HAWKINS: Roosters crowing in the post office, really?
The other morning I was standing in line at the post office on Texas Avenue and I heard something curious — roosters crowing.
As the line got longer, other customers were wondering what the strange noise was.
“Is that someone’s ring tone?” one lady asked.
I shrugged and the crowing continued about every three minutes.
Finally a guy in line piped up and asked one of the clerks, “Do you have live roosters back there?”
“Yes, they’ve been crowing all morning,” she answered, adding that the cock-a-doodle-do was in fact driving them all crazy.
She went on to say that there were not one, but six roosters that had been delivered to the post office and they were packed in crates waiting for someone to pick them up.
It turns out roosters aren’t the only critters that travel via the USPS. Folks can mail small reptiles, bees, and several types of poultry including chickens, pheasants, quail and yes, roosters.
“You wouldn’t believe what we get up here – you’d be surprised,” the clerk told me.
But all that crowing reminded me of something roosters are often used for in the rural parts of Texas: cockfighting.
A few years back, I had the occasion to interview a guy in Comanche County who was hanging up his “rooster spurs” after the U.S. Humane Society ordered him to shut down his cockfighting school. The “School for Beginning Cockers” located in Blanket about 85 miles south of Abilene, was the last one in the nation.
Mike Ratliff, who was 83 at the time, said he taught the basics of care, breeding, feeding and culture of “game fowl” and did not refer to his school as a cockfighting school. At the time he lamented “there was nobody to take my place,” in the business of training roosters.
Cockfighting is a centuries-old activity that involves birds or roosters that have been trained to fight. Their legs are fitted with sharp weapons such as blades or gaffs - sometimes in place of a rooster's spur, a bony protrusion on its leg. Matches are usually fought to the death and spectators like to gamble on the birds during the events otherwise dubbed “derbies.”
The fact is, cockfighting is illegal in all 50 states. But as it turns out, it’s not illegal to raise the birds as long as the authorities know they are not being raised to fight. But in 2006, the Humane Society was adamant about shutting his place down.
“We don't have schools for drug running or organizing a prostitution ring, and we shouldn't have a school for cockfighting,” said Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of The Humane Society of the United States, said in 2006. “It is a relief that this so-called school has closed, but we are still dealing with the ‘graduates’ of this program who are engaging in their criminal conduct throughout the country.”
A piece in the Texas Tribune a couple of years ago proclaimed that even though cockfighting is illegal, you can still find remote locations throughout the state where cockfighting is alive and well.
I called Ector County Sheriff Mark Donaldson to see if his office gets calls on what has been called a “blood sport” or what Ratliff calls “the sport of kings.”
“We get reports of them (cockfights) periodically,” Donaldson told me. “It is usually way out in the county.”
Back in 2009, the Odessa American reported 84 were arrested after a raid on a cockfighting ring in Martin County. A couple of the guys arrested three years ago apparently got their feathers ruffled after their arrest saying they were just engaging in sport they loved.
Midland had a big crack down about a year ago when nine men were arrested at a cockfighting match.
The Texas Legislature made the laws a little tougher in 2011, charges can be made related to raising roosters to fight. And, those who are only guilty by association can also be arrested.
Back in 2006, Ratliff declared that the sport would not go away, and judging from recent events around here, he was right.
“Cockfighters are here forever,” Ratliff said in 2006. “The only thing the Humane Society can do is kill the people and the chickens.”
