Sabong: Blood Sport, Betting Culture, and the Limits of My Frame of Reference

There are two forms. The formal cockpit, the sabungan, operates under licence and regulation, with purpose-built arenas, registered birds, and a betting system that is supervised and taxed. The informal tupada operates in fields and backyards outside the regulatory framework, which means outside the tax system, which is why the formal version is permitted and the informal version is technically not. We went to a legal sabungan in one of the poorer provinces outside Manila, taken by a local contact who knew the place and who regarded the whole enterprise with the easy familiarity of someone who has grown up around it.

We were the only westerners in the building. The reception was friendly with the specific quality of genuine curiosity: people interested in our presence without performing that interest, helping us to good seats, explaining the rules and the betting system with patience that reflected the understanding that someone seeing this for the first time would need the explanation. The betting system operates through a network of signals across the arena, bets negotiated between individuals with hand gestures, facilitated by intermediaries in red vests who handle larger transactions between parties who cannot see each other directly. The odds shift continuously as information about the birds circulates and money moves. A man near us was managing a wad of thousand-peso notes with the concentration of someone running a complex financial operation, which is more or less what he was doing.

The birds are kept in careful condition before a fight and assessed for aggression, the more combative one selected for the ring. Curved blades are attached to one leg of each bird before they are brought together, and the fights themselves are typically brief, sometimes over in seconds, which is one of the things that makes the experience different from the expectation. The bull fight I watched in Pamplona last year was a prolonged ritual lasting fifteen or twenty minutes, the matador working the animal through a series of prescribed stages toward an execution that was designed to be aesthetically significant. The rooster fights at the sabungan are contests that end when they end, with no prescribed duration and no ritual. One bird attacks, one blow connects, and it is over. The crowd responds to the result with the concentrated excitement of a sporting event decided quickly.

I found myself adjusted to what I was watching within about twenty minutes, which surprised me. The adjustment was not ethical, exactly, not a conclusion that what I was watching was acceptable or unacceptable. It was more like a recognition that the context I had brought with me did not fit the context I was in. Cockfighting in the Philippines is not an import or an eccentricity or a practice maintained in defiance of a wider cultural consensus. It is embedded in the country’s pre-colonial history, survived three and a half centuries of active suppression, and is attended weekly by millions of Filipinos for whom it carries the same combination of sport, gambling, and community that horse racing carries in England or baseball carries in the United States. Whether that cultural embeddedness makes it morally different from what it would be elsewhere is a question I can formulate but not confidently answer.

I bet on three fights. I won one. The net loss was a few hundred pesos, which is about four pounds, and represents, I think, fair value for the afternoon.