Cockfighting Is Illegal in the U.S. Why Does It Breed so Many Fighting Birds?

According to some rooster men, the game fowl, or fighting chicken, was almost chosen to be the national bird of America. “And it should’ve,” a breeder once told me. “An eagle ain’t nothing more than a glorified buzzard.” Such game-fowl lore and sentiment abound: George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were devoted rooster fighters. Union and Confederate soldiers put aside their differences on Sundays during the Civil War to pit their chickens against one another. Abraham Lincoln was given the nickname Honest Abe after he displayed impartiality as a cockfighting judge. Whatever the (dubious) historical merit of claims like these, they are meant to establish the deeply American identity of game fowl. “They fought them right out on the White House lawn,” says David Thurston, president of the United Gamefowl Breeders Association, a national nonprofit dedicated to the birds’ preservation.

Such conviction exists in stark contrast with the state of cockfighting in the country today. Taking part in the practice, which consists of strapping metal spurs to the legs of two chickens and confining them to a pit to fight each other to the death, is now illegal in all 50 states, and it has been since Louisiana was the last to outlaw cockfighting in 2007. It has been banned in all 16 U.S. territories since 2019. Federal law also makes it a crime to “knowingly sell, buy, possess, train, transport, deliver or receive” any chicken across state lines for fighting purposes.


https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/magazine/cockfighting-rooster-breeding.html