Cockle-doo-doo-death

There are certain questions I have never expected to be asked. One of them is: 

"Would you like to go to a cockfight Friday?"

It was the specificity of the question that surprised me last week, when Fong, a mototaxi driver who drives me around Phnom Penh sometimes, asked me. This was not an abstract proposition; if I wished, I could actually attend a cockfight and no one would throw me in jail for my morbid curiosity.

And so, of course, I hopped on Fong's motorbike and went across the Tonle Bassac to an island stuck between that river and the Mekong river. With the city behind us, I prepared myself for a debauched scene. I was not disappointed.

I learned a few things almost immediately after sitting on a wooden bench a few feet from the ring, a padded cement circle underneath a galvanized steel roof propped up by wooden posts. (All with only two walls to shield the scene from the tiny dirt road running alongside it. As if anyone in the neighborhood didn't know why dozens of motorbikes are parked there everyday and men can be heard breathlessly shouting for 2-3 minutes only twice every hour.)

Cockfighting is illegal in many parts of the world for very good reasons. To witness men priming roosters into anger by holding their faces inches from each other, and then to watch them carefully tape spurs to the roosters'legs, is to watch something deeply twisted. The fighters are weighed and hefted and showed to the crowd. The ring's owner steps up and announces the fight, the cocks' "trainers" mist water all over them to cool them off for the action, and then: within three minutes the cruel duel is complete, and one of the roosters is either dead or twitching severely in the dusty dirt ring.

I'll admit the two fights I saw were exciting: What's more viscerally exciting than a fight for survival? But why anyone, save the most inveterate gamblers, would return to the scene day after day is beyond me. (Fong knew most people there, and they knew him.)

It is one thing to choose to eat chicken (or any other animal) and accept the suffering that meat-eating almost necessarily entails. It is another to entertain oneself with, for example, elephants in a circus, when it is very clear that elephants do not like being in circuses. But it's a whole order of magnitude worse to essentially force an animal to kill another in order to take pleasure in and profit from the spectacle.   

But Fong told me cockfighting is more sophisticated than simply sizing up two birds and picking one. The birds are imported from countries' around the world, he said, and each rooster's origin can be surmised from the size and shape of its head. Each national breed, apparently, has different strengths. (American roosters are particularly ferocious and victorious and are occasionally imported, he told me.)

The sport has been around in Cambodia for at least a millenium, probably a Chinese cultural import. Roosters can be seen battling each other, surrounded and egged on by men, in certain bas-reliefs on Angkorean temples. The sport's old age is probably the central reason efforts to outlaw the practice appear futile.

I can't resist one paragraph on the legal status of cockfighting in Cambodia. Conversations with Fong yielded the following bewildering information, which offers a perfect window into Cambodia's "the rule of law."

-Cockfighting is illegal in Cambodia.
-If specific information about the cockfighting ring became public knowledge, the owner of and enthusiasts at
the ring would be very, very unhappy. I learned this after taking out my camera; Fong was sure
to tell the crowd that no photos would appear in The Cambodia Daily. We all had a good laugh.
-Cockfighting is filmed and televised in Cambodia once a week.
-Nearly every bettor/spectator at the ring was a soldier or a policeman. (In civilian clothes -- except
for one soldier who walked into the hut with his rifle during the second duel and began cheering
on the action.)

The lesson here: Cockfighting in Cambodia will not be ending any time soon.