I’ve always been an animal lover. As a kid I cried with a mysterious intensity after my guinea pig Twinkie died, my first taste of grief and loss.

I write this now to the sound of my dachshund Thor barking in the next room at some phantom intruder, while my other dog Peanut — a derpy pandemic pup who wakes me up every morning by plopping a toy on my face — rests at my feet. Outside, my cat Boo is silently stalking a lizard. My wife and I refer to the three of them as the Goon Squad.

Animals of all sorts have enriched human lives since we organized into societies, as sources of food, beasts of burden, hunting partners and of course, as domestic companions. Konrad Lorenz, the Nobel Prize winning zoologist who spent his life studying animal behavior said that anyone who has spent time with animals and is unconvinced that they have feelings is psychologically deranged. 

I agree with him. Though the Goon Squad clearly possess a different type of emotional repertoire than I do, it is obvious that when I am in a room with them, I am not alone. As the field of ethology expands and develops, it has become clear that most animals experience an interior life much more sophisticated than we tend to think, from apes and orcas to pigs and crows. This includes animals we typically consider to be dumb, like cows and fish. 

And, yes, also chickens, those pesky descendants of dinosaurs running rampant across Hawaii, from mountainsides to shorelines and everywhere between. 

A chicken is often a positive presence, a provider of eggs and comfort for families. At worst they’re seen as a mild nuisance in most places, but there’s one place where their presence is criminalized: fighting pits. 

Hawaii is one of eight states where chicken fights are only a misdemeanor and not a felony act of animal cruelty. The Legislature is currently considering changing that. 

“Chickens feel a wide variety of emotions,” says Lauri Torgerson-White, senior director of research and animal welfare at Farm Sanctuary. “There’s been quite a bit of research on emotion in chickens. A lot of research has focused on fear. We are certain that chickens feel fear.”

Animal scientists differentiate a feeling from an emotion. A feeling is an internal state, whereas an emotion is observable through behavior and physiological changes. 

“There is no such thing as higher or lower species,” says Giorgio Vallartigara, professor of neuroscience at the University of Trento. “There seems to be no difference of basic cognition between species. Verbal language is a specific adaptation of our species just as building a web is a specific adaptation of a spider. Apart from these special cases, the building up of the brains is very much similar in different species.”

It is thus reasonable to claim that fighting chickens know what is happening when they’re in a fighting pit, and that they are reacting not just out of animalistic survival instincts, but also out of a kind of fear that we would intimately recognize.

From the moment they hatch, chickens have natural hierarchical instincts encoded in their DNA — it’s where the term “pecking order” comes from. These instincts provide safety and structure for easily preyed-upon chicks, compelling them to follow close behind the mother hen at all times.

Cockfights hijack these instincts. In a natural environment, when two roosters meet to assert dominance, the confrontation is violent but not always fatal. Not so in the pit, where blades are attached to the spurs on their feet, and there is no possible escape or retreat.

Locking two dogs in a fight to the death and weaponizing their limbs would be unconscionable for most people because we tend to think of them as smarter, more humanly emotive animals. But if we accept the science that tells us chickens are more intelligent and have a deeper emotional capacity than we give them credit for, then it stands to reason that we should be just as disgusted by chicken fighting. 

Indeed, House Bill 1980 explicitly states that it aims “to strengthen existing laws relating to the fighting of birds to more closely mirror those of existing state dogfighting laws.” 

But there are complications to consider. We should be cautious about the consequences of felonizing something that has existed in the islands since the plantation days and is primarily — though not exclusively — practiced by poorer, underserved communities.

Do we really need harsher penalties for local people in an already overburdened penal system? That’s assuming the new laws would even be consistently enforced, which would be a departure from how the current laws are applied.

And while cockfighting is undeniably cruel to the birds, it’s a tough argument to make in the face of our current industrial farming system, the cruelty of which is not far off from cockfighting, and affects innumerably more chickens. More chickens are killed for food each year than there are people on the planet, and they are not included in the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act that requires other animals to be “rendered insensible to pain” before being killed. 

When trainers say they take good care of their fighting chickens, they aren’t lying. Chickens destined for the pit live much better lives than chickens destined for fast food — at least up until they are forced into death matches. That used to be the deal with farm animals, before the task of feeding people fell to fewer, larger industrial operations. 

The rebuttal to that, however, is that food is obviously a more noble purpose than entertainment — and even calling it entertainment is euphemistic, since gambling is really what cockfighting is about. 

Anyone who has attended a chicken fight — and full disclosure, I have — knows that they are all-ages affairs, but far from family-friendly environments. I’ve seen elementary aged kids walking through beer-soaked grass next to craps tables under smoke-filled gambling tents to sit close enough to the pit to get bloody feathers stuck to their clothes. That’s to say nothing of the potential for the violence to spill out of the pit and into the crowd. 

The question then is whether stiffer criminal penalties will be enough to deter people from engaging in something that, like it or not, is part of the cultural fabric of Hawaii, or if the better bet is to try and clean up the seedy environments through legalization and regulation. 

Either way, it’s important to keep the chickens themselves in mind, not just because of how their deaths might impact our own simian psychologies.

“These animals have inner lives and needs and desires,” says Torgerson-White. “They’re whole people, they truly are. Focus on the fact that they have rich inner lives, and that’s reason enough to protect them.”