We drove though a leafy neighborhood and pulled up in front of a farmhouse set well back from the road. The front yard had been converted to a training camp. The air was heavy with the tart smell of poultry and the crowing of roosters. Two dozen metal cages were arrayed around the grounds.
In a makeshift ring fashioned from concrete block and plastic tarp, a hired trainer was teaching a young prospect how to feint and dart. The man, a dour fifty-six-year-old named Decha with a black shirt and green cargo pants coated with dander, had wrapped his bare right hand beneath the chest of an old, retired rooster, palming it like a basketball and rocking it back and forth toward the young cock. Decha lunged forward with the old bird and then jumped back. He thrust it in and pulled it out, then swung it from side to side. The young cock followed the moving target intensely, ducking and dodging, pecking and kicking. Decha looped the old bird over and behind his student, and the young prospect spun around furiously, feverishly trying to land a blow.
Decha had wrapped strips of black sponge around the spurs on the young cock’s claws, both to keep them from cracking during practice and to protect the old rooster. But blood was still drawn, including the trainer’s. His hands and arms were scarred and swollen from the errant attacks of his pupils.
When the exercise finished, Decha released a second young cock into the twenty-foot ring and let the two prospects spar for about five minutes. They puffed out the plumage around their necks and repeatedly pounced at each other in a whoosh of feathers and fluff.
“Train harder,” Phapart counseled Decha. “They’re not really strong enough.”
Phapart explained that roosters must be exercised every day. They should be drilled on walking to build their leg muscles and drilled separately on kicking. At least once a month, he continued, they should be pitted against other cocks in full-length practice bouts, their beaks covered with little sacks much like boxers sparring with headgear. The birds would require three months of intensive training before they were ready for the arena.
Our next stop was the Khun Dej Camp on the edge of town, a sprawling training facility that Phapart billed as a “gymnasium” but was really more of a boarding school for would-be contenders. In a long shed toward the rear of the property were ample quarters fashioned from wood and screen for promising candidates, with smaller cages for breeding hens. The owner, Sitthidej Sanrin, a solidly built forty-nine-year-old with a high forehead, thick mustache, and disarming smile, had been in the business for twenty-five years, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather as a breeder and trainer. Many of the roosters were his own, but some belonged to clients who had entrusted him with the rearing and seasoning of their pricey investments.
When we drove up, Sitthidej was seated on the edge of a practice ring, clad in a red tank top and gray shorts. His legs were scratched and smeared with bird droppings, his feet bare. He had placed two roosters in the pit, an older one still inside a metal cage and a young prospect loose outside. The latter, an exquisite bird with yellow and white feathers around its neck, was circling the cage, stalking, and then lunging, trying to peck through the bars. The caged veteran watched warily, spinning on his claws, parrying the attacks. For half an hour this dance continued, the young cock exercising his leg muscles. He had already fought twice in the arena and won. A third bout in Chiang Rai was imminent.
Sitthidej lifted the lid of the cage, letting out the old bird, and the two roosters sparred for a few minutes.
“Your cock will do well in Chiang Rai,” Phapart told his friend. “Over there, most of the cocks are very aggressive and like to fight up close. But yours likes to hang back and then kick. It’s a good style.”
Clearly pleased with this endorsement, Sitthidej scooped the young rooster from the ring and placed him in his lap. Then he reached over and grabbed a soft, moist towel, warmed it on a hot plate, and began to scrub the bird feather by feather, rubbing the muscles in the shoulders, back, and stomach. He gingerly held the rooster’s red neck between his thumb and forefinger and leaned back, surveying his condition, and then resumed. It was bath, massage, and sauna rolled into one, and Sitthidej continued meticulously for twenty minutes.
As part of the strict regimen, Sitthidej served the rooster a lunch of champions: the grilled meat of a local mountain river fish called kang, a lean, brawny creature so tough that the villagers of northern Thailand claimed it can survive out of water for an hour. The meat was minced and mixed with honey and herbs, including garlic, pepper, and lemon grass, and then rolled into marble-size pellets. “This is our secret formula,” Phapart offered. “It goes back generations. It makes them strong.” Sitthidej nimbly slipped the food with his fingertips into the cock’s mouth.
After a dessert of chopped banana, Sitthidej walked over to a wooden cupboard to grab the vitamins. The shelves were crammed with little bottles and containers, protein supplements, and various antibiotics. One jar contained yellow paste made from a local root, soaked and ground, used for special massages. Another contained facial cream to prevent skin disease and heal wounds. A third contained a red paste to be applied to the face before matches to toughen the skin. Beside it was a glass jar stuffed with replacement beaks and claws in case the bird’s own cracked or snapped off. Beside that were a needle and thread to stitch wounds closed and eyes open.
Sitthidej returned the rooster to his cage and moved it into the tropical sunlight. It was time for the bird’s daily sunbath before he would retire to his quarters. Phapart teased his friend that there was no music to serenade the bird, recalling that other trainers played Thai country songs while the roosters lounged in the sun. “In truth, the music is for the owners more than for the cocks,” Phapart admitted. He smiled and the corners of his eyes crinkled. “But it makes the birds happy too. Sometimes they even try to sing along.”
Komsan Fakhorm, an eighteen-year-old from the eastern province of Prachinburi, loved his fighting cocks, as Thai men had for generations. He would clear their throats by sucking out the blood, mucus, and spit from their beaks with his mouth. He would sometimes sleep with his favorite roosters.
On the final day of August 2004, the young cock breeder fell sick. He had a fever, a nasty cough, and difficulty breathing. Though Thai officials later faulted his family for waiting too long to get him medical care, by September 4, he had been admitted to the hospital. Three days later, he was dead.
There was no doubt this was bird flu. Thai health officials reported that thirty of Komsan’s hundred roosters had died in previous weeks. But this was the first confirmed human case of the virus in Thailand for months and a jarring setback to Thai efforts at containing the disease. After a series of false starts and premature declarations of victory, senior Thai officials finally had seemed justified when they announced that summer they had turned the corner and quashed the epidemic.
Thailand would continue to struggle with bird flu over the coming months. But by the end of 2005, a massive campaign by health and agriculture officers coupled with thousands of local volunteers had again appeared to banish the virus. It would be deja vu. In July 2006, after more than seven months without a case, a seventeen- year-old boy from a province north of Bangkok fell ill with a high fever, cough, and headache. He was hospitalized five days later, deteriorated rapidly, and died after another four.
Thai health officials concluded that he, too, had caught the virus from a fighting cock. He had been infected while burying roosters that had died of bird flu. “The victim failed to report the death of his fighting cock because he was afraid the authorities would slaughter his birds,” Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra told reporters angrily.
The livestock chief of the boy’s home province, Pichit, alleged an even wider cover-up, saying villagers had declined to notify officials that some of their cocks were dying because the birds were so expensive. Tests by the national livestock laboratory ultimately confirmed bird flu in samples taken from the carcass of a dead cock. When authorities learned of the outbreak and ordered that the surviving roosters be culled, the owners resisted. The livestock chief himself was disciplined for failing to prevent the outbreak, and a complete ban was slapped on cockfighting in Pichit and neighboring Phitsanu lok provinces.
Ever since the virus resurfaced in late 2003, cockfighting has played a role in spreading it around Southeast Asia. At least eight confirmed human cases were possibly caused by infected fighting cocks during 2004 alone.
These roosters have proven to be difficult targets for disease control efforts. Owners have frequently hidden their cocks when officials have ordered mass poultry culls. Others have smuggled the birds across provincial and even national lines to elude the dragnet. Each time they are moved, they risk introducing the virus to new flocks. When bird flu was confirmed for the first time in Malaysian poultry in August 2004, animal-health officers blamed illegal imports of fighting cocks from neighboring Thailand. In turn, several other countries banned imports of all Malaysian poultry, and an area of the northern Malaysian state of Kelantan, where the outbreak occurred, was put under quarantine to prevent further spread. The state’s chief minister, Nik Aziz Nik Mat, who doubled as the spiritual head of Malaysia’s Islamic opposition, slammed local cockfighters. He urged them to give up the sport and repent. While some Muslim clerics opposed the culling of cocks and other poultry as un-Islamic, Nik Aziz endorsed
