Animal-human relations: fighting cocks and their professional cock-feeders in England in the long eighteenth century: the secret world of cockfight preparation

For much of the sporting past, animal-human relationships have been central to many of England’s more popular sports, often encouraging sociability, gambling, and commercialisation. Yet historians of sport are yet to fully initiate studies of animal-human inter-relationships. Cockfighting provides just one example. It was a leading sport in England from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. For its more professionalised and commercialized cock-match mains, expert ‘cock-feeders’ were employed to train, feed and prepare gamecocks for combat. Most were publicly available, hiring out their specialized knowledge, skills and expertise. The social origins, careers, and the skills and expertise of the profession, the complexities of the work done by feeders with their charges, and how it changed over time, in terms of exercise and sparring regimens, the length of training, the nature of cock diets, and weight reduction techniques, serves as a strong reminder that cock-feeders and the gamecocks both had agency, and that relationships between gamecocks and humans were two-way affairs, as the birds responded to their feeders and the feeders to their charges.