A la sombra de la legalidad

Abstract

The cockfight is considered a subject of social debate because of the cruelty that evokes this tradition. Colombia as a rural country with a strong Hispanic and Caribbean influence has a remarkable cultural attachment to fighting cocks. The development of globalized departmental and municipal capitals, as well as the processes of internal migration of the national territory, have caused historical cultural phenomena. These phenomena, today, have been questioned in the social, legal and political fields. Therefore, cockfighting experienced a social transition; in the past it took advantage of being part of large municipalities as places of national and international sports meetings, but currently it is attacked and marginalized by ecological and animal ideologies. Also, the cockfight has gone from being the pro-electoral point of many politicians, to being judged by many of them especially those of popular election in the national and municipal order (Cárdenas, 2021). Thus, socio-political movements against cockfighting are present at national and international level, and although they use different strategies, depending on where they come from, they all aim at the legal prohibition of cockfighting. Cockfights act as thermometers of the social, political and legal changes that present-day society is experiencing. There is an obvious dichotomy in the concept of animal abuse between the breeding of fighting cocks and the production of poultry meat for human consumption. Demonstrating that we take advantage of animal suffering hiding in the production chain, and therefore we promote a process of social hypersensitivity showing animals as sentient beings and rejecting identity behaviors which, in turn, become new forms of crime in Colombian society.