Cock a Doodle Doo!

Alright, the inspiration for this next post literally stems from outside my home office window, just beyond the 12 foot concrete wall topped by some nasty looking rusty barb wire. Each morning generally too early for civilized people to be awake, a cacophony of rooster crows fills the air. For those of you who do not know, Manila is quite an urban setting and actually has a population around 20 million people. Thus the idea of hearing roosters crow in such a setting might be a little odd. Much like your neighbor in New York City raising his own chicken in his kitchen. Anyway, after a little investigation I discovered that the explanation for the roosters was certainly not for any agrarian purposes, but rather for good old fashion cock fighting. Apparently there is a rather large cock fighting area right outside of the aforementioned 12 foot high concrete wall, and the gentle people who reside their actually breed them, and can make quite a good living doing so. Even by American standards. So having placed that little nugget in my head, and perhaps using the fact that I live near a cock fighting pen as an anecdote at a party on an occasion or two, I generally forgot about it. Not to mention having lived in New York and now Manila for that matter, I am now immensely proficient at ignoring the load sounds associated with large metropolises . . . albeit crowing roosters in this case.

Well, after several trips, outside of the Philippines, months later I was walking to work and I noticed a rather odd sight. Outside of a 7-11 was a rather large, proud looking rooster tied to a street sign. Admittedly, on my first encounter I did not see him at first, and only seeing him out of the corner of my eye this awkward creature scared the bejesus out of me. Having recovered from my shock I just chalked it away as one of those things that you see in developing countries. In fact I am no stranger to seeing chickens walk around in Asian cities, just this one struck me as odd. So anyway after several days of walking to work each morning, as I walked by the 7-11 I saw the same proud looking rooster tied to the same street sign. Curious one morning as I bought a Coke Zero (My “Juice”) I asked the cashier who did the rooster belong to. She told me some name Rudolpho, and kinda left it at that.

Intrigued I did some investigating over the next several days and discovered that the poor rooster was from the general area right near my apartment, and was actually a pretty proficient cock fighter in his own right. He always seemed to have a rather calm demeanor to me and generally did not strike me as a killer, but there you go. He is apparently a type of breed from the United States which here is affectionately called Texas. I have since learned that apparently American roosters are coveted for cock fighting. I assume that this stems from a combination of features making them perfectly engineered for fighting rather than indicating a rather inherent bellicose nature of the country from which they come. A quick google search yields several results for breeders selling big muscular roosters in many cases for a sizable amount of money. The add at the following link is asking $5000. (http://www.sulit.com.ph/index.php/view+classifieds/id/1864735/fighting+cock,+manok+pang+sabong,+texas.) In the Philippines that is quite good money when you think that a good salary here would be like $12,000 per year.

Cock fighting in general is quite prevalent here, and I discovered yesterday that they even have a season just like baseball, basket ball, or football. They even show it on television, and I must say that it is not something that translates well on the medium. The few matches I have seen basically involve a bunch of men standing around a pit, while two chickens flap their wings vigorously, and claw at each other for a few moments until one or the other stops moving. The other option is that one comes close to stopping to move and some gentlemen comes in and finishes the job off.

Now while I have yet to figure out what the name of the rooster is, I decided to take my camera to work and snap a picture of the rooster. He has been there almost every morning on my way to work for the last few weeks, which either means that he is really good at his job or he has not fought in a while. I suppose if he is not there we could only assume that he might have not been so lucky one evening. But at least he will be immortalized to the three to four people who actually read this blog.