Chicken boxing

Can't get through a legislative session in this state without one of these numbers showing up somewhere.

State lawmakers spent a portion of Tuesday morning discussing the finer points of a “sport” known as chicken boxing. And no, it wasn’t an April Fools’ joke.

It started when state Sen. Jean-Paul Morrell, a New Orleans Democrat, introduced Senate Bill 523, a measure that would expand the state’s current ban on cockfighting to include all types of chickens. The bill also would make it a felony to possess paraphernalia such as spurs, leather training spur covers and other items commonly used in the illegal sport.

SB523 ran into a little trouble when state Sen. Elbert Guillory, an Opelousas Republican, said the bill is too broad. He said the bill would make it illegal for people that raise “15th and 20th generation fighting birds that are exported legitimately and legally to other nations”

That’s when Morrell interrupted, telling his colleague that raising chickens for fighting is illegal.

“No, no. Not for fighting,” Guillory said. “They just raise them.”

“So, they’re raising chickens who are 15th generation fighting chickens, and they’re exporting them just to export them,” Morrell asked. “That sounds like someone who buys a lot of pseudoephedrine and ships it to a trailer in the middle of Texas for the fact that someone might have a big cold.”

“I don’t know what ephedrine is,” Guillory responded.

In his defense, we already know that Guillory's constituents  raise chickens for purposes other than fighting.  Sometimes they just need their bones for reading the portents and whatnot.

A bill to repeal the law was recently killed for the third straight year by Louisiana’s Senate Education Committee. In this post on Slate, Zach Kopplin writes about Louisiana state Sen. Elbert Guillory, who explained at a May hearing that he doesn’t think the law should be repealed because he wouldn’t want to dismiss faith healing as a “pseudoscience.” Guillory even describes his encounter with the faith healer, who was “half naked” and used bones in a ceremony.

As to his familiarity with ephedrine and its derivatives, the jury is still out.