Will the legislation on cockfighting be toughened? They are still authorized in the name of tradition in the Antilles, Reunion, the Nord and Pas-de-Calais. A bill aimed at prohibiting under-16s from attending these shows, as well as bullfighting, must be examined on Thursday, November 14, by senators. An online petition even calls for a ban on these shows deemed cruel by animal rights activists. Franceinfo witnessed cockfights in the north of France, the last metropolitan region to allow them.
Coming to bet and watch the show in Mouchin, a village in the North very close to the Belgian border, Bruno is not disappointed. “I've never seen a cockfight in my lifehe explains. I have a friend who talked to me about this and he told me it's a sick thing. And roosters, in fact, don't show any pity.” The atmosphere is overheated in the gallodrome. Two hundred people are crowded around a ring surrounded by fences. When the owners present their roosters, taken out of their boxes to the public, bets are off: 5, 20 or 50 euros on the Belgian or French rooster.
You have to move quickly, because the fight sometimes ends after a few seconds with the death of one of the two roosters. Here, the protagonists are armed. “They have a pair of heels and we put a pair of needles at the end of the heelexplains Thierry, a betting breeder from Pas-de-Calas. The spike goes into the body of the other rooster. But it’s not cruel at all.” When we tell him that the rooster is still suffering, he recognizes it. But he claims that roosters “are born to fight. If they don't fight, they will die. The blood will rush to their heads and they will die.”
What breeders call the fighting cock is also a breeding animal. There are lines, crosses and a good year of work before arriving at a fighting cock. Mateo, a young 20-year-old breeder and boilermaker, devotes all his leisure time and savings to taking care of his twenty gallinaceae. “It takes an hour and a half a day to take care of the roosters, every dayexplains Mateo. We have to give them food, we give them vitamins. Afterwards, it's the moulting period, so we take care of them. We give them vegetables that make them molt faster so they don't have pain.”
Mateo has always lived among roosters, like his father and grandfather. He shrugs his shoulders when we talk about the threats hanging over cockfighting: “We have always lived with this fear because there is always animal protection. There are always people like that in fact. So yes, it is a fear, of course, but at the same time, we say to ourselves that we've been told that for 20 years.”
With the continued decline in the number of breedings and the number of fights, or even the ban on new gallodromes, many breeders are convinced that the tradition of fighting cocks will one day stop, for lack of fighters.
