I’m 100% with Timex here. Cockfighting can suck a nut. It’s cruel and fucked up. I don’t give a shit if it’s culturally significant - it’s 100% wrong.
Yeah, bullfighting is pretty barbaric too.
But i think that the exceptions have generally been made for religious reasons, right? That’s why native Americans can smoke peyote and stuff like that.
For things like whale hunting, it’s allowed because it’s a fundamental food source for a native culture. They can’t survive without those resources without fundamental cultural changes.
Banning cockfighting has no such cultural impact. It’s literally nothing more than a spectator sport.
To cockfighting and bullfighting I would add rodeo. They use shock prods to get broncos to buck and put a tight leather cinch on bull testicles to get them angry.
I would also add circuses. Basically, any “sport” or exhibition where we use animals for our amusement can suck a dick.
That goes for horse and dog racing as well.
Perhaps the small local petting zoo on a nice farm can go on. And modern zoos, I think, play an important element in education, but should be highly regulated.
They’re in the USA. There is zero reason to believe someone is going to starve if we don’t allow them to hunt whales. We have more than enough food for everyone.
Yeah no disagreement there.
I don’t know that Peurto Ricans agree with that statement, and for that reasons, whatever process we have for saying yes to this one and no to that one.
And here we go… yeah everyone has their thing right? I don’t know that wrestling lambs to the ground while they’re running around being terrified is the best thing for them either, and that sure as heck isn’t done for anything but spectacle, insert sheep, goats, pigs… whatever the adults want to see the kids do.
There was process done before to allow some things and not allow others, that should just be followed, even for this.
And yeah many roosters don’t need any encouragement to fight. Those little bastards can be mean as hell, but you just wring their necks and eat em, assuming they’re not too old, when that happens.
Farming ain’t entertainment, but hunting (in the West), cock fighting, hare coursing, bullfighting/running etc is and if I ran things would be banned.
If there are reasonable food alternatives for factory farmed chicken, the choice to produce and consume chicken in that manner isn’t a question of starvation or caloric value, it’s one of “amusement”, i.e. human enjoyment of the taste of chicken.
Whatever metric you use to determine that cockfighting is 100% wrong, objectively, so too are a lot of other things.
I’m admit to being just being argumentative here. I don’t actually think cockfighting is particularly defensible, but I feel uncomfortable imposing my own cultural values on others without some additional consideration.
As humans we are allowed to draw lines, and even move them as time goes on.
At one time lots of things were allowed that aren’t now. They put cocaine in soda, but don’t anymore.
So we can decide as a society that cock fighting, while it used to be OK, isn’t anymore, but factory-farmed chicken is, even if you could make the same argument for both (but I personally think that’s a stretch).
And I don’t give a shit about the people employed in chicken fighting rings, or the money it generates. It’s like lamenting the drug dealers we want to put out of business.
Would dogfighting be OK if everyone got together to eat the tasty dog flesh afterwards?
I’m still trying to figure out why football is okay, the one that destroys brains in our species. Somehow I think I’d get a lot of push-back if i said it’s barbaric.
We certainly don’t allow duels any more, at least in the US.
So if we put helmets on the roosters and mittens then cock-fighting would be okay so long as the injuries just take longer to kill them?
Well, the football players are making a choice to do so, animals aren’t. I don’t think people would be okay with forcing prisoners to fight to the death and then eating the loser either. :D
I’m fairly sure about half the people who work in corrections would disagree.
Haha, fair point. :)
I’d question the choice piece here. You look at some of the backgrounds of some of those players, and this was their way out… perhaps their only way out. There are plenty of stories, even a recent one, about what happened to the kids that were kicked out and denied even a chance to try… and it wasn’t great. Interesting factoid, some ancient gladiators actually chose that profession too. There were many worse existences than being fed and fighting for a living back then, but I suspect we’d still call it barbaric.
We eat cows, and we eat chickens. There are plenty of people that believe the fact we eat them at all is an act of cruelty because yes, that does require killing. And yes, we have human and inhumane ways of doing that but it’s still killing.
So my point is not that I would want to watch any animal, or man for that matter, just hurt each other for sport, but that we currently have in place, today, exceptions from federal laws for specific groups often leading back to cultural links. Since we have that process, instead of Puerto Rico doing what it is doing, they ought to try that path.
I suspect the end result would still be no, and I am fine with that.
I don’t know about actual viewership numbers, but I’ve basically stopped watching football entirely in the last couple years, because of the whole CTE thing (and the NFL’s unwillingness to make any attempt to prevent or help the affected players).
I haven’t watched much in the last few years for similar reasons. That and I sometimes feel like I’m watching more commercials than game.
Adrenaline and stress chemicals make meat taste rancid.
When slaughterhouses and factory farms have large groups of spectators cheering along and placing bets then perhaps we should start comparing fun to farming?