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Carlos Dews was brought up in a poor area of rural east Texas, travelling every weekend to cockfighting tournaments across the southern states. 鈥淚 remember,鈥� he says, 鈥渓imp necks and the lifeless swaying heads of beautiful birds as they were carried by their feet to barrels for burning. I was told not to cry, not to remember these things. But we always remember what we鈥檙e told to forget.鈥�

Carlos鈥� father was in his day a great champion, twice winning the title 鈥楥ocker of Texas鈥�. While the sport is now banned in the US, and Carlos himself shares the aversion felt by many to the sport and is a vegetarian, he also feels a powerful sense of nostalgia regarding its loss since it played such an important part in his childhood, shaping his identity as a youth growing up against a set of powerful masculine codes he was largely at odds with.

Visiting a cockfight in Puerto Rico before heading home to Texas, Carlos argues that cockfighting is, a highly complex cultural practice for which he has a great deal of regard that leant meaning to lives often disregarded by mainstream America. Nonetheless Carlos will describe how the sport represents the last vestiges of a necessarily outmoded and dying culture whose values are so out of step with modern Western society, hearing from the Humane Society along the way.

(Photo: A rooster roaming free at Hackney City Farm, London, 2008. Credit: Barnaby Perkins)