Bird Fights and Cage Matchs--Stephen Huysman

OK, so I all but killed the Post of the Week Feature due to my constant back and forth from Ithaca to Newark, the constant stories and poems I grade for my creative writing class, and my own procrastination for making a well-crafted blog post. I'll catch up the postings in the next week. Here's the best from last Sunday:

The other day as I was walking home from class I saw three birds flying erratically. When I looked closer, I saw that two of the birds were teaming up on the other of a different species in an avian dogfight. I don't normally do much bird watching, as my vision is quite shortsighted and as a botany student, I am often observing terrestrial objects. However, I couldn't help but take a few minutes to watch this bird fight. Watching the birds engaged in aerial combat over territory, food, defense of offspring, or whatever the reason was, was truly enthralling. After a few minutes I tired of watching and continued walking and didn't give it much thought.

A few days later in this class, we watched the "Hell in a Cell" match between The Undertaker and Mankind. In the match, Mankind is absolutely brutalized. He gets thrown off the top of the cage that must be at least 25 feet high, is choke slammed through its chain-link ceiling onto the mat, is repeatedly tossed onto a pile of thumbtacks; frankly, at times, it was difficult to watch. Here, this violence was performed solely for the entertainment of the audience. There was (as far as I know) no backstage grudge between Calaway and Foley, however you wouldn't think that from the way they pummeled on each other.

I didn't think much about the bird fight at the time, but after watching wrestling I've seen how there are some parallels between the performances. The birds were very much engaged in an aerial wrestling match over whatever resource it was they were fighting over. The chased made sharp turns and dives in an attempt to evade his pursuers much as the bodies of the wrestlers slip in and out of one another's grasps as they grapple for dominance. Ultimately, I was being entertained by live beings engaged in physical and painful struggle.

However, unlike the wrestlers, the birds certainly had a real life grudge behind their fight and that grudge could very well have been a matter of life or death. Their fight was the result of natural interspecific competition, a fact of life that has challenged all creatures on Earth for the past four billion years. None of the birds probably wished for or enjoyed the struggle; instead they were simply acting, as they needed to in order to survive. The wrestlers on the other hand were paid to perform their struggle. Both wrestlers desired to inflict and receive physical pain to entertain the audience as part of their job.

In that regard, maybe the two struggles were not that different. Both the birds and the wrestlers were performing simply as their occupations required. If the wrestlers were reluctant to perform as the ring required they would probably not be wrestlers. However, society provides them with a number of options to make a living that would require creating far less pain. The birds on the other hand, had no choice but to be birds. At that moment, their livelihoods were challenged and they reacted accordingly. Certainly, both the birds and wrestlers could have received serious injuries from their matches, however the wrestlers were not seeking to seriously or permanently damage each other’s bodies.

It’s strange that given how much more serious the consequences of the bird fight were than the wrestling match, how much less attention I paid to it. I watched that wrestling match with unwavering attention the whole way though, whereas I tired of the bird fight after a few minutes and went about to perform other tasks of trivial importance required of my life. Especially given the retrospective seriousness of the incident, I’m surprised how lightly I took it even at the time I was watching. In my life in a modern, developed nation, I’m not exposed to much violence outside of fictional media. Then, when I’m confronted with real, natural acts of violence, I’m inclined to perceive it the way I am most familiar with: as entertainment.