the draconian measure but asked that it be carried out away from villagers so as not to antagonize them.
Some animal health investigators have also suggested that cocks exported from Thailand were behind the far wider outbreak of bird flu in Indonesia. In 2002, the year before the virus swept the region, Thailand shipped nearly six thousand fighting cocks abroad, most of them to Indonesia, according to the Kasikorn Research Center in Bangkok. Later, Thailand may also have been on the receiving end. Health officials speculated that illegal cockfighting tours reintroduced the virus from Laos into the northeast of their country after a long hiatus. Thai cock owners, including a government livestock officer whose own roosters later died, had been stealing across the broad Mekong River to pit their birds against Laotian opponents despite an outbreak on the far side of the border.
The allegation by some Thai officials that cockfighting helped seed the regional epidemic leaves the sport’s partisans seething. “The government is telling lies,” Phapart retorted when I asked him about the claim. He insisted the poultry industry and not fighting cocks was to blame. (Some Thais have also objected to cockfighting on the grounds of animal cruelty, but their calls for prohibition have never gained traction.)
To regulate the movement of fighting cocks, Thai agriculture officials suggested a modern, digital fix for this ancient pastime. They recommended inserting microchips into the roosters. But this prescription was no better received than the diagnosis. “That’s ridiculous,” Phapart scoffed. “They move around. They don’t stand still. How are you ever going to put a microchip into them?” He said a microchip could cramp their agility and leave them vulnerable. “When they fight, they get hit in every part of the body. It might create a weak spot. What if they get hit in the chip? They might run away and you would lose your thousand-dollar bet.” Senior Thai officials ultimately agreed with this widely shared critique and dropped the microchip proposal.
They had only slightly better success with their plan for fighting-cock passports. Local veterinary departments began issuing travel documents for each rooster with its photograph on one side and a register of its movement on the other. Every time an owner planned to take his bird across district lines, he was required first to visit a government veterinarian, who would examine it, record the trip, and stamp the passport. These control measures were to be supplemented with random testing of fighting cocks. Phapart said he personally obeyed the regulations but the whole notion made him chuckle. “Many people don’t use the passports,” he explained. “Less sophisticated villagers don’t care. They just keep breeding and pitting their cocks like they always did. They just tell their friends that they’re going to meet up and hold a fight before the police come. They even have someone to look out for the police.”
Phapart urged that cock owners be left to regulate themselves. In this age of cell phones, he said an outbreak in one village is instantly flashed across the district through text messages, and owners effectively quarantine the infected area themselves. No owner would want to see bird flu spread among his own prized roosters.
“The decision makers analyze the situation just on paper,” he said, growing agitated again. “Their feet aren’t on the ground. They don’t really know how we treat the cocks and don’t really share our feelings. We care more for the fighting cocks than the health officers do.”
But for a growing minority in Thailand, the debate keeps coming back to the basic question of whether it is time to ban the pastime altogether. Phapart leaned forward intently and vowed, “They’ll never be able to stop us from doing cockfighting.”
In contrast to the brawny, exquisitely groomed gladiators of the cockpit, the vast majority of Asian chickens are scrawny, sorry creatures. In Indonesia they’re known as
In Bali, as throughout the Indonesian archipelago and much of the region, a home is not a home without a chicken, or several dozen. They pretty much come and go as they like, sleeping as often in trees and under beds as they do in their own cages. The Indonesian government estimates that 30 million households raise poultry. It is their intimate presence in the lives of so many Asians coupled with the near-total absence of safeguards against contagion that makes backyard poultry farming what the U.S. Agency for International Development has called “the greatest single challenge to effective control of the spread of the virus.”
Wardana raises twenty-five chickens behind the ornately sculpted walls of his family’s traditional compound on Bali’s lush east coast. When he invited me inside the courtyard, the air was fragrant with frangipani blossoms and the grounds tranquil, shaded from the sun’s midafternoon rays by a stand of palms. At his feet, a black hen cackled. “It would be hard to imagine life without chickens,” he said, nodding with a laugh. “Life would lose its flavor without chickens.”
Yet culinary concerns are the least of it. Chickens are central to home economics, he continued, taking a seat on the wooden floor of his
Chickens also constitute part of the social contract binding communities together, providing what Wardana’s matronly neighbor Made Narti described as the “solidarity of the centuries.” Though her good fortune has translated into a flock of several hundred chicks, she recalls a time when she was hungry and had to turn to her fellow villagers of Tegal Tegu for chicken. She said she has reciprocated countless times. “For generations, chickens have lived very close in the lives of us Balinese,” she recounted. The elderly raise chickens as a hobby. The devout raise them as a matter of faith. Four times a month, Narti slaughters a bird and carries it with a plate of fruit and flowers down the narrow, walled alley to a Hindu temple. It’s an offering to the gods.
Some public health officials have urged an end to backyard farming. But it is so tightly stitched into the cultural fabric of Asian life that the prescription is sure to fail. “If you seriously proposed eradicating backyard poultry farming, you would get a lot of undesirable outcomes,” said Jeffrey Mariner, a veterinary professor at Tufts University dispatched to work with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Indonesia. Senior FAO officials have cautioned that a ban would simply force poultry farming underground. This could also alienate villagers from other programs to control the virus, for instance notifying authorities of outbreaks, Mariner explained.
Mariner is not one to underestimate the threat of flu. In early 2006, he helped set up and train teams of inspectors to uncover outbreaks that had gone undocumented. “We thought at the time we’d find that bird flu is underreported. We never imagined the extent to which this is true,” he said. They started with twelve districts on Java, then twenty-seven districts, then the outer islands. Everywhere the teams looked, they found the virus. Even on training exercises they found it. “It’s very widespread, and it’s difficult to address the disease, since it’s in the backyard system.”
In the two months before my visit to the village of Tegal Tegu, Mariner’s teams had confirmed a dozen different outbreaks in Bali, including a pair just days earlier. Animal-health officials had burned more than a thousand chickens in a bid to contain the epidemic in one location on the resort island. Though Narti had heard about bird flu on television, she remained oblivious. “Bali is safe. There’s no bird flu here,” she assured me. Her warm eyes, full cheeks, and thick lips offered a mother’s comforting smile. “It happened on Java. The chickens that got bird flu on Java had white feathers. My chickens mostly have green feathers.”
Researchers elsewhere in Southeast Asia have found that villagers are widely cognizant of bird flu’s perils yet continue to take risks with their own backyard birds. As they have for generations, they handle sick and dying fowl, butcher and eat birds that have died of illness, and even let their children play with infected livestock. The contradiction is not surprising. For years, long before the disease struck, they have seen their own relatives and neighbors engage in these practices and rarely come to harm. As a precaution, Narti volunteered she was in the habit of separating out any of her birds that seemed sick and fortifying the rest with vitamins, including a supplement to combat depression and stress. “But there’s really nothing to worry about,” she added. “I don’t think it could happen here.”
