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get you, the snipers will.
     
    Let’s crow for Hialeah cockfighting
    April 17, 1989
    Let freedom ring!
    Three dozen men cradling live chickens appeared at the Metro Justice Building the other day to demonstrate in favor ofdon’t laughcock-fighting.
    The men were members of a Hialeah “social club” raided last week. Police arrested 186 people, seized 86 birds and grabbed $40,000 in gambling money.
    The club offers live music, rides for the kiddies and a restaurant. But the main attraction is a i^o-seat fighting pit where grownups sit and cheer while two dumb barnyard animals mutilate each other. Can you think of a nobler cause for demonstration? Raise your placards high, boys.
    How dare the police shut down such an enriching pastime! My goodness, if they strip us of our right to torture God’s hapless creatures, then what next?
    Granted, an organized cockfight isn’t really an act of nature. Under normal farm conditions, most roosters are too busy chasing the hens to stop and disembowel each other.
    But with a little human guidance and just a touch of inbreeding, a rooster becomes a ferocious fighting machine.
    I know what you’re thinking: chickens. Gamecocks are basically just chickens in drag. And how fierce can a chicken be?
    Plenty fierce, especially if you attach razor-sharp spurs to its scrawny yellow legs. These devices are made of honed steel, bone or fiberglass. The purpose is to replace the rooster’s natural spur with something slightly more effective.
    Otherwise a cockfight is about as thrilling as a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon. Without artificial spurs, the birds just hop and squawk and pull each other’s feathers out. Where’s the drama in that?
    But add those nasty little can-openers, and cockfighting becomes a macho life-or-death spectacle. In fact, matches often do not officially end until one of the two birds expires of its wounds. That’s when the big money changes hands.
    We’re talking rich tradition. Dueling poultry goes back to the days of ancient Persia and Greece, before video games, when people were forced to amuse themselves with whatever was handy. Given the abundance of chickens, and the relative ease with which they could be dragooned, it was only natural that a mindless blood sport would evolve.
    Popular among English nobility (what wasn’t?), cockfighting was soon introduced in colonial America. Among its ardent fans was the highly cultured Andrew Jackson. Always controversial, cockfighting was outlawed in Great Britain and Canada. Massachusetts banned it in 1836. In recent years, the legality has been debated from Maryland to Louisiana to Key Largo.
    In some places, cockfighting remains legal provided that the birds are not fitted with sharpened spurs, and that no gambling is allowed. This, of course, takes all the fun out of it. If the roosters can’t slash each other to shreds, and if the spectators can’t bet on it, where’s the pleasure?
    The argument from animal-rights sissies is that cockfighting is cruel, even sadistic. They like to mention that big raid in West Dade a few years ago, when police found live roosters with their eyes missing. It happens, sure, but at least they didn’t wind up as fried nuggets in a Col. Sanders
    box.
    Most of those arrested last week at the Hialeah pit were accused of misdemeanors, although a few face felony charges that carry possible five-year prison terms. In Florida, it’s illegal to promote, stage, attend or gamble on an animal fight.
    Now’s the time to take a stand against such government intrusion.Tell those pointy-heads in Tallahassee that enough’s enoughwhat goes on between a man and his chicken, well, that’s a sacred and private thing.
    And who’s to say these gallant birds don’t relish the tang of fresh blood on their beaks! Why, you should see their tiny eyes light up when those spurs are strapped to their shins. There is no finer moment in sports.
    So cheer those crusaders who carried their killer roosters to the