Colophon

Imprint

The Gamecock Codex is an editorial encyclopedia dedicated to a single bird — the fighting cock, the game fowl, the cock of the pit and the show pen and the heraldic crest. The site treats the bird as a subject of cultural and biological significance: as the first animal athlete, as the emblem of three continents, and as the foundation stock of several of the world’s most distinctive poultry breeds.

The site is built with Hugo (a static-site generator) and deployed via GitLab Pages. The source is set in Cormorant Garamond (display), EB Garamond (body), Inter Tight (UI), and JetBrains Mono (data). The illustrations are hand-drawn SVGs in the engraved-plate tradition of John James Audubon and Ernst Haeckel.

The site is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The illustrations are CC-BY-SA. The breed portraits are original works drawn from period breed books and museum specimens.

A Note on Ethics

The Gamecock Codex is a museum, not a pit. The site treats the fighting cock as a subject of cultural and biological significance — the way one might treat the Saluki, the Andalusian horse, or the falconer’s peregrine. It is not, and has never been, an advocacy site.

Blood sport is illegal in the great majority of jurisdictions, is widely condemned on welfare grounds, and is not a tradition we celebrate. The breeds themselves — and the cultures that produced them — are part of human heritage worth recording. We treat them as a museum would: with seriousness, accuracy, and care.

Analytics & Privacy

The site uses Matomo, a self-hosted, privacy-respecting analytics platform, to count visitors and understand which essays are being read. The instance is hosted at analytics.catalystgroup.tech (Site ID 17) and is administered by the Codex team — no third parties receive your data.

Tracking only fires after you explicitly accept, via the consent banner. You can withdraw consent at any time — your choice is stored in localStorage only. We respect your browser’s “Do Not Track” setting, and the analytics endpoint never sees your IP address beyond the standard network hop. No personal data is sold, shared, or rented.

The site’s newsletter stores your email only; it is not used for analytics and is not given to any third party. Manage your analytics choice.

The site’s editorial choices reflect this position. We do not depict birds in combat. We do not provide instructions for the breeding or conditioning of fighting cocks. We do not name modern pit operators, breeders, or venues. We do not depict the gameness of the bird as something to be cultivated; we describe it as a phenotype of interest to historians of animal breeding and culture.

Where we describe the historical practice of cockfighting — and we do describe it, because the bird cannot be understood without it — we describe it with the same clinical precision that a natural-history museum would bring to the description of any animal tradition. We do not celebrate it; we do not condemn it. We document it.

Sources & Bibliography

The Codex draws from a wide range of primary and secondary sources. The principal categories are:

• Primary breed books — Lewis Wright’s Book of Poultry (1885), Harrison Weir’s The Poultry Book (1853), William Bernhard Tegetmeier’s The Poultry Book (1867), the American Standard of Perfection, the Poultry Club of Great Britain Standards.
• Ethnographic and natural-history works — Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Ornithologiae (1600), the Senri Ethnological Studies monograph on Japanese long-crowers (1996), the Aviculture-Europe breed monographs (2010s).
• Period news and periodical sources — The Field (London, 1853–present), Gamecock magazine (1940s–1950s), American Poultry Journal (1870s–present), the Asiatic Review (1886–1917).
• Modern heritage and conservation sources — the Livestock Conservancy (Pittsboro, NC), the Poultry Club of Great Britain, the American Poultry Association, the Rare Breeds Survival Trust.
• Genealogical and biographical works — the Public Record Office (London) for the Tarleton dispatch and other Revolutionary War sources, the National Archives of India for Manasollasa studies, the British Library for early Stuart cockfighting broadsheets.

A complete list of cited sources is provided at the foot of each entry. Where a primary source is available in the public domain (most notably on the Internet Archive), the Codex links directly to the source.

How to Cite

To cite an entry in the Codex, use the following form:

Author (if given), Title of Entry, in The Gamecock Codex (gamecock.org), accessed [date].

For example:

Marlow, Iris. “The Shape of Courage,” in The Gamecock Codex (gamecock.org), accessed 21 June 2026.

Contact

For corrections, additions, and correspondence, please open an issue on the GitLab repository.

A Specimen of the Press

The Codex is set in five faces. Each has a specific role.

A Note on the Display

The display face, Cormorant Garamond, is a contemporary Garamond revival drawn by Christian Thalmann for Catharsis Fonts (2015). It is released under the SIL Open Font License. The body face, EB Garamond, is Georg Duffner’s faithful revival of the sixteenth-century romans of Claude Garamont, cut for the Éducycational Bureau (2011). Both are open-source.

The Palette

The Codex’s color is drawn from six sources — the oxblood of the medieval pigment vermilion; the gold of an illuminated capital; the cinnabar of the lacquered cock’s comb; the forest of the long-crower’s bamboo cage; the indigo of the printed page; the paper of the vellum. Each has a tonal family in light and dark.

The Ornaments

A small library of SVG ornaments runs through the Codex. Each is a hand-drawn vector; each is licensed CC-BY-SA.

The Codex is a work in progress. New entries are added as they are researched, written, and reviewed. The current edition is Volume I, the Folio Edition, compiled in 2026.