The Death of the Cockfighters

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Carlos Dews was brought up in a poor area of rural east Texas, travelling every weekend to cockfighting tournaments across the southern states. “I remember,” he says, “limp necks and the lifeless swaying heads of beautiful birds as they were carried by their feet to barrels for burning. I was told not to cry, not to remember these things. But we always remember what we’re told to forget.” Carlos’ father was in his day a great champion, twice winning the title ‘Cocker of Texas’. While the sport is now banned in the US, and Carlos himself shares the aversion felt by many to the sport and is a vegetarian, he also feels a powerful sense of nostalgia regarding its loss since it played such an important part in his childhood, shaping his identity as a youth growing up against a set of powerful masculine codes he was largely at odds with. Visiting a cockfight in Puerto Rico before heading home to Texas, Carlos argues that cockfighting is, a highly complex cultural practice for which he has a great deal of regard that leant meaning to lives often disregarded by mainstream America. Nonetheless Carlos will describe how the sport represents the last vestiges of a necessarily outmoded and dying culture whose values are so out of step with modern Western society, hearing from the Humane Society along the way. (Photo: A rooster roaming free at Hackney City Farm, London, 2008. Credit: Barnaby Perkins)