In the summer of 2010, researcher Nichar Gregory stood out like a sore thumb in cockfighting rings around Thailand. Amid the arenas’ boisterous crowds watching and betting on the matches, Gregory was usually one of the few women, and a distinctly Caucasian-looking one at that, being only half Thai. But she took it all in, dutifully jotting notes on her clipboard and watching birds fight—sometimes to the death.
“It’s very high energy. It can be contagious. But then you realize it’s about these two birds trying to hurt each other, and it sort of brings you back down,” says Gregory, who never got used to the brutality, even after attending several matches.
After her graduation from the University of East Anglia, Gregory teamed up with conservation biologist Diana Bell, whose East Anglia lab was studying the role of cultural practices, such as cockfighting, in the spread of the H5N1 bird ...
