BREEDING AND RAISING
Bob’s uncle George raised fighting cocks. He lived just up the street from us. That’s where we first got our roosters from and that’s how we first got started. He would tell Bob this is a good bloodline raise this one, I’ll give you this rooster but you have to give me half the chicks. So they would kind of do that to each other. But you would never want to give your bloodline away especially if it’s a good rooster, because they’re just went your profits – your money. If you gave that bloodline away then you don’t have the father and you can’t produce those fighting cocks anymore. George would say give me half the chicks but never the parent.
We had certain hens that we wanted to get pregnant by certain roosters. We would let certain hens that were good moms nest in the pen. We would have hay all over for them to lay their eggs in. If we wanted a particular bloodline, we would put the hen and the rooster in a cage together in the building. And we’d write down which mommy it was. The chickens had little tags on their legs so we can tell them apart. And we would write everything down, so we would know which mom and which rooster it was and which batch of eggs.
We had a bunch of hens and we would let them just wander free because they always stayed with the roosters. When the rooster and a hen mate the rooster gets behind the hen and pecks at her head. And if the hen is not ready or if she doesn’t give it to him, he’ll kill her. He’ll peck her brains out. So it had to be a mature mommy and a good mommy. Some of the hen if they were not ready, they would lay their eggs and walk away from them. We usually wanted to make sure what hen was with what rooster. And the hens would lay the eggs wherever they wanted. We would have to find the nest of eggs under the building, or in the building, or in an old dog house, or where ever she felt and thought she was safe. Each egg she would rotate and lay on them and incubate them for a certain amount of time. And all this stuff was written down in a book that Bob kept. Because in the end when we sold the roosters, the people would want to know what was the parent, what was the mom, what was the rooster, they would want to know what the bloodline was. And then we would raise these cock and if it won at the fightin’, we would want to do more of that same bird. It sounds a little confusing but all of the stuff was wrotin’ down.
If we wanted to mate a certain rooster with a certain hen, we would see them mate and then put the hen in a cage so it couldn’t mate with any other rooster, and that’s how we know which rooster mated with which hen. After we seen them mate. But then when she was ready we would lead her back out. The hens would feed off the land and so we would let them back out and then they would take their little chickens all around and feed. When the eggs hatched, we didn’t keep the females if we didn’t get enough roosters. We didn’t want too many of them and we didn’t want an interbreeding bloodline. Some of them got cooked and some of them we just gave away. It was a great business because it provided money and occasionally dinner and eggs for breakfast!
People would buy our roosters and fight them. But we only sold them the babies. We kept the rooster. We would watch the fight to see who won and who lost and we knew who bought the roosters. So then we knew the parentage of the winners. That way we could breed the best roosters. This was a lot of work. You put a lot of money and time into it but when roosters from our bloodline won, people would really want those roosters and they would come back over and over. If it was a good bloodline we would charge $50 to $100 for one bird; sometimes more. We wouldn’t tell them what bird came from what bird because then they might steal the bird. But we knew because we kept records of it. That’s how the money was. And if you didn’t produce good fighting cocks, nobody would want your cocks and you would just be stuck with a bunch of roosters.
You can get maybe a dozen chicks from one clutch. So you didn’t want too many hens on your property at once because you didn’t want them all getting pregnant. We had more roosters than anything. You wanted them two to mate and you would put them in a cage together. Or you would do this – it’s kind of mean but this is what you do and it would work every time – you take that chicken feed and put it right in front of the rooster and the hens have to go up to the rooster to eat. And when a hen would go up to eat, that rooster would nail her! The rooster was more wanting a piece of tail that he was food. He’d sit there and he would even do a little dance to try and get her to come there and make noises trying to get her to come to him. He would be more infatuated with getting tail than eating. He wouldn’t accept food. He would wait for her to come. And then when she would bend down to eat he would nail her. And if she wasn’t willing he would peck her brains out. If they were young they didn’t want to mate, but the rooster didn’t care. And then after he mated, then he would eat.
We even had an incubator – we had the whole thing down. What we’d look for in a hen was to make sure that she was a good mommy; if she wasn’t a good mommy then we didn’t want her. Some hens won’t sit there eggs. After she hatched the eggs she had to make sure that them babies were fed. She take them all through the yard, all across the yard, all over the place to feed those chicks. And she would fight to the death for those chicks. And if she wasn’t a good mommy she would just leave the eggs there and they would rot. So it had to be a good mom. You could take a winning rooster and breed it with four or five different hens. There was one particular hen who was the best mom and we kept reusing her over and over. And if she would get pregnant by some other rooster, we would take her eggs out and put the good eggs there that were from the rooster we wanted. We would switch her eggs and she wouldn’t even know it. If some other hen got pregnant by the rooster we wanted and laid her eggs and she wasn’t a good mommy, we would trade the eggs and get rid of the bad ones. So maybe there was 7 to 12 eggs at a time in one clutch and I don’t know maybe half of them would be roosters, and it took about two dozen days for them to hatch. Some of the chickens would scream when the eggs were coming out. And the eggs are soft when they’re coming out and then they get hard a little later. Yeah, it’s true, they would poop and pee out of the same hole. They didn’t have a pee whole, it was the same hole. This is the ultimate one-holer. Or it doesn’t matter if you talking chickens or golf, you still have a hole-in-one.
We can get one rooster to fertilize 7 to 12 eggs for one female and she would sit that whole clutch. And maybe five or six of those chicks would be roosters in about 21 days. So if we had 3 or 4 hens with the same daddy rooster, we might have maybe 20 rooster chicks in a month from that daddy. So we could potentially be making $1000 to $2000 a month per rooster, but that’s the kind of stuff we didn’t really want to keep a record of – you know what I mean. This was all under the table money, and anyway, cockfighting is illegal.
We wouldn’t sell them until they were full roosters. They were stags before they became roosters. After the stags get a certain age they start fighting and you knew by watching them, and you knew by the paperwork that they were born on this or that day that they were get in to the fighting age. Then you would have to put them on tie chords. Because when they were little they could be around each other – two males – but once they get to a certain age then they’re game. Then the rooster becomes kind a’ like a boy to a man. Then at that point they’re sellable but if you want to sell them you have to train them. So when they’re stags you’re trying to train them so you could sell them. So if one rooster got loose he would go to every rooster and fight it to the death. The roosters would start screaming and then we would have to go down there and get that cock. That happened to us once. And it was totally unfair if one rooster was loose and he wasn’t on a tie cord. The one on the tie cord had the disadvantage, he had one foot that was tied to the barrel. We had that happen once only. And we even had one time a dog from the street come in and went to each rooster and kill it. That’s why we wound up getting an electric fence. The hens could run and fly off somewhere but the roosters were tied to the barrel. So we lost the majority of the roosters that day. We come home and the dog had gotten in there. We didn’t know whose dog it was because he had left, but he must’ve got hurt because he didn’t continue to finish killing the roosters. One rooster must’ve really got him before he got killed. And then we had chicken hawks that would threaten the roosters. And the roosters would do this whistle and then they would all start going off hollerin’ to let us know that something was down there. They were letting each other know there was something there.
You had to be passionate with these birds if you wanted winners. If you didn’t put the time and effort into it they wouldn’t be worth crap. And Bob was very passionate with them birds. Bob was getting disability, and this was an income for him. I was working at the time and I was helping, but I was also working. Bob took care of most of it.
That was something he loved to do and you could tell it, and the birds told you by the way they won. I remember the winter that we had to get rid of them and it was really sad. We had a bunch of money problems that year, and so we didn’t have the money for the feed that winter, so we had to make the choice of selling them or letting them starve to death. So we sold him. It was really sad. But at one time though, it was a very hopping business.
I remember you could sit up on the hillside and listened to those roosters just crowing. In the morning when you got used to it they didn’t wake you up anymore. You just got used to it. The roosters were down in a great big open field like the kind the cows were in, and there was an electric fence all the way around. And the barrels were strategically set and they would be far enough to where they couldn’t get each other but they would be strategically set so that you could walk to them easily. You had to feed and water them every day. And in the winter time you had to take their trays and break the ice out and put new water in. It was a very big job. You put hay in the barrels and the chickens would stay in the barrel so they didn’t freeze to death. Sometimes they would be in but most the time they would be out. The barrel was there and they could go in if it rained or snowed, but when they slept they would sleep perched. The hens would just go all over either in the woods or in the trees, or underneath that little building we had out there. The hens were always let loose, they could do whatever they wanted. The hens was not in the pen after we got her pregnant. After we got her pregnant she could lay her eggs anywhere. She could go where she wanted. When the rooster came of age we would put the tie cord on them and give them a barrel. We would see how many were male and how many were females so we knew what the bloodline was and we would see them from day-to-day. But you couldn’t keep them caged up when they were chicks. They had to have a good mommy. And there was ticks, and bugs, and all kinds of things they could eat. And we would take down feed and stuff but we wanted them to be kind of wild and not depend on us for food and water. And she would teach them and take them to the woods and bring them back and they would learn to eat berries and all kinds of good stuff. This is why we would have problems with chicken hawk sometimes. Usually you would just shoot the chicken hawks. That was the business.