BLOODLINE Jesse Sidlauskas

In late 1830, Nash County, N.C. plantation owner Nicholas Arrington accepted Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna's challenge to a cockfight. Arrington and about a dozen friends spent six months crossing the country with more than 300 gamecocks in a dozen mule-drawn wagons to meet the Mexican president outside modern-day El Paso in April the following year.

Today, almost 200 years after the formation of the SPCA in London, there are satellite organizations in countries all over the globe and in many major cities. 16 years after Broome’s meeting, the crown will grant it a royal commission, and its members will dominate the politics and business of animal law in the country, and elsewhere in the world, for at least the next two centuries.

We’ll be exploring the lives of some of the all-time-great cockers of England and the world up to that time, including Edward Smith-Stanley, The 12th Earl of Derby and some of his contemporaries, including William Tregonwell Frampton, William "Bill" Gilliver, Joe Gilliver and Paul Potter.

At the end of the 1600s, cockfighting was about as prevalent among the British as it...

At its height in the 17th and 18th centuries, cocking permeated British culture without exclusion, occupying crown, court, church and countryman for centuries. Called the "Pleasure of Princes" or the "Royal Pasttime" in books from that time, it was at the same time a rabble darling, a people’s diversion.

Puerto Rican cockers currently have an appeal pending in the First Circuit Court in Boston which challenges the constitutionality of the ban and also argues the cockers were entitled and did not receive due process of law prior to the prohibition. Oral arguments were made earlier this month, and gamefowl community awaits the decision of the court judges.