The Shape of Courage

There is a bird on the standard of the Palmetto Regiment of the American Revolution. There is a bird on the coat of arms of Paraguay, on the flag of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, on the coinage of the Roman emperor Claudius, and on the weathervane of nearly every colonial church in New England. The same bird. In every case, the bird is drawn upright — comb raised, beak open, spurs forward — in the posture of an animal that has just decided to fight.

The bird is, of course, the cock — the male of the domestic fowl — but more specifically it is the cock as gamefowl — bred across six millennia for the willingness to do the thing that the species would not otherwise do, which is to fight its own kind in the presence of an audience.

I. The Persian Original

The earliest iconographic evidence of the cock as a game animal — that is, as a creature kept and trained specifically for the purpose of combat — comes from Persia and the eastern Mediterranean in the late first millennium BCE. The Persepolis reliefs of the Achaemenid period depict processions that include fighting cocks alongside tribute animals from the empire’s subject peoples. The Athenaeus Deipnosophistae preserves a Themistocles anecdote — the Greek general, observing two cocks fighting outside his tent, exhorts his men by reminding them that these birds fight for nothing but victory — that places the cock in the Greek martial vocabulary by the early fifth century BCE.

What we see, in the earliest period, is the bird being put to two distinct uses simultaneously: the agricultural (as food, as the giver of eggs, as the alarm-clock of the household) and the agonistic (as the test animal, the creature whose courage is a mirror in which men can see their own). The second use is older than the first in symbolic terms; the cock as the fighter precedes the cock as the breeder in almost every culture we have records for.

II. The Agonistic Self

The fighting cock is, in the deep sense, the first animal athlete — the first creature whose body was selectively shaped by human hands not for food or feathers but for the spectacle of courage. The bird is bred to a quality — gameness, the breeders call it, and the word has no perfect synonym — that is otherwise rare in domesticated animals. The racehorse is bred for speed. The greyhound for sight. The shepherd’s mastiff for courage. None of these is bred for the particular refusal of refusal that the cock embodies: the willingness to fight when the body is broken, when the only sensible thing is to quit.

This quality is what made the cock the emblem of the cultures that kept him. The bird is small, common, and unglamorous — but he is game. The quality has been recognised everywhere it has been bred. The Persian cock is game; the Greek cock is game; the English cock is game; the Carolina cock is game. Wherever the bird has been selectively bred for the pit, the moral quality has been the point of the breeding, and the bird has been allowed to stand for the people who kept him.

III. The Carolina Cock

In November 1780, at the Battle of Blackstock’s Farm in the South Carolina upcountry, Colonel Banastre Tarleton — having failed to overrun the Patriot militia of Colonel Thomas Sumter — wrote to his superior, Lord Cornwallis, that Sumter’s men “fought like a gamecock.” The first half of the sentence stuck. Sumter became The Gamecock for the rest of his life, and after his death the epithet passed from his person to the whole of his state.

The Carolinian Gamecock tradition is, in this sense, a literary artefact — a phrase in a dispatch, elevated by repetition into a state symbol. But the tradition is also a bird. The American Gamefowl of the Southern pit is the cock of the Carolinas and Georgia — refined in the rice country of the lowcountry backcountry into the famous family lines of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The state bird of South Carolina is officially (since 2009) the Northern Bobwhite Quail; the state wild game bird (since 2009) is the Wild Turkey. But the unofficial state bird — the bird that has been on Palmetto Regiment standards and Carolina Gamecock football helmets since 1897 — is the Domestic Fowl — specifically, the gamecock of the old Southern pit.

IV. The Asian Foundations

The American bird is a relatively recent arrival in the long history of the cock. The Carolinian cock was, in origin, English — the Old English Game of the Stuart cockpit, brought to the tidewater colonies in the seventeenth century — but the English cock was, in turn, an Asiatic bird. The Redshank of the Whitehall cockpit was almost certainly a derivation of the Malay or a closely related Oriental import, and the Malay was, in turn, almost certainly derived from the Asil of the Indus.

The Asian foundations run deep. The Manasollasa, a Sanskrit encyclopaedia compiled in 1129 CE under the Western Chalukya king Someshvara III, contains the first systematic treatise on cockfighting known to scholarship — a chapter on the feeding, conditioning, and matching of the birds that is recognisably modern in its assumptions. The Asil of the Deccan, described in the Manasollasa and recognisably the same bird in the modern Hyderabad cockpit, is the ancestral gamecock — the bird from which most of the world’s game strains ultimately descend, including the modern Japanese Shamo (via Siam), the modern Thai Game (via direct selection), and most modern American strains (via the Shamo cross of the late nineteenth century).

V. The Cock as Emblem

The bird has been put to emblematic use in three distinct registers.

In the heraldic register, the cock appears on the coats of arms of noble families throughout Europe and the Mediterranean world — typically in a position of dignity, often paired with a motto invoking vigilance or courage. The cock weathervane on the medieval church is a Christian emblem — the bird of Peter’s denial, the bird of the resurrection morning — and one of the most widely disseminated of all religious symbols. The weathervane cock survives in countless European church steeples and in the corresponding steeples of colonial New England.

In the military register, the cock has been the regimental emblem of countless fighting units, from the Palmetto Regiment of the American Revolution to the modern crest of the USS Gamecock (IXSS-390), an Emory S. Land-class submarine tender commissioned in 1944. The choice is not arbitrary: the cock’s posture — comb raised, spurs forward — is the posture of the soldier going into the line.

In the sporting register, the cock appears on the crests of clubs and teams that have adopted him as a symbol of defiance, of pluck, of the willingness to take on larger opponents. Tottenham Hotspur, the English football club, has carried a fighting cock on its crest since 1909. The image is taken from the bird in the pen-and-ink drawing of Harry Hotspur — Sir Henry Percy, the fourteenth-century nobleman who fought at the Battle of Otterburn. The bird stands for the kind of courage that the family name implies.

VI. The End of the Pit, the Survival of the Bird

Cockfighting is illegal in the great majority of the modern world. It is illegal in forty-two of the fifty U.S. states, in the United Kingdom, in mainland Europe, in Japan, and in the territories of the United States except Puerto Rico. It is legal in Louisiana, in Puerto Rico, in much of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Latin America, in the Philippines, and in parts of Southeast Asia. The total population in which the pit remains legal has been shrinking for the better part of two centuries.

The pit has been ending for a long time. It is, in the most literal sense, a dying tradition. The bird, however, is not dying. The bird has survived the pit, in much the same way that the fox has survived the chase and the salmon the rod — by becoming the object of a different, and less mortal, regard. The Modern Game of the show pen, the Onagadori of the long-crower, the Phoenix of the European exhibition, the exhibition strains of the Old English Game, the Asil, the Shamo, the Sumatra — these are the birds of the post-pit era. They are kept as exhibition animals, as heritage breeds, as objects of aesthetic and biological interest. They are preserved in the registries of the Livestock Conservancy and the Poultry Club of Great Britain. They are still game — they still have the gameness — but they are no longer asked to demonstrate it.

VII. The Bird Remains

What remains, then, of the cock that was fought in Whitehall and in Carolina, in Manila and in Hyderabad, in Bangkok and in Manila, in Lima and in San Juan? The bird remains. The comb, the hackle, the saddle, the sickle, the spur, the gameness — these remain. The symbolism remains, in three different registers, each of which the bird enters with the same upright posture and the same defiant eye. The Pit is closed; the bird is open.

“The cock of the morning stands on the ridge of the world. He does not know that the pit is empty. He does not know that the world has changed. He crows, and the world is not the same.” — from a passage in the Senri Ethnological Studies (1996)

The shape of the cock — comb raised, spurs forward — is, in the end, the shape of courage. It is a shape that has meant something to every culture that has bred it. It means, now, what it has always meant: I am here, I am ready, and I will not be moved.