COCKFIGHTING is so central to Philippine culture that Rolando Blanco, vice president of the country's Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, has little hope of persuading the government to stop it.
"How can we fight cockfighting when our lawmakers are cock fighters and breeders?" he asked.
Supporters of a ban acknowledge that fighting cocks' killer instinct is encoded in their genes, but argue that nature is more forgiving than cockfight organizers, who arm the roosters with razors and make sure they can't escape the ring. Chickens don't win much sympathy in the Philippines.
"Our laws protecting animals mainly concern endangered species and bigger animals, like dogs, cats, horses, whale sharks and monkey-eating eagles," Blanco said.
Filipinos were staging cockfights when Ferdinand Magellan came ashore in 1521, and more than 5 million roosters will clash in the country's cockpits this year, said Manny Berbano, publisher of the glossy Pit Games magazine and head of National Gamefowl Training Center.
With six national TV shows devoted to the sport, Filipinos can enjoy the carnage from the comfort of their homes almost every night of the week.
The Philippine economy benefits by more than $1 billion a year from cockfight betting, breeding farms and the business of selling feed and drugs, including steroids, that bulk up the birds for two years before their fighting instinct kicks in, Berbano estimated.
In the stands at the coliseum, bet-takers -- called \o7kristos \f7after the Tagalog word for Christ -- probably handled more than $400,000 in wagers in a single night during the Slasher Cup II, he said.
A barrel-shaped former Coca-Cola executive, Berbano is Philippine cockfighting's less garish answer to Don King. He is a cockpit evangelist with a PowerPoint pitch. One of Berbano's closing slides invokes the words of Abraham Lincoln, from a quote resurrected in 1963 in a defense of the sport in an Oklahoma court.
"As long as the Almighty permitted intelligent men, created in his image and likeness, to fight in public and kill each other while the world looks on approvingly, it's not for me to deprive the chickens of the same privilege," Lincoln told Americans demanding a federal cockfighting ban a century earlier.
Lincoln's words aside, opponents of the sport have kept up their campaign for a ban for more than a century, and now Louisiana is the last legal bastion of American cockfighting.
