Cockfighting

Cockfighting is very popular among the men of Bali.  It is deeply entrenched in the culture.  It is even incorporated into some of the Hindu ceremonial rituals, as the blood spilled during a cockfight outside a temple distracts the bad spirits and keeps them from interfering with the ceremony inside the temple.

the men of Silungan massaging their roosters

Every village apparently has its own cockfighting grounds.  The one in Silungan is just a short distance from our villa, on the small, rough and bumpy field that the local boys use as a soccer pitch.  We haven't seen any cockfights, but we've seen the after-effects of one fight - a crippled and badly wounded rooster staggering down the side road near our villa.

Gambling on cockfights has touched the lives of some of the Balinese that we are closest to, including our driver Dewa and our household helper Putu.

Dewa's grandfather worked very hard to turn jungle in Western Bali into arable farmland.  He had a large farm of 50 hectares.  But he lost about half of it gambling on cockfighting.  Dewa says that back then, wagers weren't simply for money, but were often for land.  Dewa's uncles and one of his older brothers also enjoyed cockfighting, and more of the family land was lost as a result.

Dewa says that no one makes makes money gambling on cockfights.  If you win, your friends expect you to share your winnings, or else you will have no friends.  But if you lose, then the loss is yours alone.  The village hosting the cockfight takes 10% of the winnings.  Unless you win and leave immediately, you are likely to lose the rest of your money either by making bad bets or gradually from the 'rake' paid to the village.

Roosters in the traditional cages on the road to Besakih temple

The owner of the winning rooster is awarded the carcass of the losing rooster as a prize.  The victorious rooster is often sold off at that point, so the counter-intuitive result is that a sign of a successful night is to return home with a dead rooster.  Dewa said that after a losing night his father would  often purchase one of the dead roosters to bring home to Dewa's mother, on the pretense that he had been the winner and the dead rooster was his prize.  If not for this ruse, coming home after losing a lot of the family's money would have caused, as Dewa says, "big problems with my mother."

That's because the sums gambled at cockfights are huge: hundreds of thousands or millions of rupiah - the equivalent of hundreds of dollars - from families trying to eke out a living on a few dollars a day.

Putu's story is even sadder.  He is from the village where we live.  His house is just a few meters down the road.

Putu's cousin sold off all the family land to pay off gambling debts.  The cousin used some of the money to build a house, but ran out of money and is now in debt on his house.  The land on which our villa is built once belonged to Putu's family.  His grandfather once had a small house on the property.  The cousin had no right to sell the land, but by the time Putu's father found out, the sale had already happened and all the money had been spent. 

The land was sold for a pittance, about $600 per 100 sq. meters.  Due to skyrocketing land prices, it is now worth twenty times as much.

Putu's father is angry, but there is nothing he can do about it.  The courts can't help; the land is sold and the money is gone.  Putu is sad that the opportunity for a bright future for his son and future grandchildren was sold out from under him, and he is left to earn a subsistence wage maintaining our house.