It was 10am on a Wednesday morning in the 21st century, but it may as well have been a thousand years ago. In the hinterland, under the shade cast by a jackfruit tree beside a grove of bamboo, a millenium-old contest and gambling game was about to begin. From their bags, men pulled out small whiskey bottles half-filled with water. Inside the bottles were male Siamese fighting fish, creatures so viciously territorial they will even attack their own reflections in a glass surface.
One of the ‘referees’ held up two bottles to properly match the opponents by size. When the owners agreed it was a fair fight and made a wager, the fish were put into a square glass tank that stood a half-metre high.
Immediately, the gill covers on each fish shot out like protective armour and they charged at each other. Their iridescent scales shimmered as the blue-and-green fish nipped at the fins of its red-and-purple rival. Like boxers, they circled each other, making quick strikes and then retreating. But unlike human combatants, these fish can fight like this for three hours or more.
They can fight like this to the death.
This morning’s session out in Nakhon Pathom province, an hour northwest of Bangkok, had pulled in a crowd of about 30 men, watching a like number of matches going on at once. Some of the men bred fighting fish (better known as betta splendens or bettas). Some were wholesalers. And a few were professional gamblers. One of them said that the matches also attract gangsters, drug dealers and other criminal elements who gamble on fighting cocks during the dry season and pla gat (‘biting fish’) during the months of the monsoon. Sensing our nervousness, he reassured us that these rough-and-tumble characters holster their firepower and rein in their homicidal tendencies when gambling. “Well, most of the time anyway,” he said, laughing in that gleeful Thai way that strikes a discordant note with the seriousness of what they’ve just said.
In the middle and upper echelons of Thai society, the ‘sport’ is looked down upon as a no-class pastime for ‘pricks from the sticks’. Most of the spectators and fish owners, even in Bangkok, which has around 20 fighting rings, are migrants from rural areas, and have never attended high school. At Bangkok’s weekend Chatuchak market, where they sell Siamese fighting fish, visitors can sometimes also see gambling matches.
But one man in attendance shattered all these stereotypes: Precha Jintasaerwong holds master’s degrees in both philosophy and computer science. Through his website (www.plakatthai.com), he exports the fish around the world. Precha said that gambling on fighting fish is also popular in Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia, with smaller followings in Singapore and Hong Kong.
Like many Thai boys, Precha remembers playing with the creatures when he was a kid. In those days, the freshwater fish could still be found in the canals of Bangkok. Nowadays, they thrive in ponds, rice paddies and irrigation ditches in the pastoral parts of the country. Because the fish has both gills and a ‘labyrinth organ’ in its head, it comes to the surface now and again to breathe oxygen, and can live in small jars with no filtration system or even mud puddles. (One of my bettas jumped out of his tabletop jar while I was away for the weekend and I found his withered corpse lying on the floor about five metres away from the table—an astounding feat of strength and endurance.)
The short-finned species has been bred to fight for centuries now, said Precha, who served as the scientific advisor for a Discovery Channel programme on them in 2002. However, the fancier kind, such as pla kat jeen (‘Chinese fighting fish’, because their long fins resemble the ancient robes of China’s nobility), while still aggressive, are strictly bred for aquariums. And they’re a large part of the reason why Thailand has become the world’s second largest exporter of tropical fish.
What attracts fish fanatics to the betta, however, is the incredible variety of hues, patterns and at least 12 different kinds of tail. The International Betta Congress estimates that there are more than 26,000 different varieties of the fish. Breeders are coming up with new hybrids all the time and new colour combinations like gold and copper. Some species sell for up to US$150 each.
At today’s matches in Nakhon Pathom, many breeders came to show off their fighters and trawl for new customers. Also in attendance was the province’s biggest breeder. Sandit Tanyaporn has 230 big clay tanks at his nearby farm. Each tank can hold around 200 fish; and each month he sells around 500 of them for 50 baht each. When he’s breeding the fish, Sandit leaves the male and female in opposing tanks. The female can begin producing eggs just from looking at the male, and her ease of fertility has given rise to a slang term that rural Thai women use: Mai chai pla gat (“I’m not a biting fish”)—meaning they are not easily seduced. On the eve of spawning, the males are particularly territorial, so the breeders get them to relieve their sexual tension by taking some nips out of an opponent in the glass ring.
Once the male and female fish are finally put together, the male builds a bubble nest to store the eggs. The mating dance of the two fish can last for three hours, as they swim slowly to and fro with their fins wrapped around each other, which allows the male to fertilise the eggs. Then the two fish take turns pulling out her eggs. Occasionally, the female tries to eat her own offspring, so she is usually taken out of the jar while the male guards the bubble nest until the fry are born. Even afterwards, the male plays a matronly role (rare in the realm of the wild), helping the sliver-sized newborns stick to the bubble nest as he protects them against predators.
At the age of six months, the short-finned breed is trained to fight. The owners use ancient techniques such as putting them in a big tub and splashing the water around to increase its strength and stamina. Another technique is putting a male with a female to let him ‘exercise’ by chasing her around. Different herbs, such as Indian almond leaves, are added to the water to toughen the betta’s scales. Some owners also have their own trade secrets for breeding winners. Sandit, for instance, feeds his fighters shellfish—as supplements to their staple diet of mosquito larvae and live bloodworms—in order to make their tiny teeth stronger.
Although it’s a ‘sport’ for men, Thai women don’t mind it, Precha claims. “The women aren’t interested in playing, but they think it’s okay because they know that when a breeder is training his fish, he’s not fooling around with a second wife.” The businessman laughed. “He must stay home and train them—every day for two or three hours, same time morning and night.”
This is not entirely true; some Thai women hate it. At one point during the fights, Anchana, who was the only woman present besides an older lady selling food and drinks, picked up my dictaphone and pressed the record button, saying, “This is Thai men... sitting around, gambling, drinking, smoking, talking shit. They don’t do too much. Now you know why I have a farang boyfriend.” We shared a smile. She looked around at the 30 glass rings under the jackfruit tree beside the stand of bamboo, wrinkled her nose and swore in Thai. She went back to reading her celebrity gossip magazine, stopping occasionally to read me headlines she liked, “‘Robbie Williams Romp’… what does romp mean?”
Training only accounts for about 20 per cent of any fight, Precha estimated. The most important thing is the bloodline. Even that does not guarantee any blood money, though.
For professional gambler Gai, the X factor is the most exciting thing about the fish fights. “One day, a fish from a particular family wins a match,” he said, “but the next day he’ll lose.”
Gai (or ‘Chicken’), who preferred to go by his nickname, estimated that he is one of around 1,000 full-time gamblers on fighting fish, laying down bets six days a week in and around Bangkok. The 40-year-old explained that he makes a living off his obsession, but he won’t be buying a BMW any time soon.
Before the match begins, said Gai, the gamblers put down a stake of around 300–500 baht—though he’s heard of tycoons placing as much as 500,000 baht on a single match. After 30 minutes, once they’ve had a chance to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the two aquatic adversaries and look over their wounds and mobility, they might choose to raise the stakes, or other gamblers can get in on the action.
Gai reckoned the floating number of gamblers and fighting dens is actually increasing, even though the pastime is technically illegal and the police sporadically bust them. For gamblers like him, the attraction lies in the fact that it is “not like playing cards, because it’s very difficult to cheat when you gamble on the fish. And you actually have a chance to win sometimes, not like when you’re in a casino, where the odds are stacked against you.”
According to the rules, if a fish swims away and refuses to fight, then the match is over. This is what usually happens in the wild, but rarely in captivity. Also rare is a quick kill. They only occur when one of the contestants tears the gills of his rival so the fish can no longer breathe and slowly sinks to the bottom—dead in the water. More likely is that one of the gamblers will concede a match, because if he refuses to give up and his betta dies, then he’ll be fined 100 to 200 baht. Losing fish—if they survive (and most do)—are released into local rice fields, where they disseminate their combative genes.
Some of the matches we saw went on for three hours until the fighters’ fins and tails were in tatters. Even so, the two combatants could still lock jaws for minutes at a time, barely moving, while trying to tear the lips off the other fish. Transfixed by this ‘death kiss’, the gamblers stared at the glass jars. Minutes passed. Lit cigarettes smoldered. Energy drinks went untouched. And still we stared.
There was something very primeval going on here that reminded me of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club, which provided the framework for the film starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. The satirical depiction of a man so bored of being an office lackey—and stressing out over the purchase of a new living room set—that his only safety valve and sense of satisfaction comes through physical violence, may put a more human face on the perennial appeal of blood sports and martial arts.
But is it cruel?
Precha, the businessman with degrees in philosophy and computer science, paused for a long time and looked down at the dirt. Many of the people posting messages on his website have levelled this accusation at him. “I don’t consider it cruel, but I consider using cheap labour, breeding pigs and selling drugs very cruel... that’s the way of this fish. People breed pigs to eat. So you have to kill them. We breed fish to fight, so they have to fight. And why do you Western people not think boxing or wrestling is very cruel?”
Asked the same question, Sandit, the province’s biggest breeder, shrugged it off.
“Some people are cruel and some aren’t.”
And other people just like reading and writing stories about cruelty, so we can close the book and leave it between the lines and the covers.