Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (25 page)

Sam was rare, but not a mutant. Instead the bird was a consequence of an abnormal ovum with two nuclei fertilized by two sperm that develop into two distinct halves of the opposite sex. Clinton's surprising conclusion, published in
Nature
in 2010, was that chicken cells keep their own sexual identity no matter the hormone the animal produces. A chicken's sex is fixed even before testes and ovaries produce testosterone or estrogen to make, for example, a comb and wattles. Unlike with humans, the sexual identity of the chicken is imposed at the moment of fertilization. The Roslin gynandromorphs may shed light on our own species, however. “Even with humans,” he tells me, “I think that male and female differences may be independent of hormones, and are the result of inherent differences in male and female cells.” This might prove important in treating disorders and diseases that may operate differently in men and women.

Clinton's find also piqued the interest of the egg industry, which would rather identify and destroy male embryos before they are hatched. While the sex of a chicken is determined at fertilization, it is extremely hard to tell the difference between the sexes of newly born chicks. Their color, size, and shape are virtually identical. Chicken sexing is an arcane art pioneered in the 1920s by Japanese masters
that requires great skill. The sexer gently squeezes the bird's anal cavity to see if there is a small bump inside that indicates a male, but it is far more difficult than this description implies. “Successful chicken-sexing is a little like trying to recall a name or a dream that, for the moment, escapes you,” the scientist Lyall Watson noted when he visited an Osaka center that trains some of the world's best. “The harder you try, the less successful you are likely to be.”

Detecting a male embryo at the very start of the embryo's development would save the egg industry money by doing away with sexers and provide more space in incubators for the desired females. It also would halt what many animal-rights activists consider one of the most abusive practices in the industry. In the United States alone, more than 200 million young roosters are killed each year. In many documented cases, they were tossed live into Dumpsters or fed into wood chippers.

For such sex detection to be economical, it must cost less than one cent an egg and take less than fifteen minutes. Eggs today are typically removed from their incubator twice during their three-week development, once to check if the egg is fertilized and then later to vaccinate it, and a sex test would have to take place in one of these two short periods. If perfected, this process would save billions of roosters from execution days after their birth. It would also underscore just how superfluous the rooster has become.

The crowing cock dominated barnyards and chicken symbolism for millennia, but the age of the hen is dawning. Yet amid the modern world's alarm clocks and growing demand for unfertilized eggs, the rooster still has important religious duties to perform.

9.

Feeding Babalu

These birds daily control our officers of state; these . . . order or forbid battle formation . . . these hold supreme empire over the empire of the world.

—Pliny the Elder,
Natural History

T
he Indonesian island of Bali has a unique culture that emphasizes beauty and balance in every aspect of life. It is also one of the few places in the world where cockfights are by law religious acts. If a sacred blood sport seems an oxymoron, it is just one of many on this Hindu outpost in the world's most populous Muslim nation, an ancient culture ringed by crowded beaches and rowdy bars. A meat lover's paradise within a vegetarian religious tradition, here the rooster retains its status as a sacred creature.

My first Balinese cockfight doesn't feel particularly holy. “Wanna bet?” asks a thin villager with a grin. A couple dozen men are gathered around a makeshift cockpit on a dusty corner across from a temple in a village near the island's center. Two men are squatting in the center of the bamboo enclosure, roosters between their legs. I Dewa Windhu Sancaya, a scholar of traditional Balinese culture who accompanies me, translates the request. I hesitate. He tactfully suggests
that I make a “donation” to the temple. I hand over fifty thousand Indonesian rupiah, indicating with a nod my bird of choice. It is a scrappy-looking animal that resembles a red jungle fowl, only slightly larger. Within one minute, my money—worth about five dollars—is in another man's pocket and a skinny man at the curb is plucking the dead bird for the winner to take home to cook. There is no priest or blessing or prayer.

Balinese religion is a dazzling combination of animist practices and Hindu beliefs leavened with a sprinkling of Buddhism. Its fertile soil and well-engineered rice fields generate wealth that now is supplemented by the island's booming tourist industry. Elaborate rituals are at the core of Balinese life. There is a day when everyone stays at home and remains silent and even the airport is closed. There is a celebration of the goddess of wisdom and learning when people make offerings to books and abstain from reading and deleting anything written. There is even a festival that honors domesticated animals that are recognized for their role in human survival and the workings of the universe. Pigs are gaily decorated, cows washed and dressed in human clothes, and chickens and dogs are fed special treats as their owners offer prayers for their welfare.

The day after I arrive on the island is the festival of sharp objects, including motor vehicles as well as knives. Dazzling flower arrangements drape motorcycles. A large ceramic bowl filled with a dozen bananas and other exotic tropical fruits, flowers, and a well-cooked split chicken breast surrounded by smoking incense sticks sits on the hood of a parked car. The Balinese universe is a riotous mix of demons, nature spirits, ancestors, and gods and goddesses all clamoring for attention. Humans communicate with this world—a sort of spiritual extended family—via ceremonies designed to address the needs of a particular spirit or deity. Maintaining harmony in this system is the paramount goal. To do so, sacrificial rites may be made to an individual person, a deity, an ancestor, a priest, or a demon. Each offering is a gift or an appeal.

Later that afternoon, Windhu Sancaya takes me to visit a high priest at a nearby temple. The Brahman comes out to greet us in
his stone courtyard. A lean older man with a weathered brown face and kind eyes, he invites us to sit cross-legged on a marble cushion-­strewn platform in the center of the courtyard. Ida Pedanda Made Manis is fifty years old and comes from the priestly caste that lives on the gifts of villagers.
Pedanda
means “bearer of the staff” and
Made Manis
can be loosely translated as “second-born sweetie pie.” When I ask if he enjoys a good cockfight, he chuckles with glee. “To be involved in gambling of any kind will keep us from our spiritual goal of mastering our attachment to the senses,” he explains, turning serious. Then a smile returns. “Well, when I was young I would have liked to bet, but I couldn't afford it.”

When I ask why chicken is the sacrificial animal of choice, he pauses. No one has ever posed such a question to him, the priest says, so he must seek permission of the gods before responding. He closes his eyes. In the silence, a warm tropical breeze swirls through the open space. Then he murmurs to an assistant. Moments later, a woven palm leaf tray piled with flowers, a few Chinese coins with holes in the center, and smoking aromatic incense appears. The priest gestures at me. “Take a coin,” prompts Winhu Sancaya. I tentatively reach out, choose one, then place it gingerly into the open right palm of the Brahman. He squeezes his palm shut and once again closes his eyes, murmurs a prayer, and goes silent. Then he looks into my suddenly anxious face. “This question comes from your heart,” the priest finally says with evident satisfaction. “And not just from your work. You are free to ask.”

Chickens are favored, the
pedanda
begins, because they scratch around in the earth and will eat anything they can find. This makes them suitable for feeding demons but not heavenly deities; for those, duck and other animals are required. Then he explains Tabuh Rah, the concept of a sacred cockfight. “
Rah
means blood,” the high priest says, leaning his slim frame slightly forward. “
Tabuh
means to purify so that the Bhuta Kala don't create disruptions,” he adds. Bhuta Kala are negative forces or evil spirits that bedevil humanity, causing physical disease, mental illness, and societal havoc. Spilled chicken blood provides nourishment for the Bhuta Kala, keeping evil forces in check.

Sacrifice is at the core of Balinese beliefs. Though they enjoy a reputation for gentleness and compassion, islanders immolated multiple young women on pyres as recently as a century ago. A Balinese king told one early Western visitor that as many as 140 women would be taken by the flames when he died. Human blood is still used in some rituals in villages of eastern Bali, where it is drawn using a dagger, sharpened rattan sticks, or thorny leaves. The focus today is on animal sacrifice, and there is no other society on earth that practices in such numbers and with such regularity.

Terrorist bombings at a packed nightclub killed two hundred locals and tourists in 2002. To redress the imbalance created by the carnage, Hindu priests in white-and-gold robes slaughtered scores of water buffaloes, monkeys, pigs, ducks, cows, and roosters, and then placed their heads on altars to purify the devastated site. A celebrant drank pig blood drawn from a dead animal's throat while, in a boat offshore, priests weighted down two calves and threw them overboard. Most of Bali's 3 million residents took part in similar ceremonies around the island, which is half the size of Hawaii's big island. That ritual paled in comparison with a once-in-a-century ceremony in 1979 in which more than fifty water buffaloes, their horns covered in gold, were laden with precious goods and a large stone tied around their necks and then drowned in the sea while thousands of other animals, including chickens and ducks, were sacrificed to feed the Bhuta Kala.

The word for cockfight in Balinese is
tajen
, derived from the term for a sharp knife. It has been practiced here for at least a thousand years. “Night and day, you should hold cockfights” in the temple vicinity, according to one stone inscription carved in Old Javanese in AD 1011, one of the oldest known inscriptions on the island. A slightly later one states that “if you should hold cockfights within the sacred precinct” you are not subject to certain taxes.

The
pedanda
explains that the cockfight itself is not sacred, which is why the contest that I witnessed was held across the street from the temple. The cockpit traditionally is an elaborate open-air building called a
wantilan
that dominates a village or it is simply an open bit of
ground. “If
tajen
is carried out in a holy place, human greed and passion will be there too,” he adds. “It involves human greed; it is about accumulating funds, about winning and losing.” But with the correct outlook, one of detachment from such worldly concerns, “Tabuh Rah is there.” The separation between cockfighting and Tabuh Rah still seems fuzzy to me. Windhu Sancaya and other scholars of the complicated world of Balinese culture assure me later that such subtleties and paradoxes are rife in their ritual universe. The constantly changing world requires constant rebalancing, and Balinese rituals and beliefs must adapt accordingly. The Balinese universe would go awry without chickens. Few rituals of note take place without the death of the bird; only some die in a cockfight.

Dusk is falling quickly when we leave the
pedanda
's compound. Windhu Sancaya takes me just down the road to a large religious complex where villagers are participating in an annual four-day celebration of the temple's founding. Festive coral and pink clouds, lit by the setting sun, hover above the stone courtyards, elegant pavilions, and tiered pagodas shaded by high-branched trees. Pura Penataran Agung Taman Bali, which means the great temple of the Balinese garden, resonates with the sounds made by the gamelan orchestra that plays under a stone-roofed arcade. Xylophones, drums, gongs, strings, and bamboo flutes bang and shimmer in the evening breeze. The atmosphere resembles that of a Midwest church picnic. Children play with red laser lights and SpongeBob balloons on the grass as women in gorgeous silks prepare a buffet dinner.

After the meal, there are prayers and a series of processions to honor the upper, middle, and lower worlds. Women carry massive offering bowls crowded with flowers and fruits as priests chant. After dark, the hundred or so participants troop down the worn stairs to the small courtyard at the temple entrance. The rising moon washes the stone in milky light. Dogs bark and bells ring, and incense smoke wreathes its way into the tropical sky. When everyone has gathered, the chatting stops and drums and pipes begin to play.

A clutch of a dozen young girls dressed in long gowns—­premenstrual virgins, Windhu Sancaya explains—slowly begin to
circle around an enormous oval of fruit and flower offerings laid in intricately shaped palm-leaf containers. The girls' stylized, birdlike dance reminds me of the female dancing spirits called
asparas
carved on the stone friezes of Cambodia's Angkor Wat temples. Attendants twirl huge black-and-white parasols. As one seated priest chants, another holds a chicken in his right hand and a bell in his left that he rings rhythmically. He takes up a short knife, slits the animal's throat, and pours the gushing blood into white bowls that are then emptied over the offerings. The two men kneel beside the mass of fruit and flowers and blood and play a game of egg toss until two eggs smash against each other and break. Everyone cheers.

The ritual complete, the
asparas
turn back into giggling preteens, mothers collect their tired children, and the men light up cigarettes. As the crowd disperses, Windhu Sancaya introduces me to two smiling priests. One wears brass buttons and a gold badge on his shirt like that of a Western sheriff and another is elderly with no obvious teeth. The chicken's blood, explains the one with the sheriff's badge, will feed the bodyguards of the gods who were invited from heaven to take part at the start of the ceremonies four days ago. These troops are earth demons that feed on blood and therefore must be satiated at the start and conclusion of the ritual.

The bird's blood is considered
rajas
—that is, endowed with activity and movement—while pig's blood, for example, is associated with inertia. Demonic bodyguards of heavenly deities, naturally, want the power of activity and movement that comes from the chicken's veins. The blood may be poured on offerings or used to mark crosses at cardinal points of a temple's boundaries. When I press him on why the chicken must be the source of blood, he says that it must be an animal with a close relationship to humans, part of our everyday life. “We have to sacrifice something we love,” the sheriff says with a laugh, as if stating the obvious. “If you don't love it, then it is not a sacrifice. And the chicken is a symbol of the human family, because it comes in all colors.”

White, red, and black chickens are much in demand for Balinese rituals, since each color represents a direction. But in the constantly
shifting currents of Balinese theology, they also have come to represent the three human races. The killing is not simply to feed hungry demons. “Before we were human,” the priest continues, “we were animals. And we hope that through sacrifice the animals can become human in their next incarnation.” But along with this classic Hindu explanation, he offers another reason. “Long ago, humans were sacrificed,” the priest adds. “Now, every blood sacrifice is done so that we don't have to use human blood.”

This shift from human to animal sacrifice took place in many cultures. Ancient Chinese and Romans made the switch. In the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, God orders Abraham to make a ram rather than his son the victim. But not just any creature will do. “We appear to substitute animals that are somewhat close to our social worlds,” says Yancey Orr, a young American anthropologist at Australia's University of Queensland who studies Balinese culture. In the Abrahamic traditions, for example, God enjoyed Abel's gift of lamb blood but rejected Cain's hard-won offerings of vegetables and grain. They are too unlike and distant for human beings to use as a credible substitute.

Indonesia outlawed cockfighting in the 1980s to limit gambling and encourage sobriety and productivity in its citizens. Hindu Balinese were granted an exception. Technically, only three matches are allowed at a time and all gambling on birds is prohibited. I visited dozens of cockfights, large and small, around the island, where Balinese men delight in regularly breaking those rules.