SECRET COCK-FIGHTING.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 219, 16 August 1937, Page 7

SECRET COCK-FIGHTING.

ILLEGAL SPORT FLOURISHES. LONDON, July 17. Cock-fighting, illegal in England since 1849, is being practised on Salisbury Plain. Gamecocks are in trainingYvithin eight miles of Salisbury and there is a gamecock hospital with everything in readiness for the reception" of birds injured during fighting. A contest is arranged for each Sunday morning, but no one will disclose wliere it is to be held. Carloads of men arrive from London and when they reach a certain point on the plain discreet signals are given by scouts to indicate where the fights are to be held. Ordinary motorists who see tho signals think nothing of them. Only those who know what the signals mean turn off the main road to the isolated barn where the fights take place. The following Sunday the contest will be in an entirely different part of the plain. The organisers are taking no chance of a police raid. . It is understood that the “mains are organised by cock-fighting promotors from the North of England. Owing to the efforts of the police to stamp out the sport, they have had to leave their favourite spots in the Yorkshire dales and come south. Peers, retired officers, farmers, millers, shopkeepers, all rub shoulders with each other at the ringsideinspectors of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals disguised as countrymen will attempt to “gate-crash” at the fights.