Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 11, 1991 TAG: 9102110344
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A4 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: OVERTON McGEHEE RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH
DATELINE: RICHMOND (AP) LENGTH: Long
Many of the White Hackles, Brown Reds and Irish Greys fighting in Virginia today are the descendants of champion roosters from Colonial Virginia.
Sometimes sold for as much as a slave, those celebrity roosters of Colonial times won money and prestige for their owners by killing every foe they encountered.
The debate over the morality of cockfighting is nearly as old as the practice, but has been far less conclusive than the bouts between roosters.
The latest round of the debate will take place this month in the courts of Bedford County, where 47 people face charges from a raid on a recent cockfight.
The Continental Congress said on Oct. 20, 1774, that (we) "discountenance and discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horse racing, and all kinds of gaming, cockfighting . . . and other expensive diversions and entertainments."
The earliest objections to cockfighting in Virginia and the other colonies were directed at the gambling on the matches, not at the actual fighting.
Those objections stand in Virginia law today. It is illegal to bet on a cockfight or to charge admission, but nothing explicitly outlaws breeding and training gamecocks and watching them fight.
Yet many believe that cockfighting is cruel and may be illegal on those grounds. In Bedford, eight of those arrested were charged with cruelty to animals because undercover agents say they were the ones handling the fighting roosters.
In a 1987 case in Hanover County, General District Judge J. Peyton Farmer ruled that cockfighting does not fall under the statute against cruelty to animals.
"Don't ask me about cockfighting," said Hanover County Commonwealth's Attorney Douglas Barry, who found the case frustrating.
`The judge pretty much said that if you can take a chicken in off the farm and cut its head off and put it in the oven, you can take it out and fight it," Barry said. "It's a farm animal, not a pet."
Doug Shaw of the Lynchburg Humane Society disagrees with the Hanover ruling.
"To me, the statute regarding cruelty to animals seems to fit cockfighting pretty well," Shaw said. "The Lynchburg Humane Society, along with many other humane organizations, is outraged at the thought of activities such as cockfighting and dogfighting.
"We firmly believe that these activities, while being known as sports, are nothing short of being cruelty to animals."
The president of the Virginia Gamecock Breeder's Association has little patience with humane societies.
"Roosters fight because they want to," Clay Brittle Jr. said. "You have to make a bull fight, but there is no living human being that can make a rooster fight if it doesn't want to.
"What is cruel about dropping two of them down and letting them fight?"
Many Virginia gamecock growers say there is much more cockfighting in neighboring states than in Virginia. Some say most of the activity in Virginia is in the horse country of the northern Piedmont and in Southwest Virginia.
Brittle, who lives in Loudoun County, said cockfighting is not confined to any part of the state.
"Let's just say it's going pretty good in Virginia and in the United States," Brittle said.
When Robert Kinchloe was fighting roosters in the 1940s and 1950s, he kept his chickens out on a farm part of the year, so they would have the exercise of flying up into trees.
"That was called a country walk," said Kinchloe, a retired Crewe businessman. "Then I would put them in conditioning pens I had built."
One of Kinchloe's methods of strengthening the rooster's legs was to walk them sideways on an old car seat. Another was to bury grain under straw so the roosters would have to scratch harder to get it out.
"They would cluck for the hens to come, and then they would scratch even harder to get the grain out to the hens.
"Every few days, you'd let a couple of them fight with muffs on, just for exercise."
Kinchloe would order chicks or fertilized eggs from gamecock magazines, such as Grit and Steel.
He fondly remembers the Red Quills, the Irish Greys and the Old English Black Breasted Reds.
"They say it's in your blood," Kinchloe said of cockfighting. His grandmother told him that the strain of gamecock called Crippled Tony was named for one of his ancestors, a breeder who had been injured as a boy when he was thrown from a horse.
Richard Powell of Williamsburg is researching cockfighting history in Virginia for a book. He discovered that the activity has attracted participants from all social classes in Virginia for about 300 years.
In Colonial times, planters, small farmers and even slaves would gather for cockfights, each in the fashion befitting their society.
"You find some illustrations of slaves and white men at the same cock pit," Powell said. "Even if the slaves were the handlers for the white men, that was as prestigious as handling the race horses."
Powell, a master's candidate in American studies at the College of William and Mary, is particularly fascinated by the breeding of gamecocks.
"It was financially desirable to keep careful records and selectively breed gamecocks," Powell said of colonial planters. "What I'm suspecting is that the wealthy families eventually were able to apply what they learned from gamecock and horse breeding to cattle and other kinds of livestock."
The Cocke family of Surry County kept meticulous breeding records in the late 1700s and early 1800s.
"The Cockes had a rooster called the Drunken Blacksmith," Powell said. "I imagine that's because he shifted, reeled and then hit hard."
Colonial Williamsburg has a gamecock that struts around the windmill, pecking at grain and representing his fierce Colonial forebears for tourists. "He'll walk around children and not bother them," Powell said. "But a couple of weeks ago he tried to fight three turkeys through a wire cage."
by CNB