Siamese fighting fish will even attack their own reflections.



Before fights, breeders compare the fish and match them by size.



Thailand is the world’s second largest breeder of tropical fish.

Fight to the death

By Jim Algie

13 July 2006

Siamese fighting fish are notorious for their viciously territorial behavior. For some, this is an opportunity to make – or lose – a few extra baht.

It’s 10am on a Wednesday in the 21st century, but it may as well be a thousand years ago. Under the shade cast by a jackfruit tree beside a bamboo grove, a millennium-old sport is about to begin. From their bags, men pull out whiskey bottles half-filled with water. Inside the bottles are male Siamese fighting fish, creatures so viciously territorial they will even attack their own reflections on a glass surface.

One of the fish breeders holds up two bottles to properly match the opponents by size. When the men agree it’s a fair fight and make their wagers, the fish are put into a square glass that stands a half-metre high.

Immediately, the gill covers on each side of their necks shoot out like protective armor and they charge at each other. Their iridescent scales shimmer as the blue-and-green fish nips at the fins of its red-and-purple rival. Like boxers, they circle each other, making quick strikes and then retreating. Unlike human combatants, they can fight like this for three hours or more. They can fight like this to the death.

This morning’s session in Nakhon Pathom province has pulled in a crowd of about 30 men, watching a like number of matches going on at once. Some of the men breed fighting fish. Some are wholesalers. And a few are professional gamblers. One of them says that fish fights also attract gangsters, hit-men and drug dealers, who gamble on fighting cocks during the dry season and pla kat (“biting fish”) during the months of the monsoon. Sensing my nervousness, he tries to reassure me that these rough-and-tumble characters holster their firepower and rein in their homicidal tendencies when they’re gambling – well, most of the time.

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 players, even in Bangkok, which has around 20 fighting rings, are from rural areas, and have never attended high school.

But one man here shatters all the stereotypes: Precha Jintasaerwong holds master’s degrees in both philosophy and computer science. He exports the perennially popular fish around the world through his web site (http://www.plakatthai.com) and says the sport has big followings in Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia, as well as smaller cults in Singapore and Hong Kong.

Like many Thai boys, he remembers playing with them when he was a kid. Back then, the fish could be found in the canals of Bangkok. Nowadays, they thrive in rice paddies and irrigation ditches in the pastoral parts of the country.

The short-finned species, known as betta splendens, has been bred to fight for some 200 years, says Precha, who served as the “scientific advisor” for a Discovery Channel program on them in 2002. Fish that lose a fight, if they survive (and most do), are released in local rice fields where they disseminate their combative genes. But the fancier kind, known as pla kat jeen (“Chinese fighting fish,” because their long fins resemble the ancient robes of China’s nobility) are still aggressive, but strictly bred for aquariums. And they’re a large part of the reason why Thailand is now the world’s second largest exporter of tropical fish.

Many breeders come to show off their fighters and net some new customers. At today’s matches in Nakhon Pathom, the province’s biggest breeder is in attendance. Sandit Tanyaporn has 230 big clay tanks at his nearby farm. Each tank can hold about 200 fish; and each month he sells about 500 of them for 50 baht each. When he’s breeding the fish, the 30-year-old leaves the male and female in opposing glasses. Since the female can begin producing eggs just from looking at the male, her ease of fertility has given rise to a slang term rural Thai women use: “Mai chai pla kat” (“I’m not a biting fish,” meaning they are not easily seduced.) On the eve of spawning, the males are particularly territorial, so breeders get them to relieve their sexual angst by taking some bites 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 about three hours, as they swim slowly to and fro, 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, however, the female tries to eat her own offspring, so the male has to guard the bubble nest until the fry are born.

At the age of six months, the short-finned strain is trained to fight. The trainers use 1,000-year-old techniques like putting the fish in a big tub and splashing the water around to increase its strength and stamina. Another technique is putting a male in 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 scales.

Some of the breeders 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, women don’t mind it, says Precha.

“The women are not interested in playing, but they think it’s okay because they know when a breeder is training his fish he will not have any second wives,” Precha laughs, “because he must stay home and train – every day for two or three hours, same time morning and night.”

But some women hate it. At one point during the fish fights my female translator, who is the only woman there besides an older lady selling food and drinks, picks up my cassette recorder and talks into the microphone: “This is Thai men…sitting around, gambling, drinking, smoking, talking. They don’t do too much. Now you know why I have a farang boyfriend.”

Training only accounts for about 20 percent of any fight, Precha estimates. The most important thing is the bloodline. Even that, however, is no money-back guarantee.

For Gai, a professional gambler, the lack of certainty is the most exciting thing about the fish fights. “One day a fish from a particular family wins a match,” he says, “but the next day he’ll lose.”

Gai is one of about 1,000 full-time fish gamblers, laying down bets six days a week. The 40-year-old explains that he makes a living off his obsession, but he won’t be buying a BMW any time soon.

Before the match begins, says Gai, who prefers just to go by his nickname, the gamblers put down a stake of 300 to 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 reckons the number of gamblers and fighting dens is actually increasing, even though the sport is technically illegal and the police sporadically bust them. For gamblers like him, the attraction is that “it’s 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 and gambling.”

According to the rules, if a fish swims away and refuses to fight, then the match is over. But this rarely happens. Also rare is a quick kill. They only occur when one of the opponents gouges 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 bet dies, then he’ll be fined 100-200 baht.

But some of today’s matches go on for three hours until the fighters’ fins and tails are in tatters. Even so, the two combatants lock jaws for minutes at a time, barely moving, while trying to tear off the lips of the other fish. Rapt with fascination, the gamblers stare at the glass cases. Minutes pass. Lit cigarettes go unsmoked. Energy drinks go untouched. And still we stare.

There’s something very primeval going on here. It reminds me of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club and the subsequent film starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. The book’s satirical depiction of a man so bored of being an office lackey – and agonising over the purchase of a new living room set – that he can only find release, and a little satisfaction, through physical violence, may help to explain the lure of fighting fish.

But is it overly cruel? Precha pauses for a long time and looks down at the dirt. Many of the people posting messages on his website have leveled this accusation at him.

“I don’t consider it cruel, but I consider using cheap labour, breeding pigs and selling drugs very cruel…but that’s the way of this fish. It’s something like, you breed pigs to eat. So you have to kill. 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 of biting fish, shrugs it off and gives the same answer somebody must have given a thousand years ago, which will still be reiterated in another millennium: “Some people are cruel and some aren’t.”

Thai Day

I love those fishes, they look damn good...

I used to own an aquarium. I kept just the one Siamese Fighter in it along with other species. Nice looking fish, making them fight to the death is pathetic.

I used to have one of this fish! lol in my area, they call it "fighting fish"