Setting birds or dogs to fight each other to the death was outlawed in the first half of the 19th century. Nearly 200 years later, the RSPCA has a fight on its hands to catch the criminals perpetuating clandestine slaughter for money. Chris Arnot reports on some people's leisure pursuits
The hunting debate: special report

Wednesday January 26, 2000
The Guardian

The background scenery could be anywhere in suburban or inner-city Britain. A jerky video offers a glimpse of the neighbours leaning over the garden fence. A football lies abandoned at one end of a scrubby lawn, close to the footings of an old shed. A small child comes into view, his anorak hood pulled up and his back turned towards the middle of the lawn, where two fighting cocks are trying to peck and claw each other to death.

The date on the bottom of the screen is clear: 14.3.1999. But the location remains a mystery to members of the RSPCA's Special Operations Unit. Since more than six months have elapsed since the film was made, they can no longer bring a prosecution - even if they could find out where the cock fight took place. The video is one of several unearthed after a raid on a house in Birmingham.

The west Midlands, along with west Yorkshire and the west country, seems to be something of a blackspot for a so-called "sport" which was officially - if rather ineffectually - made illegal in this country as long ago as 1835.

It remains, though, a popular pastime in Pakistan, and there's little doubt that the Asian community has provided more than its fair share of the 62 convictions which have been secured in Britain since 1985.

But there have been no convictions among those members of the landed gentry who feel that they can carry on like Regency bucks at the cockpit, albeit with considerably more discretion. How does the RSPCA know what's going on in hidden corners of remote country estates? "We just do," says the unit's head, chief superintendent Barry Fryer, who is understandably cagey about revealing the surveillance techniques of special operations or the numbers involved.

They've had more success with raids on camps of travelling families. Five years ago, they went in with a heavy police backing and broke up a mid-morning cock-fight on a caravan site at Belvedere in south-east London. Both birds were injured and exhausted. Of the 47 fighting cocks removed from the site, 14 were already dead.

The special operations unit was set up around 25 years ago, primarily to monitor the transportation of live farm animals. But increasingly its resources have been diverted towards combating cock-fighting, dog-fighting and badger-baiting.

"It's disappointing that a large majority of the unit's time is spent trying to root out activities that were outlawed many years ago," says RSPCA spokeswoman Julie Briggs.

She is well aware of a cruel irony in all this. Some time in the 21st century it seems likely that parliament will find time to ban the hunting of foxes. Yet blood sports which were banned in the 19th century still have a dedicated following. According to one RSPCA inspector, several cock-fights take place every week in Birmingham alone.

Fryer finds it impossible to say whether activity is increasing or his unit is simply finding out more about it. "It goes in cycles," he says, "and we're getting a run of information at the moment." About dogs as well as cocks.

There have been 139 convictions in the last 10 years for dog-fighting, an activity which was also officially banned in 1835, when Staffordshire bull terriers were the most common participants.

Pit bull terriers, longer of leg and even stronger of bite, arrived in this country in the early 1980s. By 1985, the RSPCA was mounting its first prosecution of recent times for illegal fighting.

"It's now pursued only by the serious criminal element," says Fryer. "Anybody who was just playing at it dropped out after the dangerous dogs act of 1991. Every pit bull had to be registered and neutered. In theory, the breed should be dying out, but it isn't."

Thirteen heavily scarred pit bulls were recently discovered in one semi-detached house in rural Lincolnshire. There was enough evidence to confirm that they had been used for organised fights and to secure a six-month prison sentence for their owner, a 34-year-old man with the words "fuck off" inscribed into the stubble at the back of his closely-cropped head. He was given another year for breaking the nose of an RSPCA inspector and three years for possession of £100,000-worth of illegal drugs which police discovered in the course of the raid.

"A pit bull," says Fryer, "will fight, fight and fight again if it's game, whereas a fighting cock will just be used for breeding after its first year." That's a winning bird, of course. Losers almost invariably die in fights, which can last anything from 20 seconds to 20 minutes.

Sometimes they are pecked to death. Sometimes the heart is punctured by the sharpened spurs attached to the claws.

Fights take place in sheds, gardens, upstairs bedrooms or living rooms. They're videoed so that owners can show off the prowess of champion birds to would-be purchasers. The special operations unit has a stock of seized film at RSPCA headquarters in Horsham, Sussex, and grisly viewing it makes.

Here's a man in a grubby vest, on his knees in an industrial unit near Doncaster, urging on his pit bull to tear the throat out of its opponent. There a couple of rock partridges with sharpened beaks on a plastic sheet laid down to keep splashes of blood off the ghastly carpet beneath. There again, two men in a shed in Derbyshire taping spurs on to their birds to the accompaniment of background laughter.

Every now and then, it becomes evident that somebody - a child, perhaps - has tried to tape over part of the video. A particularly gruesome scene is suddenly interrupted by an almost surreal burst of Del Boy and Rodney in Only Fools And Horses.

Comedy and cruelty, fiction and fact, sharing the same jerky video that could have been recorded anywhere in suburban or inner-city Britain. Or even a country estate.