25
Ratliff won his first derby in 1951 in Carlsbad, New Mexico. By 1968, he had won
more derbies than any man alive. So he started a school to share his secrets.
It wasn't a cockfighting school, Ratliff says. It was a school to teach beginning
cockers how to care for their birds, how to condition them and how to help them
heal if they survived a fight. Classes were two weeks long. Instruction was detailed
to the point of teaching the proper way to pick up a bird (one hand on the leg, the
other on the breast to avoid hurting them). He even taught a technique for birds
that became aggressive toward their owners. Feed them out of your hand, he'd
say. At first, they'll peck you, but after a while they will eat the food, be it apples
or grain or millet, and you will regain their trust.
Roosters overshadowed every part of Ratliff's life. He worked jobs -- from meat
cutter to oil-field pumper -- that allowed him time to feed and care for his chickens. He raised his oldest son, Mike Jr., to become a cockfighting man. Finally, his
wife had had enough. In 1974, after 30 years of marriage and three children, she
said she wanted a divorce. It's either me or the chickens, she said.
"Well, honey," Ratliff says he told her, "don't let the door catch your shirttail on
the way out."
Ratliff plowed on, taking his school
on the road. He went all over the
South. Once, in Georgia, he ran
into two representatives of the Humane Society who protested his
habit of killing the vultures and
hawks that preyed on his gamefowl. Whenever Ratliff killed a hawk
or a fox, he strung its carcass up
on a fence around the property
where he was holding his school.
There was a fine in Georgia for killing hawks, the man told him. Ratliff
wasn't impressed. "We're just killing the damn things that eats our
chickens," he says he told the man.
"By the way, I'd just as soon hang
your ass on that chain-link fence
Teacher Mike and Student Nene. Nene
Abello of the Philippines, himself an acknowledge master breeder and cocker has been a student of Mike Ratliff.
Thanks for sharing Roosterman
N0. 38