Anatomy of the Cock

The fighting cock has a vocabulary of its own — a precise, almost technical language in which the bird’s parts are named, counted, and judged. The vocabulary is centuries old, and it is the common property of every poultry culture that has bred the bird seriously: the Persian and the Indian, the English and the Japanese, the American and the Filipino all use essentially the same terms.

This essay is a glossary of that vocabulary — an anatomy of the bird, in the order in which a fancier would examine him.

The Head

The Comb

The comb is the fleshy crown on the top of the skull. It is, in the cock, larger and more developed than in the hen. Six principal types of comb are recognised by the American Standard of Perfection and most other breed standards:

• Single — a single, upright, serrated blade, as in the Leghorn and the Old English Game
• Pea — three narrow, parallel ridges, as in the Asil and the Sumatra
• Rose — a broad, flat, low comb with a spike behind, as in the Wyandotte and the Hamburg
• Walnut — a small, rounded comb of strawberry-like texture, as in the Shamo
• Cushion — a small, smooth, low comb without points, as in the Chantecler
• Buttercup — a cup-shaped comb split into points, as in the Sicilian Buttercup

The comb’s type is one of the principal breed markers. In the fighting breeds, a small and low comb is preferred — a comb that bleeds little in the pit and that the bird cannot easily injure against the opponent’s beak.

The Wattles

The wattles are the two fleshy flaps that hang below the beak. In the cock they are large and conspicuous; in the hen they are small and rounded. In the fighting breeds, the wattles are often dubbed — removed, in young cocks, by a quick cut at the base. Dubbing was historically performed to reduce the comb and wattles to small, clean, low-profile shapes that would offer the opponent no purchase; it is now principally an exhibition practice, retained for the sake of breed type in many breeds.

The Beak

The beak is the principal weapon of the bird — the first line of attack, the principal instrument of the strike. The fighting cock’s beak is short, strong, curved, and hooked at the tip — a beak built for the seizing of an opponent’s feathers and for the delivery of the cutting stroke that has decided more matches than the spur.

The Eye

The eye of the fighting cock is fierce, deep-set, and overhung by a heavy brow. The colour varies by breed — black, brown, red, pearl, yellow — but the expression is constant: the bird is looking at something, with a directness that the breeders call gameness in the eye. A bird without a fierce eye is not, by the fancier’s standard, a serious bird.

The Body

The Hackle

The hackle is the cape of long, pointed feathers that drape over the neck and shoulders of the cock. The feathers are narrow, long, and pointed; they hang from the neck like the mane of a horse, and they are one of the most striking ornamental features of the bird. The colour of the hackle is the principal marker of several plumage varieties — the black-breasted red cock, for example, has a bright orange-red hackle contrasting with his black breast.

The Saddle

The saddle is the corresponding patch of long feathers on the bird’s back, between the shoulders and the tail. Like the hackle, the saddle feathers are long, narrow, and pointed; they flow over the upper back and into the tail. The saddle’s colour is also a breed marker.

The Sickle Feathers

The sickle feathers are the long, curved main tail and tail-covert feathers of the cock — the dramatic, sweeping plumes that arch over the back of the bird. In the Modern Game and the Yokohama, the sickles are extremely long; in the Asil and the Malay, they are comparatively short. The sickle is one of the most sex-specific features of the bird: hens have only short, rounded tail feathers.

The Wing

The wing of the cock is the principal instrument of balance in the pit. The bird does not fly — it cannot, in any meaningful sense, become airborne — but it uses the half-opened wing to throw its weight off balance and to spring into a strike. In exhibition breeds, the wing is judged for symmetry, colour, and length; in the pit, it is judged for the power of the half-open spring.

The Leg

The Shank

The shank is the leg from the hock down. The shank is scaled — covered in a pattern of horny plates that grow outward from the bone. The colour of the shank is a breed marker: yellow, white, slate, black, willow, or green. In the fighting breeds, the shank is long, thick, and powerful — the better to support the weight of the bird’s body and to deliver the force of the kick.

The Spur

The spur is a bony outgrowth of the tarsus, sheathed in horn. The spur grows continuously throughout the bird’s life, like a fingernail; in old cocks, the spurs may be several inches long, curved and pointed. The spur is the weapon of the cock — the instrument of the killing stroke — and in the pit it was kept needle-sharp.

In exhibition strains, the spurs are blunted — filed or sawn to a rounded point, for safety. In the pit, they were kept at their natural sharpness, and the bird was allowed to do what the spur was bred to do.

The Foot

The foot has three forward toes and one rear toe — the standard arrangement of the Galliformes. The forward toes are long, scaly, and tipped with claws; the rear toe is shorter and set higher on the shank. The bird’s grip is remarkably strong; the foot is the principal instrument of the bird’s hold on the opponent, and the leg and foot together constitute the bird’s base, the foundation from which every strike is launched.

The Gameness

None of the parts described above is, in itself, gameness. The comb, the beak, the spur, the foot — these are the instruments. The quality they are in the service of is something else — something the breeders have never been able to name with precision, and something the geneticists have never been able to isolate.

It is, in part, aggressiveness — the willingness to fight. It is, in part, endurance — the willingness to continue fighting. It is, in part, intelligence — the willingness to fight well, to conserve strength, to read the opponent, to deliver the strike at the right moment. It is, in part, something else — the refusal of refusal, the quality that the old breeder quoted in Gamecock magazine called game.

The breeders have spent four centuries trying to fix this quality in the bird. They have succeeded, in the sense that gameness is reliably heritable in the fighting breeds — a strain of game cocks will reliably produce game offspring. But they have not been able to isolate the gene or the genes responsible; gameness remains a complex, a phenotype that emerges from a configuration of many traits, none of them fully understood.

It is, perhaps, the most honest thing about the bird. The parts can be named and counted. The gameness cannot. It remains, as it has always been, the refusal of refusal.