Cockfighting has been around for centuries. Though banned in North America, it remains quite popular in many corners of the world. In some countries, the spectacle of cockfighting draws families and entire villages. Specially bred and conditioned birds known as gamecocks are squared off in enclosures, their legs often fitted with razor-sharp steel blades or with gaffs resembling curved ice picks, appendages designed to puncture and mutilate. People wager on the outcomes or simply watch the fights for entertainment. Needless to say, the birds usually fight to the death.

Critics and opponents of mixed martial arts, or ultimate fighting as it has come to be known, perhaps the largest growing sport in the world, liken it to cockfighting. But this is patently wrong. Though it shares some similarities with the avian blood sport, important differences exist. Yes, specially trained and conditioned human combatants do square off in enclosures (reinforced wire-mesh cages known as Octagons) before frenzied crowds of paying and wagering spectators, but unlike the birds, the humans are not equipped with lethal blades. Rather, they use hands, feet, knees and elbows to strike each other, or force one another to submit with moves such as rear naked chokes, guillotines and arm bars, or holds like the gogoplata, where legs scissoring an opponent´s neck cut off his oxygen supply. A gamecock, no matter how selectively bred and superbly conditioned, cannot perform the simplest chokes and arm-bars, let alone execute something as exotic as the gogoplata. For all their posturing, fighting birds have yet to grasp the most rudimentary aspects of Brazilian Jujitsu, Greco-Roman wrestling, Karate, Muay Thai, Tae Kwon Do, Sambo, Judo, and the dozens of other fighting styles and systems that humans have so readily and beautifully blended into ultimate fighting.

In sharp contrast to cock battles, ultimate fights are stopped before death occurs. Only one death has ever been attributed to a sanctioned North American mixed martial arts event. After being knocked out October 20, 2007 fight, Texas fighter Sam Vasquez suffered blood clots in his brain and died a few weeks later. Further, over the past few years a series of strict and elaborate rules have been implemented, aimed at protecting fighters, making the end product more palatable for the mainstream public, and blunting the attack of critics, moralists, and government watchdogs who view the sport as a strictly blood-and-guts, no-holds barred spectacle of savagery. The truth is that most if not all of these rules have been openly flouted and willfully ignored by gamecocks and their trainers alike.