Sabong: An Afternoon at the Cockpit

We were the only westerners in the building. The reception was friendly in the way that genuine curiosity is friendly, the other spectators interested in our presence without being performative about it, helping us to good seats with the practical hospitality of people who want the visitors to see the thing properly. The men who handled the betting explained the system with patience, which I appreciated because the system is not simple. Bets are made across the arena using hand signals, negotiated between individuals, with intermediaries in red vests who facilitate larger wagers between parties who don’t have direct sight lines. The odds shift constantly based on the perceived condition of the birds and the money currently in play.

The birds themselves are kept in careful condition before a fight, fed and handled and assessed for aggression, the more aggressive one selected for the ring. Small curved blades are attached to one leg of each bird before the fight begins, and the fights themselves are typically brief, which is one of the things that makes the whole experience stranger than expected. There is no prolonged suffering in the manner of the bullfights I watched in Pamplona, where the ritual requires the bull to be killed slowly and publicly over a period of fifteen minutes while the crowd observes the matador’s technique. The rooster fights last seconds in most cases. One high kick, one connecting blow, and it is over. The crowd responds to the result with the same compressed excitement that any sporting crowd produces when a contest is resolved quickly and decisively.

I found myself, within about twenty minutes, entirely adjusted to what I was watching, which surprised me. The adjustment was not an ethical position so much as a recognition that the context was different from the one I’d brought with me. This is not a European sport being observed by a European. It is a practice embedded in Philippine culture for centuries, predating Spanish colonisation, and the relationship the spectators have with it is not the relationship of people watching an act of cruelty but of people watching a contest, with money on it, that involves animals they have raised and trained and care about in a specific way that doesn’t map onto the categories I arrived with.

Whether I would reach the same conclusion watching it a second time, or a tenth, I can’t say. What I can say is that the Pamplona bullfight produced in me a discomfort that didn’t leave for several days, and the cockfighting arena produced something different: a feeling of being genuinely outside my frame of reference without being able to claim that my frame of reference was the correct one. Travel produces this experience fairly regularly. The question is what you do with it, and I’m not sure I have an answer that satisfies me.

I bet on three fights and won one. The net loss was a few hundred pesos, which is a reasonable price for an afternoon of genuine bewilderment.