Chicken Fighting

Recently there have been victorious accounts of chicken fights raided, arrests and EUTHANIZED birds.

Now, like most of you, I don't hold with organized animal fighting. The little bit that accidently occurs is bad enough. I do eat eggs, lots of chicken and some beef. I bet you do to. This may sound like I can't string a paragraph together, but stay with me here and reserve judgement for a minute.

In the US, we raise MILLIONS of birds for eggs and meat. Most of these MILLIONS live in horrible conditions and are badly stressed. The stress is so bad that hens are culled when they finish their laying cycle. At that time many are thin, wounded and often have broken bones. Meat birds live an even more horrible life. They are breed to mature so fast that their legs cannot keep up with their weight. Again they are badly overcrowed, stressed and then killed at 6 to 12 weeks. That's right, weeks.

So the hens make it to about the first birthday and the little meat birds might make it to 12 weeks (most do not). At no time in their short lives do they recieve decent treatment. Do some research on it if you don't beleive me.

Of course, some organic or free range egg producers do a little better. But again few keep hens longer then a year or two and little roos in a commercial production setting never see their first birthday.

Now, hobby and exhibition breeders keep birds, often for years. Some hens live to be more than 10 years and some lay, in a reduced capacity, for many many years after the first molt. Some keep a special roo as long as it lives. But even so, most baby roos of all breeds, kept for any purpose, are culled. That means, gentle reader, that most are killed.

The next fact about chickens is that roosters fight. All breeds, commerical and otherwise. Some are better at it then others. But mature roosters, of any breed, cannot, except for the rare exception, be kept together with out serious, often fatal results.

The second fact about chickens is that some chickens, again we are really talking roosters, will "fight" humans. These mean birds are found in all breeds. In fact, white leghorns, a breed heavily used to create commercial egg layers, are often considered the nastiest of roosters. Game bird roosters are no more prone to people hating then any other breed. Bird to bird aggression is no indicator of bird-human agression.

Now, consider the gamecock. His owner knows his genetic history back for generations. The bird could well represent a particular line kept in the owners family for multiple generations. The hens often run loose or in a semi free range. No one kills them when they molt. Some of the little roos don't make the grade, they go the way of most little roos all over the world. BUT A GOOD MANY get to grow up and have a life. They are lovingly cared for, protected, known as individuals. It is safe to say the greatest numbers of senior roosters in the United States belong to gamecock breeders. Hobby owners, like me, might keep a favorite rooster as a pet, but we don't indivdually have numbers of mature adult roosters.

It is nuts to say that the deplorable conditions commercial birds are kept in and the short brutal lives of most male chickens is ok, but that a three year old healthy rooster should be killed because it is a gamecock.

I think that if you asked the bird, would you prefer to be born in an incubator, raised in a box and when you are eight weeks old hung upside down and your throat cut OR born in a pen with a mother, live a bit scratching around and learning to crow, then get sent to live on a tether or in a roomy pen for a year or so, then maybe die in a chicken fight, or maybe live on to be a papa and watch the seasons change and the sun come up and the sun go down... Well which would you choose?