Cock fighting
The outlawing of certain activities sometimes actually makes them more prevalent in the underground network of arenas. The Prohibition Amendment to the Constitution certainly did this for liquor stills and moon shining. Instead of it being harder to find an alcoholic drink in the Roaring Twenties, it became a trifle bit easier, if one knew where to look. The same could likely be said of cock fights, which have been outlawed in many western nations for over a century, yet still take place in back alleys, barns and other improvised mini-circuses. Ferdinand Magellan, or at least his scribe, of which very few get any actual notoriety (including Tertius, who penned the whole book of Romans for Paul – Rom 16:22), was the first to document the ‘sport’ of cockfighting. What was then fringe, foreign, and quite literally considered barbaric, soon became a ubiquitous pastime in most of the world; perhaps because there is some trace of barbarism in all men who innately desire to see conflict played out on a stage of organic proportions, or perhaps because some saw the economic profit they stood to benefit from the gamblers on the fights, or maybe, just maybe, because every man is still a boy in some sense and is intrigued by the head-on collision of battering rams, the scowl of males wolves to achieve the first-Greek-letter status, and the thrashing of talons of untamed birds. In either case, when the first two aforementioned brawls take place, there are no PETA representatives holding signs in protest. Is this because they primarily occur without witnesses in the wild, or because they are considered natural and unsanctioned by people? If it is the first, then Discovery Channel documenters will soon be out of a job; if it is the latter, then Darwin’s principle reigns supreme – or as Richard Dawkins put it, “they are merely dancing to the tune of their DNA.” Thus, we should not need to go to the cockpits of Cuba or the hillsides of Peru to witness cock fights, but we should be letting bulls into our streets and orcas in our pools, since this would be only natural and would actually catalyze the process of nature’s selection. Of course, this is not what I am actually proposing, even though fighting cocks and battering rams and savage wolves are realities – they are realities in the animal kingdom, where they belong. Rather than set up shop (literally) to watch and bet on these scuffles, we can look with amazement that we are something more than they in a very real sense, though, a potential exists to be far worse. Finally, if one wishes to have bulls run in their street, intentionally, they may visit the Running of the Bulls festival in Pamplona, Spain, or if one wishes to swim with orca, they may become a whale trainer at Sea World – it is a strange world we live in, indeed!
