There used to be a few small harvesting facilities around Texas that I'd visit in my early twenties. I remember one time at a facility in Louisiana, some ladies of the night did show up. It's part of our nation's culture.
A lot of breeders, their birds have been in their family for two or three or four generations. Then, in 2002, voters in Oklahoma banned cockfighting in their state too. Cockfighting came over on the Mayflower. Ultimately what makes a good bird great is the way you care for it. Why are people in areas like Houston and Dallas, where there's practically no morality, able to dictate what we do in rural areas, when they know nothing about it? That sent me on visits to Oklahoma. I'm completely outside that, because I fell in love with them as a kid for their tenacity and their looks. I began getting invitations to countries where harvesting is widely accepted, like the Philippines, Guam, Saipan, and, of course, Mexico. Gamefowl for sale in texas at austin. The law comes after us even though all the golf, rodeo, and bass people are doing the same thing. No, what I'd like to see is a law that gives rural counties the power to decide what they want, instead of being told what to do by people in cities. Well, the gaff originated in England; it came over on the Mayflower. You can't tell if a bird is promising the moment it hatches; you have to watch it over time.
The women he filmed at the fights were nothing more than sisters, mothers, and daughters; his remarks are really unfortunate. The difference is that we have rules that govern our harvesting. Gamecocks are an agricultural commodity. John Goodwin, of the Humane Society of the United States, testified in favor of the bill. Peruvian gamefowl for sale in texas. If he found a bird with particularly desirable characteristics, he'd take him out of fighting and focus on breeding him. Soon the birds became my sole source of income. He sells his birds to clients around the world, and in April he testified in Austin before Senate and House committees to oppose a bill that would outlaw the raising of game birds in Texas. But by 1977, I was traveling with my birds to states where game fowl harvesting was legal. Breeding game chickens is like breeding racehorses.
In the late eighties, when the economy was bad, I started a business, Bobby Jones Hatchery. I now own five bloodlines: a straight-comb red, a straight-comb dark-legged, a pea-comb, a black, and what we call a gray—it's actually more or less yellow. It's a 365-day-a-year job: overseeing what kind of feed your birds get, their water, their nutrients and vitamins. It was more or less a hobby for years. Gamefowl for sale in usa. He was a mentor of mine. In 1963 a judge on Oklahoma's court of criminal appeals had ruled that a chicken was not an animal, so harvesting was alive and well across the state line. It's a gentleman's wager, like betting on a football game. It took the owners all of fifteen minutes to tell those gals they weren't welcome.
He was breeding his fowl the way everyone does today, except he was thirty or forty years ahead of his time. This spring I spoke at the Capitol against a bill that would outlaw game fowl breeding, to defend my right to own and sell birds. When a rooster has had enough, he's had enough, and he's counted out just like a boxer is. As for gambling, what goes on at harvesting facilities is no different from what you see at a golf course, the rodeo circuit, or a bass tournament. Back then, breeders focused on pure bloodlines—the chicken business has as many as the cattle industry does, with its Holsteins and Herefords and Brahmans—but what Goode did was find a quality rooster, then breed the rooster's sisters to another quality, tested rooster. But Governor Dolph Briscoe formed a crime prevention task force to control, among other things, the drugs coming across the border—this was in the seventies—and I guess law enforcement got tired of chasing drug dealers, because they started shutting down our facilities, which were labeled organized crime. But it's not like that.
Most of these breeds are referred to by their colors. The governors of Texas and Oklahoma bet on the Red River Shootout every year, and there's no discussion about that. I checked both sides of my family tree, and nobody even knew what a gamecock was until I came along. And the slashers—in Mexico they are about one inch long, and in the Pacific they are longer—are comparable to what Pilgrim's and Tyson use to harvest their birds commercially. That, along with construction, was how I made my living. This animal husbandry is where it's all at; the harvesting is just a small part of a bird's life. The reason my birds were an overnight success is that in 1970 I secured two bloodlines from a famous breeder in Killeen, Joe Goode.