African coast, Hernán Cortés was finishing off the great Aztec Empire in Mexico. A decade later, Francisco Pizarro and his soldiers took on the Incan Empire in the Andes of South America. Spain soon was in control of vast stores of gold and silver from the New World, and enormous mines worked by Native Americans produced astonishing wealth at a horrifying human cost.

Spain needed a stronghold close to the markets of China and the Southeast Asian islands like Sumatra, which had the spices, silks, and other luxuries craved by increasingly prosperous Western consumers. China was closed to foreigners. Their merchants, however, wanted New World silver and gold. The Philippines, sitting astride the major
sea routes in the western Pacific, proved a strategic military and economic base for the wealthiest European nation to consolidate its position in the East. The first three attempts at colonization ended disastrously, including one organized by Cortés himself. But the fourth succeeded, and by the end of the sixteenth century, Spain had a commercial treaty with China and a well-fortified port in Manila. Spanish galleons laden with New World silver mined by Native Americans sailed from Acapulco to Manila. There they could trade with Chinese merchants. That lucrative trade lasted for nearly three centuries and depended heavily on Spain's control of the Philippines.

Governing a colony consisting of hundreds of islands with dozens of ethnicities half a world from Madrid posed a challenge to the distant Spanish rulers. Copying what they had done in the New World, friars and civil administrators in the 1600s set up a feudal-style system across the colony. Scattered populations were concentrated in towns so that natives could be monitored, taxed, and used as a labor force. The ingrained passion for cockfighting in the Philippines offered Spanish administrators both an important revenue source and a way to control the population. Spiritual wealth through Christianity and earthly wealth through cockfighting proved key levers in drawing the native peoples of these islands into towns and generating the tax revenue that made this Asian beachhead pay for itself. Even today, almost every Filipino village has three main structures—a church, a town hall, and a cockpit.