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carefully dieted and treated with shampooing and medicaments. When they are being made ready for an approaching fight, a constant watch is kept over them, and the chiefs, lazy as they are at other times, will get up several times in a night to see whether their servants are attending properly to the animals. Rams are taken for quick runs by way of exercise, and are exposed from time to time to the heat of a wood fire which is supposed to rid them of their superfluous fat.
Not a whit less care does the Achehnese noble bestow on his fighting cocks. In the day time they are fastened with cords to the posts underneath the house; but at night they are brought into the front verandah. They too rob their owners of a good deal of their night's rest. The neighbours of these amateurs are often waked at night by the cackling set up by the cocks while they are being bathed and having their bodies shampooed to make them supple; occasionally too they are allowed to fly at one another so that they may not forget their exalted destiny.
The other fighting birds, such as the leuëʾ and the meureubōʾ (both varieties of the dove, called by the Malays těkukur and kětitiran)[1] the puyōh (a kind of quail) and the chémpala are kept in cages; with many princes and ulèëbalangs a leisurely promenade past their prisons takes the place of their devotional exercises in the morning. The daruëts (crickets) are kept in bamboo tubes (bulōh daruët).
No Achehnese devotes a measure of care to the cleanliness, the feeding, the repose and the pleasure of his own child in any way comparable to that he bestows on his scrupulous training of these fighting animals.
The great and formal tournaments of animals are held in glanggangs (enclosures) for which wide open spaces are selected. The arena is either marked off with posts or else simply indicated by the crowd of spectators who group themselves around it in an oval circle or square. Certain fixed days of the week on which fights regularly take place in a glanggang, are called gantòë (succession or turn).
All who desire to enter their animals in a contest against each other in the arena must first obtain the consent of the ulèëbalang in whose territory the glanggang is situated, whereupon they enter into the
- ↑ The Malays in the N. of the Straits call them měrěbōʾ the identical word used by the Achehnese, making allowance for the difference in pronunciation. (Translator).
