Café de Nuit

Wow! What a jerk the guy in the article was! To first participate in cockfighing and then to delay in getting medical attention?! I feel sorry for the roosters. I hope some of them were able to be rescued.

Could anyone explain how the heck the rooster was able to fight with a blade strapped to its leg and how it managed to cause a wound serious enough to kill a man.

My guess is the blade opened the man's femoral artery. Once that's open, you'll bleed out unless you get professional help - your blood just won't be able to clot to stem such a heavy outflow.

As for the rooster fighting with a blade strapped to its leg - it may just be an issue of acclimatization. I've seen seagulls with missing feet still hop along around the beach and forage and hunt for fish, etc. Sure, it's hardly an evolutionary advantage, but many animals have behavior patterns which are surprisingly flexible and adaptable.

I do not pretend to have expert knowledge of cockfighting, but I'd imagine somebody's tried strapping a blade parallel to the "sole" of the rooster's talon, so it's facing forward much like its natural claws. If that's the case, it's not quite as debilitating for walking around and hopping, and it would be effective just as an extension of the rooster's natural clawing instincts.

This is just the armchair theorist in me talking.

The fact that you had answers to those questions is both scary and fascinating at the same time.

I'm not saying I have personal experience with death by femoral artery injuries or cockfighting. These are things that you can just deduce logically without having seen it first hand.

It's hardly necessary to have actually followed an enemy operative past the lighted areas of the Embassy Row into the dark corners, and then to have approached them under guise of asking the time, then flicking the switchblade at a low angle, like I was twitching a leash at his groin, before catching him around the upper arms and then gently moving him to face the wall so it looks to any passersby like he's drunk and I'm helping to hold him steady while he empties his bladder in the alleyway, whereas actually I'm holding him steady so he'll bleed out faster.

It's all totally hypothetical.

Zettaijin wrote:Could anyone explain how the heck the rooster was able to fight with a blade strapped to its leg and how it managed to cause a wound serious enough to kill a man.

Small, razor-sharp artificial spurs are, unfortunately, standard equipment for roosters that get used in blood sports. Blades like that always getting seized as evidence, when cockfighting rings get busted. The birds' owners amputate their real spurs, then strap the metal ones in place, so the roosters' instinctive jabbing attacks will be bloodier and more lethal.

Sadly, it's generally not possible to rehabilitate a fighting rooster: they're goaded to attack anything else with feathers, so can't be retired to some quiet farmyard full of hens. The combatants were almost certainly euthanized once the abuses they'd suffered had been documented.