Future for Game Bird Breeder and His Roosters May Be Nothing to Crow About
“If these chickens could vote, they’d want to be here, not at Foster Farms,” Arlin Strange says as a few hundred members of the putative electorate mill about his feet. “Here they’re guaranteed two years of pampered life, and they’re looked after as individuals.”
We’re standing near the center of Strange’s 22-acre spread in the town of Hickman, which he compares favorably to the vast Foster Farms poultry factory a few miles away. Around us the roosters, each staked by a 6-foot tether to the ground in front of its own fiberglass coop, keep up a chorus of urgent crowing.
These are no ordinary fowl cooped up in tiny cages or scratching away in a neighborhood yard. Strange’s roosters are show birds, as colorful and various as hothouse orchids. As he describes his business, he picks up a compliant bird and cradles it firmly in the crook of his arm, displaying its characteristic plumage: a rust-red cascade of satiny feathers down its neck known as a shawl; a spray of iridescent blue-green tail feathers; a stance, or “station,” upright and proud like that of Chaucer’s Chanticleer.
“I’ve been raising chickens for 50 years,” says Strange, 74, depositing the bird on the ground and speaking with the fatalism of a man who considers his way of life under assault by armies of the ignorant. “That was when I went to my first rooster fight. I’ve wanted to own these birds ever since.”
He has placed his finger on the issue. Although most game birds raised in California are destined for show, breeders admit that many are sold for the fighting ring. (Cockfighting is a misdemeanor in California, but it’s legal in several states and in many countries around the world.) Public disapproval of cockfighting makes it easy to hang a wide range of other sins on the breeders. Over the years, as owner of one of the state’s largest game fowl ranches, with 2,000 birds, Strange has borne witness to many campaigns aimed at demonizing the gamecock trade as a harbor for drug dealing, cruelty and, most relevant for the moment, disease.
The spark for the latest campaign was October’s eruption of exotic Newcastle disease in Southern California. The poultry virus has led to the enforced destruction of more than 3.1 million California chickens, most of them commercial egg-layers; triggered a quarantine prohibiting the movement of chickens out of eight southern counties; and undermined a $3.5-billion-a-year industry.
The poultry industry, which has long looked down on game breeders, has been all too happy to blame them for the outbreak. “This is fighting cock season,” Bill Mattos, president of the California Poultry Federation, told me from his Modesto office, and Newcastle “is mostly spread by fighting cocks, or people who go to fights and track it around.”
Breeders consider this a prototypical industry slander. “There’s no derogatory statement that’s too bad for them to pass on to game fowl people,” grouses John “Bucky” Harliss, spokesman for the California Assn. for the Preservation of Gamefowl. Although he acknowledges that the state’s estimated 10,000 game breeders can’t compare with the commercial poultry sector -- Foster Farms alone employs more than 10,000 workers -- he argues that they make a significant economic contribution through their investments in feed, veterinary services and the like.
Harliss argues further that the game breeders have stood in the vanguard of the battle against Newcastle. As early as October, his organization began distributing warnings and advice about the disease via its newsletter. In December, the group voluntarily canceled its entire 2003 slate of poultry shows to discourage the movement of flocks around the state.
Indeed, the commercial ranchers’ rhetoric also is frowned upon by professionals charged with fighting the disease. They believe the latest outbreak originated in Mexico, where it is endemic, and reached the U.S. via smuggled parrots or free-flying birds such as pigeons.
“When there is a failure in the poultry system, there isn’t much to be gained trying to figure out who to blame,” Dr. Francine Bradley of UC Davis, one of the state’s leading poultry specialists, told me.
Strange, like other breeders, believes that Newcastle is the latest pretext for the kind of assault on gamecock breeding that can’t be thwarted by the fierce Great Pyrenees dogs that patrol his grounds by night: His enemies’ real agenda is to wipe out cockfighting.
He admires a sport that outsiders consider disgraceful and inhumane. Over his lifetime he has attended hundreds of rooster fights, he estimates unapologetically. What strangers do not appreciate, he says, is that although attaching knives and razor-sharp gaffes to roosters’ legs to make them more effective killers may be an expression of human culture (the implement of choice apparently varies by national taste), the fighting itself reflects the animals’ natural instinct.
“I’m not denying it’s brutal,” Strange says. “But both combatants are willing to fight to the death. You compare that to pheasant hunting or fishing, in which only one party is willing.”
UC Davis’ Bradley agrees with this assessment of chicken behavior. “You don’t train them to fight; they’re hatched that way,” she says. “They’re naturally pugilistic and that drive is incredibly strong.”
Strange understands that the nexus between his business and the sport is what brings him tribulation as well as profit. His best customer is a Mexican businessman who buys 600 roosters annually, presumably for fighting. The businessman comes to the farm several times a year, personally selecting 100 birds at a time and paying as much as $200 for a 2-year-old, which yields $90 in profit.
Public animus toward cockfighting has encouraged repeated attempts to stamp out all game bird breeding. As president of the state game fowl association in 1989, Strange spent months in Sacramento fighting off a bill to criminalize the possession and breeding of game birds. Right now the Legislature is considering a proposal to elevate cockfighting to a felony from a misdemeanor. (The sponsor is a senator from a commercial poultry district.)
But “fighting’s cultural ties are too strong to legislate it out of existence,” Bradley says. “And when it comes to fighting catastrophic disease, we need to know where all the flocks are.”
Strange is irked that commercial breeders don’t recognize that he also suffers economically from the quarantine and other fallout from the Newcastle infestation. “I make my living raising game chickens,” he says. “But nobody wants California chickens to cross their state lines.” Experts have told him that even if the disease is brought under control soon, the quarantine might persist for a year.
He leads me into a yard furnished with a couple of dozen breeding cages, each hosting a splendid rooster and one or two dowdy hens.
“There’s lowlifes in the chicken business,” he says. “But tell me a business where there aren’t any.”
Turning his attention to the chickens, Strange brightens up. He points out the finer qualities of the rooster, including its size, plumage and station; ticks off the pedigree of the hen; and speculates about the genetic prospects of their offspring. For the moment, economics, disease and the intolerance of humane society officials fade into irrelevance. All that’s left is husbandry.
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“This pair will make a beautiful bird, I believe,” he says.
Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. Michael Hiltzik can be reached at golden.state@latimes.com.
