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When the first chicken died, I felt bad—just at the sight of a creature going lifeless—and could understand those who want to make cockfighting illegal. With the second bird, it didn’t feel so bad. Quickly desensitized, was I now part of the problem?

Hanging as heavy as the cigarette smoke in the air was the sense of resignation that Saturday nights in this corner of Louisiana would never be the same. As much as these game birds were born to fight, these folks were raised in a culture in which it was OK to watch them. But not for long.

All that’s left to decide about making cockfighting illegal is a date certain. The Senate bill by Sen. Art Lentini, R-Kenner, would take effect Aug. 15; the House bill by Rep. Harold Ritchie, D-Franklinton, would enact the ban one year later. There will still be illegal cockfights scattered about, but nothing like the big derby earlier this month at the Atchafalaya Game Club in what used to be a sweet potato shed just down the road from the town of Cecilia.

“They’ll be going to 1 or 2 in the morning,” says the young woman collecting $15 at the door. Patrons walk past some of the night’s contestants, in their portable cages under the stands, and around to the cockpit, a 15-by-20 wire cage with dirt floor, with comfortable stadium seating for about 300 rising from both sides.

Cockfighters holding their roosters, which have steel gaffs attached to their legs, enter the cage from opposite sides. They briefly joust the birds toward one another, then step 10 feet apart and let them go. The animals charge, with one or both flying up 4 to 6 feet at contact, then hop over, around and on each other in a deadly ballet.

Owners often have to untangle the birds when the gaffs get caught, then set them up a few feet apart for the fight to resume. But sometimes a wounded bird just falls over, and the opponent pounces to finish the fight. Maybe five minutes or less has passed.

For the untrained observer, it is not easy to tell which rooster is winning until the bout is almost over. It is not as grisly or horrific as is often portrayed, or visibly bloody, except as one patron notes, “Blood shows on the white ones.”

The casually dressed, all-adult crowd, ranging from seniors to young couples on dates, is into the action but isn’t going bloodthirsty wild. A few, usually ones with $50 bets riding on the outcome, get exercised. “Go Red, go Red,” shouts one. The buzz of the crowd is constantly broken by the cockle-doodle-doos from waiting contestants beneath the stands, half of whom have greeted their last dawn.

The audience includes a high-level state bureaucrat, a young business lobbyist and the area’s state representative, Sydnie Mae Durand, D-St. Martinville. “This goes back to biblical times,” says Durand, who has raised game birds but who also voted for Ritchie’s bill because it gives cockfighters a year to dispose of their stock, mainly by fighting them off.

This resigned view is shared by John, a carpenter from Ponchatoula, for whom raising and fighting game birds is a hobby and a passion. “If they make me a criminal overnight, I’ll talk to my friends and we’ll give the state our chickens,” he says. “Why should we kill ’em? We’ll drop ’em off at the Capitol. Let them kill ’em.”

Durand still holds out hope for an alternative through technology. In New Mexico, she says, cockfighters have outfitted their game birds with boxing-like gloves and vests with computer diodes that register strikes. She’s not kidding, though it does remind me of an old Gridiron skit in which the Edwin Edwards character announces a new form of gambling: video cockfighting.

Durand agrees that this crowd probably won’t go for computerized rooster boxing matches, but it would be a way for cockfighters to keep doing what they do, though with some very confused birds. And it could be just weird enough to find an audience in a state that thrives on being different.