A COMMON reaction to the criticism of cockfighting is a seemingly unassailable retort: ‘You eat meat, don’t you, you do?’ But eating meat does not invalidate concern for deliberate animal suffering. I wonder what their go-to question for vegans would be: ‘How are you still alive?’ This is not an argument. It is a distraction. It brings up a deep problem: the tendency to collapse all acts involving animals into the same ethical category that, in turn, allows people to evade more uncomfortable questions about the kind of cruelty we are willing to tolerate and why.
This line of defence is not merely tired; it is intellectually lazy, too. The difference lies in the intent and the process. The core issue with cockfighting is why people are still defending the deliberate staging of animal death for entertainment. The moral dilemma of meat consumption is real and industrial animal farming warrants serious criticism. This is one of the most common and major issues that activists and critics raise worldwide. Industrial animal farming is one of the most violent, exploitative systems built on mass suffering, ecological collapse and the mechanisation of death. Animals are confined, mutilated and slaughtered at immense scales, often with little regard for their sentience. This system demands urgent, sustained transformation. The world food consumption chain has entirely changed after the industrial revolution, which multiplied cruelty, a challenge that we, as the supposedly most intelligent species, are struggling to tackle.
In animal fighting, animals are specifically bred to fight and mutilate each other and, finally, one kills the other for human entertainment. They both may also die. The cognitive dissonance that most people feel and probably try so hard to avoid subconsciously lies in not merely the contradiction of eating and protecting animals but the logic that tries to equate a morally complex survival practice with a bloodsport that has hardly even been in need.
A typical game of cockfighting involves two gamecocks armed with blades tied to their legs. The blades may be knives or gaffs, curved, razor-sharp steel weapons designed to slice through flesh and bone. These blades are so sharp and dangerous that bird handlers have accidently been killed by their own birds.
Steroids and stimulants may be administered to enhance aggression. Placed in the fighting pit, the birds do not fight the way they do in nature. Natural skirmishes between cocks over territory or food rarely end in serious injury. But in the gaming pit, death is the goal. The style of knife often determines both the duration of a fight and how long it takes the losing cock, and even the winning one, to die. The birds are hacked and torn apart. The winner is often only marginally less mutilated than the loser. The details are grotesque. Knife fights can end in ten minutes, with both birds dying. Gaff fights are slower — lasting 30 to 45 minutes — because they produce internal punctures rather than external slashes. Either way, the outcome is prolonged suffering. If a fight drags on too long, it’s moved to a ‘drag pit’ so the schedule of death can continue uninterrupted.
Why do people justify cockfighting at all? If it is so obviously cruel, why does it persist? The answer lies in how the human mind deals with discomfort and contradiction. Social psychologists call this ‘moral disengagement,’ a process by which people convince themselves that unethical behaviour is acceptable under certain conditions. In the case of animal fighting, this usually involves a cocktail of excuses: ‘It’s tradition,’ ‘These animals are born to fight,’ ‘It’s part of our culture,’ or the hollow ‘It’s no worse than slaughterhouses.’ Each claim serves a purposeÌý —Ìý not to explain, but to deflect.
And, not everyone engages from a feeling of cruelty when something keeps getting pushed into a place for centuries. Often, they emerge in response to cognitive dissonance, the inner conflict that arises when people sense a clash between their values and their actions. Instead of confronting this discomfort, many choose to resolve it with a moral disengagement, a coping mechanism to silence the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, without having to change the behaviour.
This deflection is often reinforced in group participation. Cockfighting rarely happens in isolation. It is communal. When cruelty is socialised, it begins to feel less cruel. The betting, the cheering and the structure — all of it — creates a spectacle that masks the underlying violence. Alarmingly, some of the most ardent defenders are not unaware of the suffering involved. They are no longer moved. And, that is the real danger: the normalisation of suffering, when ritualised.
Cockfighting, as a practice, has existed for as long as humans have sought thrills through orchestrated violence. Roman mosaics immortalised it. Roman mosaics from Pompeii depict roosters squaring off in organised battles. In Tudor England, royal endorsement elevated the bloodsport into something of a noble pastime. Henry VIII and James I were both known as ‘cockers.’ The colonial enthusiasm for cockfighting in British North America, especially in 1750–1800, reflected a broader tendency among settlers to mimic English aristocracy.
Cockfighting is not the only form of ritualised animal violence that hides behind culture. Bullfighting in Bangladesh, Spain, India and parts of Latin America similarly masks cruelty in the pageantry of tradition. Dressed in regal costumes, matadors ceremonially stab bulls weakened by prior injuries, often to the cheers of thousands. In dog fighting, especially prominent in underground criminal circles, dogs are trained to attack until they or their opponent are incapacitated. In all the cases, the animal is reduced to a vessel for human aggression, pride or profit.
What justifies this? Supporters reach for claims of ‘tradition,’ ‘pride’ and ‘culture’, which are hollow refrains to bestow legitimacy on the sport. What unites the practices is not tradition but ‘entitlement,’ the belief that animals exist to serve human impulses, no matter how brutal. And when people argue that the sports are ‘part of our identity,’ what they often defend is not heritage but the right to remain unexamined.
And the question remains: if one is going to take an animal’s life, should there not be a purpose beyond amusement and gambling? In cockfighting, death is the spectacle and cruelty is the method. We are not talking about food production or survival. We are talking about choreographed suffering for ‘sport.’
This dissonance, between the supposed dignity of tradition and the reality of gratuitous cruelty, reveals more about human psychology than it does about culture. It speaks of our capacity to normalise violence when it is ritualised, distanced or embedded in community identity. When a practice is inherited, it becomes insulated from moral scrutiny. But longevity does not equate with legitimacy. If it did, we would still be justifying slavery, child labour or public execution.
Records tell us that even centuries ago, people questioned these forms of cruelty. By the 1830s, cockfighting had begun to be seen in many parts of the world as distasteful and barbaric and was being denounced as inhumane. Thinkers increasingly called for compassion towards animals and over time, the practice was banned or pushed underground. Today, such practices are not only condemned but also outlawed in many countries. In Bangladesh, the Animal Welfare Act 2019 includes this shift. The legislation criminalises all forms of animal cruelty, including animal fighting. It specifically prohibits unnecessary pain, suffering or harm to animals; and, cockfighting or any staged brutality where animals are forced to fight squarely falls into this scope.Ìý
Yet, the practice continues. Organisers speak proudly of the legacy and crowds gather, sometimes with children, to bet, cheer and watch animals bleed. In these clandestine corners, morality is suspended in favour of adrenaline and cash. The message this sends out to younger generations — violence can be fun, tradition justifies all, and empathy is weakness — is corrosive. To condone such practice is not merely to allow animal cruelty. It is to celebrate it. And when cruelty is celebrated, it never stays confined to animals. Tolerance of violence against animals often overlaps with broader social desensitisation to violence in general, even against humans. The cost, therefore, is not just ethical but social.
Cockfighting, or any ritualised cruelty marketed as sport involving animals, is not a tradition worth preserving. It is a ritual of pain dressed in pride. And the sooner we confront it for what it is, the closer we come to becoming a society that respects life, any life, as tolerating such violence also have broader consequences. Research has consistently showed links between animal cruelty and other forms of societal harm. The normalisation of cruelty, when taught to children, erodes empathy. When young people grow up witnessing animals tortured for sport, the line between acceptable and unacceptable becomes dangerously blurred.
What is needed now is a strict enforcement of the law and a cultural and psychological reckoning. We must ask: what kind of society do we become when suffering is recast as sport? What values are we reinforcing when we cheer as two animals destroy each other for our entertainment? And what does it say about our moral development when we cannot abandon even the most indefensible of traditions?
There is nothing noble about forcing two animals to kill each other for spectacle. And there is nothing culturally sacred about gambling on their death and pretending that it is about heritage. Cultural strength lies in the ability to evolve, to leave behind what no longer serves the moral health of a society.
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Rafia Tamanna, an environmental and rights advocate focused on human, non-human and ecological justice, is an editorial assistant at ¶¶Òõ¾«Æ·.