August 15, 2008
"Dogs are your friend... Not to say I don't like my chickens, but they are not my friend."
Cockfighting is now outlawed in every state in the union — as Louisiana caves to mainstream decorum.
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40 comments:
Jindal just lost the Hispanic vote.
This will make roosters unhappy. They like fighting.
Enforcement is going to be tricky.
Wow - social progress wherein informal societal norms arising from society's evolving standards of decency pressure states into uniformity without the intervention of the courts?! Well that just makes no sense. This story must be false, for I have heard it told that such things require the intervention and benevolent guidance of Justice Kennedy, that watchful black-robed sentinel who stands over American society resembling little so much as the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Soup's on!
See it's RH Hardin bait.
She does that to get you to post.
First she posts about masturbating.
Now chickens.
It's not fair. It's entrapment.
Professor, If I may be so bold to suggest that in the future any post with the word COCK in it should come with a Titus label as a matter of course.
Personally, I like to bring my cock out to participate in cock fighting.
Jindal is really ugly.
He is no Raj, from the US Gymanstics team. Absolutely love him. Raj is so beautiful. Would you look at his arms. I want to eat them. I would be so into curry if we were married.
Is "Dawn in Louisiana" meant to sound like "Morning in America"...?
Quote:
"We ain't barbaric and we ain't hurting nobody," insists Bunch's longtime friend Chris Stewart. He feels outsiders don't understand a culture that is centuries old and had been a hobby of presidents. The story is retold countless times about how Honest Abe got his name as a cockfight referee.
Yes, and US Grant used a spittoon for his chewing tobacco, TR Roosevelt went on African safaris, and John Quincy Adams loved swimming nude in the Potomac.
If any US presidential candidate did this today, they wouldn't stand a chance of election.
But what about The Diversity©? Surely we must respect and celebrate! the cultures that enjoy cockfighting?
Jindal just lost the Hispanic vote.
What's your basis for that?
The story is retold countless times about how Honest Abe got his name as a cockfight referee.
Lyndon B. Johnson was reknowned in the cockfighting world. The minute he dropped trouser his opponents would run in fear while the ladies fainted.
His ring name was Tripod.
True story.
Yep. I always thought if LBJ hadn't stopped with just showing his gallbladder scar, and had dropped his trousers all the way to his ankles, he would've carried California in '68.
Both Roosevelts apparently were similarly gifted.
We need a corroborating statement from Doris Kearns Goodwin.
A hotel where we stayed for awhile on Maui adjoined a private property noisy with roosters. My brother and I looked over the privacy fence to see what a thing looked like that kept a bunch of noisy foul. Roosters, so radical they can't be kept together, dozens were spread across the entire lawn in small separate rooster pens. It didn't make sense. Doesn't usually one rooster do, lording it over a roost of hens, blissfully laying in nests of hay? I'm fully informed from Warner Brothers cartoons featuring Foghorn Leghorn. Now I ask you, what possible reason does a person have to keep so many separate roosters like that? I must add, the people on Maui are the loveliest people I've ever met. This created a counterstereotype that has never been resolved.
Illegal or not, lovely or not, they're still going to go about their cruel business. Not satisfied with ordinary chicken talons, handlers attach razor-sharp gaffs to the legs of the radicalized birds and set them in a ring where escape is impossible.
They put steroids in their grain.
*sads*
Not just dogs, they still do this with beta splendens too. I don't see how a person can hold one of these creatures on their lap and pet it without having concern for their fins and for their well being.
This is the latest skirmish in the French and Indian War. How long can the Code Napoleon stand?
Doesn't usually one rooster do, lording it over a roost of hens, blissfully laying in nests of hay?
We need a corroborative statement from Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Jindal just lost the Hispanic vote.
What's your basis for that?
Hispanics are big into cockfighting.
Titus, is that true?
Trooper York said...
See it's RH Hardin bait.
She does that to get you to post.
First she posts about masturbating.
Now chickens.
It's not fair. It's entrapment.
It will really be unfair when they outlaw chicken choking!
Worse, I hear tell that blgging cocks will be prohibited too!
This country os going to the dogs!
Worse, I hear tell that blogging cocks will be prohibited too!
So Andrew Sullivan will be out of a job?
I do not understand this ban. I thought we were supposed to celebrate the voices, votes, and cultures of others, no matter how odious thay are.
Vicki Hearne has a couple of essays in Adam's Task, around about page 200 if you want to search for fighting, that dog fighting is not as simple as the modern narrative has it.
She comes out against it, but there's a lot of things to be said first.
I notice that Amazon in the also-bought line has ``The heart-warming story'' of Bandit, by Vicki Hearne.
Hearne is about the fiercest author, philosophically speaking, that you'll ever run into. Nietzsche maybe was fiercer. It's close.
Favorite headline NP on Drudge : Edwards Baby Denial.
Speaking of chicken fighting.
I do not understand this ban. I thought we were supposed to celebrate the voices, votes, and cultures of others, no matter how odious thay are.
Not if said voices include or are led by poor, rural Southern guys called Wooly and use "ain't" in conversation with a WaPo journalist, they're not.
Then we do not celebrate. We ban, imprison, condemn, and mock in no particular order.
Cheers,
Victoria
What about Guam and Puerto Rico?
blake said...
What about Guam and Puerto Rico?
Give them to the Russians, along with Georgia.
Simon said...
Wow - social progress wherein informal societal norms arising from society's evolving standards of decency pressure states into uniformity without the intervention of the courts?! Well that just makes no sense. This story must be false, for I have heard it told that such things require the intervention and benevolent guidance of Justice Kennedy, that watchful black-robed sentinel who stands over American society resembling little so much as the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
That was a masterpiece of sarcasm, Simon. WEll DONE! Hope somehow your sentiment goes national. For my part, I'm submitting it to Drudge as a "pithy comment" on the cockfighting ban.
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I've been at cockfights. Mainly for the spectacle and learning experience of watching Japanese, Thai&Chinese, and Filipinos go collectively nuts and the betting arcana and nuances pre-fight - which are as technical and as detailed as horse racing are the main focus of time. The fight, like the horserace, is just the fast main event to a whole evening of Asian recreation and fun. But cockfighting is more honest, I was told. Because horse races can be thrown by the jockeys, and drugs that speed up or slow down horses can not be apparant in horse movement or behavior until they actually run full out. Not cockfighting, where 100 experienced eyes guiding 600 to 10,000 betters are on the pre-combat chickens, and injuries and doping are far easier to detect in the active birds...
In Japan, it's illegal, but the Nipponese are proud of 2,000 years of breeding perhaps the best fighting roosters, and Japan had computer bookie experts looking at cockfighting spreadsheet odds "formulas" and displaying their talent, and cut, to salarymen since the 60s.
Of course, just because 3/4ths of the planet has no gooey empty-wombed women substituting their unfulfilled maternal needs on their cats, "poor zoo animals", and chickens - doesn't make it right.
The Japanese, for example, are World-Class Pervs. Rape, Bondage, and little school-girl Manga and Anime` fly off the shelves. They invented Bukkake and tenacle sex. So 2,000 years of cockfighting in Asia is not automatically "culturally legitimate".
Still, given cockfighting (and lesser animals also bet on in fights like Thai fighting fish, cockroaches, even turtles) is amongst the cleanest forms of gambling in terms of assuring betters are not cheated by insiders and misleading house odds - its global popularity outside Western "animal-lover" societies is obvious.
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CJ Sullivan at NY Press had some good reflections:
But should it be legal? Anyone who’s downed a juicy chicken leg cannot moan that the sport is inhumane. At least these birds have a fighting chance. With Popeyes and Colonel Sanders, it’s a mass-produced genocide. My argument against making cockfighting legal is that it would become the next Willimasburgy thing to do, instead of being a "naughtily attractive" illegal back-street gambling event as it currently is.
(But it should be on media) The tantalizing broadcast synergies between the Animal Planet, ESPN and The Food Network (and Hispanic TV) would raise Roone Alredge from the dead.
Here’s the best part: Cockfighting actually has the total worldwide appeal that the NBA, NFL and MLB only dream about. From Algeria to Bangkok, from Sao Paulo to the South Bronx: They’re cockfighting like crazy. It may be the one thing that Hugo Chavez and John McCain have in common. Cockfighting could unite the world.
Perhaps we could learn something from cockfighting. In a recent Forbes.com interview, veteran cockfight organizer Jose Feijoo from Puerto Rico explained that “the cock is the only animal that fights its own kind … out of instinct.” I would argue that there is another animal, which from time immemorial has repeatedly demonstrated that same instinct: man.
Why not vicariously let the cock exorcise our demons? Have we not learned from our short stay on earth that we are but bloodthirsty creatures that will erect massive cultural institutions in the service of sport, art and religion only to distract us from our violent nature? There is good reason why cockfighting has endured as a centuries-old leisure sport in the Middle East, Europe, Latin America and Asia. Those two birds allow us some relief from the savage impulses that peck and claw at our fragile self-control. Ultimately, it is a civilizing sport.
Like other invalidated old laws that forbid our natural impulses—sodomy, miscegenation, flag-burning—the ban on cockfighting must be lifted.
ricpic, Hispanics are a small part of the Louisiana population. Cockfighting is a Cajun and Creole thing here.
Beth, just to follow up, cockfighting is only popular with a tiny handful of Cubans in SoFla. Heard the older emigrés of the 60s had a cockfighting ring in Hialeah, but it was very much an underground activity.
The same snootiness about rural hicks applies to all Hispanics, save perhaps the Dominicans because it's a national sport in Hispaniola.
(Even the Mexicans look down their noses at cockfighting enthusiasts IN Mexico)
So Jindal need not worry...
VB, if he loses any vote from this, it won't be Hispanic. I don't think the cockfighting contigent is really big, but there is some tendency to romanticize cultural traditions here, so he'll probably continue to not get the percentage of Cajun vote he hasn't gotten yet anyway. I just don't see it as a big minus for him; the fact that the bill finally made it through the legislature tells me the defenders had lost steam.
It's a sad thing, really. Oh, I don't figure that the roosters should have razors attached to their spurs; there's no real reason for the losing rooster to die; but it's a sad thing for chickens as a species.
The chickens we eat are carefully bred to produce a carcass that is "full size" in about eight weeks. Much longer than that and they start to die of all sorts of physical problems, most stemming from simply being too large. Even our pretty back-yard chickens are unlikely to have the instinct anymore to hatch a nest of chicks and even fewer will take care of the babies adequately. Broody hens stop laying eggs you see.
The roosters still fight. (Do recall that Foghorn Leghorn was in constant violent conflict with that Rhode Island Red fellow.) I've had to get rid of many roosters of the civilized, non-radicalized, variety because they simply won't coexist when hens are in the mix, and my "pet" roosters just can't stand up against the young cocks.
So the young fellows go in someone's stew pot... which is fine with me.
Fighting breeds have been bred to be faster, better and stronger... to win... sort of like, oh, NATURE selects the rooster that wins to reproduce while the weaker roosters don't. The result is that fighting breed hens *also* retain all of their chicken instincts and are great mothers.
I don't care to watch cock-fighting but I can't help but recognize that this is good for the chickens, overall.
The only consolation for the chickens, really, is that LA and Florida will likely come home to "wild" chickens after people have no reason to keep anything but the ornamental sort any longer. (Sort of sucks for people having to deal with the feral chicken problem, but it's good for the chickens.)
Can anyone look at the picture of the roosters posted with the article and not be awed by how beautiful they are?
"Animal advocates" who want to stop this are like "animal advocates" who think that "animal slavery" is wrong and no one should "own" a dog. The end result NOT being lots of happy and unenslaved house pets, but an end to the animals altogether.
Because it's better simply not to be born for dogs, than to live in a house with people, be made to pull a sled, or work with police or the military and maybe get shot by a bad guy; or in the case of chickens to get to fight for the reward of passing on your genes to the next generation.
As usual, the usual suspects said nothing of import. So, it behooves me to add some enlightenment to this post. In L.A., the fascist city council has pasted an ordinance demanding that dog owners spay or neuter their pet, as well as shoot the dog up with lethal rabies vaccine. You face stiff fines, the confiscation and imprisonment of your dog, and the eventual imprisonment of the dog owner if you fail to pay the $2,000 fine and submit to the Gestapo dog catchers and vet ball removers. There will be another Waco shootout when they come for me or my dogs.
I won't submit. NAZIS!
Now you all can go back to your commercial for Dog and Cock fights. Have you no sense of decency? McCarthyites the bunch of you!
P.S. Simon, what you and Scalia know about Social Progress is truly frightening.
Yes, Ann, there is a very dark side to living in L.A. Gangs, garbage, graffiti, traffic, pollution, crime, homelessness, poverty to name just a few. See how long it take for the cops to arrive in an emergency. You focused on the pleasant touristy side of things on your recent visit to L.A. There is plenty to hate about this city if you are forced to live here. And no, I don't want to move to where racist Cederford purports to subsist and breathe. He's a vile, wild animal worse than a cross between a fighting one-eyed cock and a rabid pitbull. What scum of the earth!
As a life-long L.A. resident, I can honestly say I've been pleased with the cop's response to 911 calls.
And it was better when I lived in worse areas. Like int the Lafayette Park/MacArthur Park area, when a 911 went out, they were there in minutes--sometimes seconds. Usually in force, with helicopter. For relatively minor stuff, too, like car radio theft.
Blake,
I'm glad you've had positive experiences with 911 and the L.A. police department. Consider yourself luck; the last time I dialed 911, I kept getting a busy signal.
Dude, that sucks, sorry to hear it. Hope nobody got hurt.
Trumpit said...
"There is plenty to hate about this city if you are forced to live here."
Hah! "Forced." You choose to live there.
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