Belton Hodges has been a cockfighter for 70 years, and finds it addictive. (Paul Fraughton/The Salt Lake Tribune)

BY CHRISTOPHER SMITH
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
   
   
    BEAVER DAM, Ariz. -- Belton Hodges is a cockfighter, has raised and fought roosters for 70 years now, and he figures you formed a pretty low opinion of him and his fellow cockers even before you finished reading this sentence.
    He would like to change your mind, educate you a bit about game fowl, try to counter all the claims of cruelty by animal-rights activists, but he knows cockfighting carries an almost insurmountable social stigma.
    ``Some people see this the first time and just want to puke,'' Hodges explains to a visitor seated in the bleachers surrounding the cockfighting pit at Sierra Bonita Gamefowl Club, tucked into a canyon on the Arizona Strip about 30 miles southwest of St. George.
    ``Other people see it, don't mind it, but aren't that interested,'' continues Hodges, past president of the national United
    Gamefowl Breeders Association. ``But others see it, like it, want to learn more about it. This stuff is addictive. You find out a good rooster is like a good racehorse.''
    And on this first Friday in April, on the eve of what traditionally is the biggest chicken-fighting weekend of the January-to-June season at Sierra Bonita, the air is ripe with anticipation of competition.
    ``For us, this is the Kentucky Derby,'' smiles Dick Hatch of Centerville, one of several active game-fowl breeders in Utah who travel to Sierra Bonita every other week to participate in cockfights. ``If I could afford it, I'd be breeding thoroughbred horses. But ever since I saw my first chicken fight in the Salt Lake Valley when I got out of college in the early 1960s, I was hooked.''
    Considered one of the world's oldest spectator sports -- it's been around since before Christ's birth -- cockfighting is a simple pursuit: Take two roosters that have an innate hatred toward each other, put them in close proximity and let them battle like feathered gladiators until one no longer fights back, which oftentimes is after his last breath.
    Cockfighting has been illegal in Utah since 1888. Clandestine pits pop up in barns and canyons periodically, but citations -- cockfighting is a misdemeanor in Utah -- are as rare as hen's teeth. Still, most Utah game-fowl breeders head to this enclave in Arizona, one of only five states in the country (the others are New Mexico, Oklahoma, Missouri and Louisiana) where publicly pitting game fowl against game fowl remains legal.

A sign in the cock weigh-in booth at Sierra Bonita reads: ``Pride and Dignity: Take them in with pride, win or lose, take them out with dignity.'' (Paul Fraughton/The Salt Lake Tribune)

    But perhaps not for long. Opponents have launched a massive petition drive to ask Arizona voters in November to make cockfighting a felony and being present at a cockfight a misdemeanor in the Copper State. The campaign, which started in November 1996, is slightly behind schedule to gather 160,000 signatures by July 2 -- 112,961 must be validated as registered voters to qualify -- but organizers are confident they will prevail.
    ``If we get on the ballot, it's over for the cockfighters and they know it,'' declares James Massey, campaign director for the Tucson-based Citizens Against Cockfighting. ``We did a 600-voter statewide survey a year ago and found 80 percent support for a ban in the metro areas and 75 percent support outside the cities. There're not a lot of people who buy the cockfighters' arguments that this is a cultural tradition, that it's not animal cruelty and it's a family sport.''
    Yet those are just the things you will hear at Sierra Bonita, a nondescript compound of cockhouses and an arena owned and operated by Jack Robertson, a retired steelworker who lives in Utah County.
    ``Jack's pit has a good reputation, a place that holds a fair fight and is nice to bring the family to,'' says Hodges, who refereed a 1954 cockfight that became a test case before the Arizona Supreme Court. The justices ruled the state's animal cruelty law did not prohibit chicken fights. Since that ruling, there have been 23 bills to outlaw chicken fighting introduced in the Arizona Legislature.
    None has passed.
    ``The Legislature is irrelevant,'' says Massey. ``The voters will decide.''
    The Pits: Prior to the Sierra Bonita fights, Hodges steps into the pit and gives a brief update on the petition drive and encourages breeders to contribute money to thwart what he calls ``a one-man vendetta'' against cockfighting in Arizona.
    Later, Hodges says the image of cockfighting as a ``redneck'' sport is misplaced.
    ``This is not a poor man's sport; just look at the automobiles parked here,'' he says while lounging in his new motorhome, one of several parked in the arena lot. ``We don't fight on food stamps and welfare.''
    For the more than 80 individuals and teams registered for this two-day event -- some hailing from as far away as Alaska -- the entry fee for fighting four roosters each day is $300. If a cockfighter is lucky enough to win all eight fights during the weekend, he may pocket a few thousand dollars.
    Casual betting is legal, and prior to each bout, spectators yell out their wagers -- ``Twenty on the gray!'' -- looking for someone in the crowd willing to bet $20 against the gray rooster. Stacked to the rafters atop bleachers, the audience of some 200 people -- from octogenarians to infants -- seems a mix of the Good Sam RV and high school rodeo clubs.
    A typical fight starts with a referee telling both handlers to ``bill up,'' prompting the cockfighters to stand shoulder to shoulder, allowing the roosters cradled in their arms to rub beaks.
    The hackle feathers on both cocks' necks rise, and the chickens peck furiously at each other, sometimes missing and tugging at the sleeve of a handler.
    After billing up, the handlers back away and at the referee's command of ``Pit!'' the roosters are released. They leap at each other in a blur of flapping wings and flying feathers. Fighting styles vary from adroit dodging to no-holds-barred kicking, using powerful feet like velociraptor dinosaurs.
    While roosters have a natural bone spur that extends perpendicular from their ankles and is the fowl's most potent weapon, cockfighters trim the spurs and cover them with steel ``gaffs,'' needle-like spikes with sharpened tips. They say gaffs are used to equalize the competition among roosters, whose natural spurs do not grow uniformly.
    In the ring, the steel spurs are invisible to the untrained eye. But the seasoned crowd recognizes devastating blows amid the fury, groaning or cheering. Periodically, there is blood visible on the chickens, whose dark plumage hides wounds. Handlers hover over the warring chanticleers, grabbing the roosters when one's gaff becomes ``hung up,'' or stuck in the body of the other fowl, creating a disadvantage.
    Sometimes a well-placed strike in the head ends the fight instantly, but most bouts require several pittings, with handlers given 20-second timeouts to clean spurs or soothe roosters. Some cockfighters blow warm air on the back of the rooster, hoping to rejuvenate an injured bird.
    The battles continue until one bird no longer is ``game,'' showing no attempt to fight back. Prolonged bouts are moved from the main pit to smaller ``drag pits,'' nearby, to allow a new fight to begin.
    Invariably, the roosters demonstrate an unflagging will to fight, their brains seemingly hardwired to win. An immobile rooster, sitting squat on broken legs, still can score a deadly upset.
    ``Even when one is down and getting whipped, I don't believe he knows he's losing,'' says Hodges.
    While game-fowl enthusiasts see honor and dignity in the fights, Massey says the three cockfights he watched elsewhere in Arizona were ``a disgusting spectacle of cruelty.''
    ``One bird was badly injured so the handler picked him up, put the bird's head in his mouth and sucked the blood out of the bird's throat so it could continue fighting,'' says the retired elementary school teacher. ``Then he spat the chicken blood on the ground not eight feet from where children were sitting. It was sick.''
    Irrational Recreation: Robertson, the 57-year-old proprietor of Sierra Bonita, has been a game-fowl enthusiast since he was 8 years old and his uncle brought a fighting rooster back from Mexico to the family farm in Haskelville, a community near Payson. Weary of traveling to distant arenas, he bought an old steel building from the Riviera Casino in Las Vegas and moved it onto property he owned in Beaver Dam to create Sierra Bonita in 1991.
    The arena -- dirt floor, bleacher seating, rusty vending machines and a tongue-in-cheek sign that reads ``No Gambling or Alcohol'' -- is one of Beaver Dam's few businesses. The only other visible sign of commerce is a kitschy gas station and bar -- ``Entering Beaver Dam Irrational Recreation Area'' declares a sign over the tavern -- at the entrance to the community.
    Sierra Bonita operated quietly -- local law enforcement never has responded to a criminal incident at the pit -- until last August, when the Mohave County Board of Supervisors voted 2-1 to deny Robertson an operating permit, which he was not required to have when the arena first opened. The board made the decision in Kingman, the county seat, after receiving complaints that the cockfighting created health hazards and was attracting an unsavory crowd. The vote effectively put Robertson out of business.
    But after an outcry from game-fowl fanciers and local supporters, county officials visited the arena and held a special meeting to reconsider. After hearing a majority of the 200 people in attendance -- including several Utah and Nevada residents -- speak in favor of Sierra Bonita, the supervisors reversed themselves and approved the arena's permit.
    Robertson was pleased with the county's change of heart, but still frets over the Arizona cockfighting ban petition drive and the periodic salvos fired against Sierra Bonita.
    ``In one of the local papers they called me a separatist, claiming I didn't let the Hispanics come to our derbies,'' Robertson says, shaking his head. ``Look around you,'' he says, motioning to a bulging crowd of whites and Latinos in the bleachers Saturday morning as the first of more than 350 cockfights that day begin. ``Does this look like separatism? People will say anything, true or not, to get rid of chicken fighting.''
    White Meat: Larry Bain will tell you straight up, cockfighting is a blood sport. The Layton industrial instrumentation salesman makes no apologies that when roosters face off, chances are pretty good one of them winds up dead.
    But the past president of the Utah Gamefowl Breeders Association says he can make a good case for cockfighting. And his arguments usually come in the form of questions like this:
    -- ``Cruelty to animals is a human inflicting unnecessary pain or harm on a helpless animals and we are against that. How can chicken fighting be cruelty when it is two animals interacting the same way they would in nature?''
    -- ``Why is it that falconry, where one bird kills another, usually unsuspecting bird, and eats it, is considered the sport of kings and yet chicken fighting, where both animals are willing participants and one dies with dignity, is considered barbaric? Why is that worse than fishing with a barbed hook or hunting with a gun?''
    And his clincher: ``Do you eat chicken? Then how can you condemn me?''
    Bain says poultry and egg chickens -- which have been selectively bred to dilute a game fowl's inherent killer instinct -- live in cramped quarters before being summarily killed on an assembly line.
    In contrast, game-fowl breeders keep their roosters in individual pens -- lodging them with other cocks, even as chicks, would invite a slaughter -- feed them a champion's diet and make regular trips to the veterinarian. A 1983 survey of Arizona game-fowl breeders found they spent an average of $150 annually on each 2-year-old bird, the age that most begin competition.
    ``If parents treated their kids as good as we treat these roosters, there would be a lot fewer problems in society,'' says Hack Lauderdale, a veteran cocker from California as he lovingly strokes the iridescent plumage of one of his roosters. ``We love these birds, they're beautiful, and if he dies, I just may cry. But fighting is what he was born to do.''
    The fight-to-the-death nature of gamecocks is legendary -- during the Persian Wars of the fifth century B.C., the commander of the Athenian army used fighting roosters to inspire troops to fight not for glory, freedom or God ``but for the sake of victory, that one may not yield to the other.''
    In rural portions of the southeastern United States, when cockfights were as common as Sunday picnics, people discovered they had to take the hubcaps off their cars and pickups. Gamecocks that saw their own reflection in a shiny wheelcover would attack the image so furiously they would break their beaks or legs.
    Forced to Fight? Massey and other opponents of cockfighting contend that despite such a combat-ready resume, roosters do not instinctively want to kill each other. He claims game fowl have a ``dominant submission ritual,'' naturally shying away from another rooster, that cockfighters override by forcing the chickens together.
    ``They rarely ever face each other in nature and to say these birds want to fight, well, who knows what's in an animal's head?'' says Massey. ``As far as eating chicken, most people would draw a line between killing for food and killing for amusement.''
    The portrait of two gamecocks warring to the finish as nature intended is further skewed, Massey says, by the use of small amounts of strychnine and other performance-enhancing drugs in modern cockfighting.
    But the most glaring departure from what nature intended, he claims, is the use of the sharpened steel spurs on the ankles of gamecocks.
    ``When people discover these guys are using 3 1/2-inch razor-sharp blades on these birds, they cannot believe this is still legal,'' Massey says.
    Gaffs are rounded, tapered rods, sharpened only on the end, and come in various lengths, but so-called knives or blades are used in some Latin American countries for cockfighting, and at some pits in Arizona. There is division within the sport about whether knives are appropriate.
    ``If you start putting knives on a chicken, then I can't make the same case [for cockfighting with gaffs] because a knife does not approximate the natural bone spur,'' says Bain of the Utah game-fowl breeders, who, like most participants at Sierra Bonita, does not use the knives.
    Preserving the Breed:
    Game-fowl enthusiasts say they fight roosters not for bloodlust, but to test the progeny, to help them breed a purer strain of ``jungle fowl,'' and preserve the species. Using the motto ``like begats like,'' they seek out champion roosters, paying thousands of dollars for winning brood stock, in the hopes of hatching the ultimate wing-flapping warrior.
    ``If chicken fighting becomes illegal, then this breed becomes extinct and that is a tragedy,'' says Bruce Petersen, a southern Utah game-fowl breeder who was introduced to the sport as a boy by his father. ``A lot of people think we teach them to fight. That's impossible. It's in their blood.''
    Some game fowl, no matter how touted their lineage, simply won't fight when placed in a pit with another rooster. Although colloquially known as ``dunghill'' chickens, Hodges says not all of the pacifists face a destiny as a dumpling sidedish.
    ``Believe it or not, we do love these animals,'' he says. ``I had one cock that wasn't worth a doodley damn in the pit but he was just so likable I kept him around for nine years until he fell off the roost and died.''
    Raising them from chicks to 2-year-old cocks, many breeders become emotionally attached to the roosters yet remain committed to putting them in a ring where they have a 50-50 chance of surviving.
    ``You've got to tune that out and remember these animals are doing what they want to do,'' says Tim Fitzgerald, one of an estimated 100 active game-fowl breeders who live in the Salt Lake Valley. ``I grew up with chicken fighting and it kept me out of trouble because it takes a lot of time. Even now, I work eight to 10 hours a day, then come home and spend another four hours or so taking care of the chickens. My wife doesn't like it much, but I enjoy it.''
    And chances are, even if Massey and the Citizens Against Cockfighting succeed in making rooster battles illegal, aficionados will find a way to keep enjoying their pursuit.
    ``You name me one place in the United States where they've put a stop to chicken fights,'' Fitzgerald winks, ``and I'll walk there. It's a part of our culture. You can't stop it.''