Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (16 page)

In 2013, a Tennessee state Republican lawmaker named Jon Lundberg tried to strengthen the state's cockfighting laws that currently make it a misdemeanor subject to a fifty-dollar fine. His attempts to put it on a par with dogfighting—a felony that involves a fine and jail time—failed. Shortly after the defeat, when I talk to him in his Nashville office near the state capitol, he is upset with opponents who argued that cockfighting is a Tennessee tradition that was enjoyed by Andrew Jackson and therefore shouldn't be demonized. “Slavery also is a Tennessee tradition that was upheld by Andrew Jackson,” he notes drily. The lawmaker worries that the lax laws make his state a magnet for organized crime. “We've created an economic draw, but I don't think this is something that we want to draw people to Tennessee.”

More than a century and a half after Jackson was criticized for his “passions,” cockfighting briefly was at the center of a bitter 2014 primary fight between U.S. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and his Tea Party opponent Matt Bevin. McConnell supported a farm bill that increased penalties for participating in the sport, a move that the president of the United Gamefowl Breeders Association predicted would “destroy” McConnell's political future. Bevin attended a pro-cockfighting rally a few months later and said that “criminalizing behavior, if it's part of the heritage of this state, is in my opinion a bad idea, and I will not support it.” His attendance and comments raised a national outcry, which intensified when a
video of a campaign talk surfaced in which he describes tying the feet of chickens and swinging them over his head as a child prior to chopping off their heads. “Sometimes a foot would pop off,” he added in a jocular tone, to the nervous laughter of the crowd.

In Manila, when I ask Luzong about New World cockfighting, he shakes his head sadly and confirms that the sport in Mexico, Colombia, and the United States increasingly is tied to the drug trade and crime syndicates, further blackening its already poor reputation around the globe. Like any blood sport, cockfighting has always been associated with men who like to gamble and drink, and as long as there have been cockfights, there have been poisons, magical spells, and any number of dirty tricks employed to beat rivals. But today, high-tech drugs and big bucks are the rule.

On the outskirts of a slum in Caracas, a gamecock breeder named Lorenzo Fragiel tells me that an unsettling change is taking place in the Venezuelan capital, which has a dozen rings within the city limits. “There's no longer a brotherhood of breeders,” says Fragiel, a lean mechanic with a bristly black mustache. “People used to keep tabs on one another—it used to be friendly.” The matches are more violent outside the ring. “There can be fights and broken glass,” he adds with a shake of his head. “There's a lot of drinking.” Ring owners charge an entrance fee and cock owners must also pay a fee per match and a fee for the referee, but the real money is in selling beer.

Fragiel keeps thirty-five fighting cocks in a spacious coop at one end of his little farm, each with a roomy cage. There is a good breeze, the floor is covered in clean sawdust, and there is no trace of the burning ammonia smell typical of most mass chicken operations. Some of the birds have livery like red jungle fowl. One variety called Bolos lacks a tail, and another—Papujos—has small feathers growing out of its cheeks. Both traits protect a bird in a fight. He has been breeding and fighting cocks since his godfather gave him his first bird at age twelve, three decades ago. “It's not a moneymaking operation,” he says with a smile. “This is a passion.”

Once he selects a potential new fighter, the bird acclimates to its surroundings for a few months. He cuts off the bird's comb so that a
rival can't grab it in the ring, shaves it so that it doesn't suffer in the tropical heat, and removes the pointy spur. When the scab has healed and the bird is about a year old, training begins in a makeshift ring in the farmyard. He gives his birds only vitamins along with the feed his mother makes every week that contains his own recipe. “Each breeder has his own diet,” he says. And he often will mix up a special feed for a bird that seems to be listless or ailing.

Fragiel uses a fighting-cock puppet to test out the bird's abilities. Later he will put it in the ring with another bird, though first he carefully wraps the beaks of both and attaches small plugs, or boots, over their sharp artificial spurs to avoid injury. Most cocks are not mature enough to fight until they are at least fourteen months old. The Venezuelan tradition is to use an artificial short spur made of tortoiseshell, a stark contrast to the wicked steel blades employed in other countries. Because tortoises today are a protected species, they use a plastic spur. He grabs one from a shelf and hands it to me. I'm surprised by how thin and light and blunt it seems compared to the lethal long metal spurs I saw in Manila. “There are so many Columbian breeders here now, that you now see more and more long spurs used,” Fragiel says with a sigh. Those matches are aggressive and bloody, he adds. Of course, matches with long spurs are also usually quick affairs that last a couple of minutes. The Venezuelan fights can go on for fifteen or twenty minutes, since it takes longer for one bird to kill another.

He pulls me over to a cage in one corner, where he is nursing back to health a black-and-white bird injured in a fight. “The career of a fighting cock can end in only one way,” he says. “Death.” Fragiel's son walks into the coop, a twelve-year-old boy clearly at home with the cacophony of crowing. “If he is interested, that would be fine,” the breeder says with a glance toward him. “But I won't push this on anyone—it has to be their own passion.”

Cockfighting's decline in the nineteenth century began in Britain as the chicken took on the new role of feeding the urban masses. Yet it won't disappear in the next century, and it certainly remains vibrant in the Philippines, Venezuela, and the backwoods of Kentucky and Tennessee. It does face a long, slow fade in most countries with
the rise of cities, the growth of alternatives like video games, and the growing awareness of and intolerance for animal cruelty. Plus, in our urban world, live chickens simply are not as visible and available. It is cleaner and simpler to let robots fight.

The ghosts of the ancient sport, however, remain hidden in plain sight in our common words and phrases. We might not be cut out for a job—a reference to a game fowl's feathers being trimmed—but we can still fight a battle royal, show pluck, remain cocky or cocksure, and sometimes have a set to. Whatever the moral or legal status of cockfighting, we will continue to guide our ships and planes from the cockpit.

6.

Giants upon the Scene

This blessed day will I go and seek out the Shanghai, and buy him, if I have to clap another mortgage on my land.

—Herman Melville, “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!”

O
rder your chicken in simple white, basic black, or in nearly any color combination. Pick your size. A Serama bantam might be only eight inches high and weigh less than twelve ounces. The Jersey Giant can top twenty pounds. Malays that can stand on your floor and eat from your dining room table can be shipped overnight. Choose your disposition, whether ornery gamecock or calm Buff Orpington. If you decide you want a good layer or fat broiler or a general all-­purpose bird, then click on, respectively, White Leghorn, Cornish Cross, or Barred Rock.

Such variety is a new phenomenon. Few Westerners took Marco Polo seriously when he described thirteenth-century Chinese chickens with hair like cats that lay large and tasty eggs. As recently as 1800, British ornithologists could count only five varieties on their entire island, and most were small, scrawny, and ill-tempered. By then, chickens had spread from their original home in South Asia to almost every corner of the world, from Africa's Cape of Good Hope to Alas
ka's Bering Strait. But the chicken was still a local bird. The fowl of the East and West had yet to meet to make the chicken of tomorrow.

Then, in 1842, Captain Edward Belcher, an accomplished explorer, naturalist, navigator, war hero, and one of the British Royal Navy's most detested men, returned to England after circumnavigating the globe.

“Perhaps no officer of equal ability has ever succeeded in inspiring so much personal dislike,” concludes the
Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography
, a source not given to exaggeration. The
Dictionary of Canadian Biography
, also a reliably staid reference, says that Belcher “suffered from an irritable, quarrelsome, and hypercritical nature which made relations with superiors and subordinates alike extremely difficult.” Sailors repeatedly accused him of harsh treatment, officers did their best to avoid serving with him, and his young wife publicly charged him with knowingly infecting her with venereal disease on their wedding night.

Belcher was from an old Boston family—his great-grandfather was a colonial governor of Massachusetts also considered ornery and vindictive—that had fled to Canada during the American Revolution. In one of those odd quirks of history, the Belcher coat of arms may have served as a template for the United States seal that won out over the version featuring a chicken. As the Napoleonic wars raged, Belcher joined the Royal Navy at age thirteen. While still in his twenties he spent four years at sea, charting the waters from Alaska to Africa as a rising star in the officer corps. In 1831, Belcher was arraigned before a naval court for sending officers out on patrol without water and threatening to shoot a midshipman in the head for not obeying a signal. The judges acquitted him.

Shortly after, Diana Belcher brought the case against her husband to civil court. A fellow officer insisted that Belcher knew he was infected when he married, and a doctor who examined her noted that she also had been beaten. A judge dismissed the wife's request for separation, but she refused to live with him again. Diana ultimately got her revenge by modeling the wicked Captain Bligh on her despised husband in her bestselling book
The Mutineers of the Bounty
.

Though legally cleared of all charges, Belcher found himself with few friends and allies in the navy's clubby world. He was sent to survey the Irish Sea, a backwater posting at a time when the British Empire was rapidly expanding. His luck changed in 1836, when the captain of the HMS
Sulphur
sickened in Chile while on an extended mission to survey the Pacific Ocean. Belcher used his remaining connections to win appointment to the post. That October, just as a young Charles Darwin arrived back in England after his five-year voyage around the world on the HMS
Beagle
, Belcher crossed the Atlantic to take charge of the 380-ton and 109-man
Sulphur
.

Crossing the Isthmus of Panama to rendezvous with the ship, he stopped frequently to collect plants, animals, and minerals, including a twelve-foot alligator. “He was much attached to certain departments of Natural History,” an officer later recalled. His cabin was like a museum. Belcher landed on the Galápagos Islands three years after Darwin, and was amazed by the ecological diversity. The captain ultimately contributed more than fifty specimens to the British Museum, the world's first national public museum. A British zoologist named a venomous sea snake that Belcher identified on the voyage after the captain—an inside joke, perhaps. It is the world's deadliest reptile. Darwin later claimed to have first identified the animal, but withdrew that assertion when given a copy of Belcher's narrative of the
Sulphur
's voyage. Among the captain's donations to the museum was a male red jungle fowl.

Belcher's surveying mission of the Pacific coincided with the start of the first Opium War against China, then the most powerful, wealthy, and populous nation on earth. Westerners were eager to purchase the kingdom's fine manufactured goods like silk, porcelain, and tea, but the Qing court restricted their business to seasonal trade in the southern port of Canton, today's Guangzhou. Chinese authorities insisted on payment in silver, but British merchants began to substitute opium grown in their Indian domains. Not to be outdone by their rivals, American businessmen began to ship cheaper opium to China from Turkey. In the late 1830s, prices for the dangerously addictive drug plummeted, enticing millions of Chinese to take up the habit.

As the
Sulphur
charted Pacific waters in 1839, the emperor in Beijing had Canton harbor sealed and thousands of chests of opium seized and destroyed. Within months, British marines were on Chinese soil. Belcher arrived in the region in the midst of the hostilities. In January 1841, two ships under his command sank a Chinese fleet in the Pearl River Delta off Canton. Two weeks later he claimed the sleepy fishing village of Hong Kong for the newly crowned Queen Victoria, and the protected deepwater port quickly became a critical naval base for prosecuting the war. The captain was subsequently part of the British delegation that negotiated the surrender under the city's high walls. In August 1842, both sides signed a treaty that forced China to open its southern ports to Westerners.

That same month, Belcher arrived back in Britain. After an absence of six years, he was forty-three years old, with thinning red hair and windburned cheeks. Despite his exploits, he would have been unwelcome in the many London drawing rooms sympathetic to his abused wife, but he did have rare animal specimens to bolster his sorry social status. He carried with him a royal gift that would alter the trajectory of the industrial world.

Exotic animals from distant lands delighted the twenty-three-year-old Queen Victoria. She enjoyed what she called “the stream of barbaric offerings” like lions, tigers, and leopards that flowed from “tropical princes.” Most of these she bestowed on the London Zoo, in Regent's Park, which by then had one of Europe's most extensive collections, reflecting the wealth and power of the growing British Empire.

She paid regular visits to the zoo. “The Orang Outang is too wonderful preparing and drinking his tea, doing everything by word and command,” the monarch wrote in her diary that May after one excursion. “He is frightful and painfully and disagreeably human.” The comment foreshadowed the controversy about evolution that would soon erupt. Darwin, who had visited the same ape, published a book on coral reefs that month, but secretly was working on a draft
outlining his radical ideas about species development that he kept under lock and key.

The queen loved the circus, too, particularly the act where a handsome American who called himself “The Lion King” whipped a beast into submission, put his head in its open jaws, and then had it lick his shiny boots. Victoria attended the show several times when it played in London. After one performance she went backstage to watch the ravenous animals feed. Domesticated animals were to be pitied but wild ones were to be subjugated.

Victoria and her young husband, Prince Albert, preferred Windsor Castle, twenty miles west of the capital, to drafty Buckingham Palace, where the surly staff did little by word and command and construction made living unpleasant. The year before, she ordered a kennel built at Windsor to house her growing number of collies, terriers, and greyhounds. Thanks to suggestions made by her clever spouse, the canines enjoyed freshly cooked food, automatically refilled water bowls, and steam heat in their new accommodations.

In late September 1842, distractions were particularly welcome. She and Albert had just returned from their first trip to Scotland and Victoria was pregnant for the third time. She dreaded the resulting nausea and the months of confinement to come. The German prince was still viewed with great suspicion by many of her British subjects. Albert, wary of her beloved governess's influence, had convinced her to send the woman into exile. She was also under pressure from the current government to halt her correspondence with Lord Melbourne, a father figure and former prime minister opposed to many of his successor's policies. Meanwhile, striking workers threatened to bring the new industrial economy to a standstill. And three times that summer would-be assassins had attempted to shoot her.

The five hens and two cocks that rolled up in a carriage at Windsor on a fall day astonished and delighted the royal couple. These were not the typical short and bony chickens they were familiar with. The birds were quickly dubbed “ostrich fowl.” The long yellow legs were bare and the feathers were a rich, glossy brown descending to an elegant black tail. They had black eyes and carried their heads held
back against their bodies. The animals were quiet and calm and regal in their demeanor, and had little in common with the scrappy and ornery British birds like the Dorking likely brought by the Romans two millennia before.

They were called, confusingly, Vietnamese Shanghai fowl or Cochin China fowl but may have been from Malaysia. Western knowledge of East Asian geography in that era was hazy. Captain Belcher did not accompany the gifts; his scandalous past may have made it impossible for him to meet the queen. Nor did he leave written evidence for the birds' heritage. He had noted in his log the purchase of chickens at the northern tip of the Southeast Asian island of Sumatra, but he had also cruised the coast of Vietnam and spent time in southern China. Whatever their source, Belcher's exotic birds formed the kernel of a flock that would transform the chicken from a minor figure in the world's barnyard into its most important.

Victoria and Albert immediately decided to construct a new aviary to house the strange birds, replacing the small and decaying structure built by her grandfather King George III, the monarch who had provoked Bostonians and led Belcher's loyalist family to flee Massachusetts. Raised on a German country estate with aviaries, the prince had brought ornamental birds with him to England in 1840 when he married his first cousin Victoria. In December, the government approved 520 pounds for a new poultry-and-dairy farm at Windsor.

The couple chose a site in Home Park, a 655-acre private retreat east of the ancient castle where King Edward III had hunted deer and Oliver Cromwell had drilled troops. The new aviary would be close to the queen's kennels and within an easy stroll to Frogmore House, the estate that Victoria the previous year had given to her overbearing mother, the Duchess of Kent. As ranger of both the Home Park and adjacent Great Park, Albert oversaw the design and construction of the structure to house the queen's gifts and other birds. “Partly forester, partly builder, partly farmer and partly gardener,” is how he once described himself. He had a practical interest in modern farming that dovetailed neatly with Victoria's love of animals.

The royal couple followed the project's progress closely. “We walked down to the Farm, after breakfast, to see where the new Aviary is to be,” Victoria wrote in her diary in late January 1843. By the end of that year, it was nearly complete. The fanciful structure was a semi-Gothic affair of elaborate gables and finials topped with a hexagonal dovecote lined with mirrors “in which pigeons delight to gaze, and before which they are constantly pruning and dressing themselves,” one visitor reported. The building, surmounted by a large weathervane topped with a rooster, consisted of a central chamber with two wings dedicated to roosting, breeding, and laying. It was a startling contrast to the small, dark coops typical of the day.

When the
Illustrated
London News
gave readers a glimpse of the new aviary just before Christmas, the reporter described the design as showing “commendable regard to the conveniences of their gram­inivorous tenants.” Spacious, dry, and warm roosts made of twigs of heather, hawthorn brambles, and white lichen emulated “their original jungles” and discouraged parasites. Heated flues running the length of the building provided warmth. Outside, a tall wire fence provided several runs for the birds during the day. Shrubs gave shade, and a veranda protected the valuable birds from chilling rain.