The arena is crowded, smoky and loud. A din of shouting and cheering rises and falls, punctuated now and then by the crowing of roosters. Fluorescent lights, not all of them working, hang from a low, yellow particleboard ceiling. Light snow is falling inside, and it takes a moment to realize that it is comprised of finely chopped chicken feathers rising from a small cock pit in the arena's center. There, two roosters-one a deep rusty red, the other a muted gray - rise in a flurry of wings and shuffling feet, flailing under the watchful eyes of their handlers and a referee. The birds come down, tangled like boxers in a clinch, and fall as one on their sides, still flailing, as the crowd cheers.

"Handle!" Yells the referee, but it is nearly impossible to hear him. Each handler takes hold of “his” bird. The red rooster's gaff - a thin, curved, 2-inch spike attached to the rear of each bird's leg - has sunk deep into the gray rooster's thigh, and the red bird's handler reaches in and works it loose. Each man picks “his” rooster up for a 20-second break. The referee scrapes two lines in the clay with the stick he carries and yells, "Pit!" Each man sets “his” bird behind one of the lines and let go.

"Eat him up, red roostah!" Yells a tall, skinny 14-year-old with a growling rasp of a voice in the second row of the bleachers. He is settling into his seat, holding a hamburger from the busy concession stand at one end of the arena. The birds rush at each other, flailing and shuffling, their wings making sharp snapping noises.

They tangle once more, and this time the gaff is hung in the gray's wing. The handlers disengage the panting birds and the referee points them toward one of three adjacent drag pits. The fight will finish there, clearing the main pit for a fresh pair. High turnover, which keeps the cheering and betting levels high, is the aim. Blood drips from the gray rooster's leg, as the men and birds leave the main pit.

Cockfighting is a centuries-old blood "sport" in which two or more specially bred birds, known as gamecocks, are placed in an enclosure to fight, for the primary purposes of gambling and entertainment. A cockfight usually results in the death of one of the birds, sometimes it ends in the death of both. A typical cockfight can last anywhere from several minutes to more than half an hour. Winners as well as losers suffer severe injuries including broken wings, punctured lungs, and gouged eyes.

The fact that some people still take pleasure watching two animals forced to fight for their lives in a pit, so they can gamble on the outcome, says something very clear about the chances for a revolution in the way humans seize other animals. It is not just about the people directly involved in Cockfighting.
It says something about the society that tolerates it.

You can’t seriously discuss how to end speciesism while even cockfighting still exists.
It is not that cockfighting is worse or more important than any other exploitation industry, however it is obvious that from society point of view, cockfighting is much less accepted. Compared to the dairy industry which most humans don’t understand or don’t even know about the resistance to it, most humans are against cockfighting.
The conclusion is that even when most of the public is against an exploitive industry, like in the case of cockfighting or bullfighting, Rodeo, modern slavery and etc, it doesn’t matter. It is not enough.
The world is changing because of economic and political reasons.
Not because of moral reasons.

Cockfights, Bullfights and dogfights still exist, in spite of the campaigns that the animal rights organizations run against them for decades, and in spite that most humans are against them.
And if this is not enough for a little and publicly unaccepted industry such as cockfighting, when will the broiler industry, which is more than 50 billion suffering animals per year industry, ever stop?

If you keep fighting in conventional methods - Never!