Fighting Cocks in the Campo

As I mentioned in a previous post, my Dominican family trains fighting cocks.  My first weekend with them, I mustered up my courage and went to see a fight.  When focusing on peace, violence cannot be avoided.  I want to understand how this culture experiences, understands, and interacts with the concepts of peace and violence, transformation and destruction.

Three of us climbed onto a scrap metal scooter and rode down the rocky dirt path to the fighting ring.  When we arrived, a crowd of men were already bustling around outside the ring.  Both humans and roosters contributed to the rising din in the Sunday afternoon heat.

Gladys and I entered the fighting ring, a circle of concrete benches surrounding a green pit; we were the only women present for this spectacle.  Gladys’s boyfriend Aldonis was fighting one of his roosters that day, but he stayed just outside peering in.

Hands gathered two roosters from the holding area and brought them out in rough fabric bags.  They plunged the roosters into the light and spritzed them with water to shake their senses.  Handlers roused the roosters into a fighting mood by jabbing at them and thrusting them toward their would-be opponent.  

The roosters have 15 minutes to fight to the death.  Or 15 minutes for them both to just barely survive.  

The fight was on.  The roosters circled and flew into each other and fought with their beaks and their talons.  An aggressive dance for survival.  The cock fight seemed to embody some key element of Dominican culture, some need for male violence. 

The enthralled men circled the fight, shouting bets to one another.  

Both roosters were tinted red with blood.  One fell and pelted out a heart-wrenching cry.  The other dove in and pecked the last of its life away.  Life is experienced as a fight until death, for roosters and humans alike here.    

After a valiant fight, our rooster died that day.  I looked to Aldonis, searching for any hint of sadness, but I could neither find it then nor in the evening when he ate his fallen rooster for dinner.

Although from my count the family has another four fighting roosters, it’ll be a few more weeks before they'll fight one again. Will this female gringa vegetarian peer into this male Dominican ritual again?  Likely not.  But it certainly wasn't an experience I regret having either.  I feel like I experienced Dominican culture on a whole new level.