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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: March 2008

Cockfighting remains implicated in spread of H5N1 avian flu

 

SAN JUAN, Bhubaneswar --Avian influenza may bring the demise of cockfighting faster than animal advocacy in cockfighting strongholds from Puerto Rico to rural Orissa state, India--but only if governments hold cockfighters to the same restrictions as other poultry farmers.

More than 100 New Year's Day 2008 cockfights were cancelled in Puerto Rico after bird imports were suspended due to an outbreak of the avian flu H5N2 in the Dominican Republic. H5N2 is a milder cousin of H5N1, which has killed more than 225 people worldwide since 2003.

The rapid spread of H5N1 through Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, was linked to the traffic in gamecocks, which remains a major suspected H5N1 vector, along with traffic in falcons, but commerce in live poultry for human consumption became the most often implicated source of H5N1 after the disease hit commercial poultry flocks.

Puerto Rican agriculture minister Gabriel Figueroa halted bird imports from all nations, not just the Dominican Republic, because of the possibility that the Dominican outbreak originated elsewhere.

"The matches were already organized, and people had already requested their visas and made hotel reservations," Puerto Rican government cockfighting director Carlos Quinones complained to Laura N. Perez Sanchez of Associated Press. Puerto Rican cockfighting involves about 50,000 human participants, 100,000 cockfights, and attendance of 1.25 million spectators per year, according to uinones' office, which puts the economic value of cockfighting to Puerto Rico at $400 million per year.

The numbers are questionable, projecting average expenditure of $320 per person per cockfight seen. Cockfighting is nonetheless so politically entrenched that the Puerto Rican legislature responded to the U.S. abolition of legal cockfighting by passing a bill defining the opportunity to participate in cockfights as a "cultural right."

In Orissa, meanwhile, and other Indian enclaves of cockfighting, participants elude prosecution by staging fights in temples under the pretext of sacrifice. Political cover tends to come from local district committees of the Hindu nationalistBharatiya Janata Party--which is ironically also the party of People for Animals founder Maneka Gandhi.

Mrs. Gandhi served five years as the first Indian minister for animal welfare when the BJP controlled the Indian parliament early in the current decade, but eventually lost her ministry due to pressure from a coalition of biomedical researchers and practitioners of animal sacrifice.

A January 2008 outbreak of H5N1 in West Bengal near the Orissa border was declared contained in early February, after about 3.4 million chickens and domestic ducks were culled, but the cull was subverted by villagers who bootlegged so many birds to market before they could be killed that the price of poultry fell by half.

Another 2.1 million chickens were believed to be at risk in Orissa, Assam, Bihar, and Jharkhand states, but Orissa balked at ordering a cull, after Veterinary Officers Training Institute officer-in-charge Ramakanta Mohapatra reported that the 900,000 chickens said to be at risk in Orissa included 10,000 to 12,000 gamecocks.

Orissa minister for fisheries and animal resource development Golak Bihari Naik told The Hindu that the gamecocks are the "life and pride" of rural tribal families.