- In Peru, where cockfighting is not only legal but regarded as an important cultural practice, cockfighters have long brought their roosters to fight wearing sharp spurs fashioned from the “teeth” of sawfish.
- The largetooth sawfish (Pristis pristis), the only sawfish that lives in Peru, is incredibly rare and considered critically endangered.
- Advocates for the species both within and outside the sport have increasingly realized that cockfighting plays a role in preventing or hastening its demise in Peru and are working to eliminate sawfish spurs from the sport.
- Although trade in sawfish parts is now illegal in Peru, times are tough for the country’s artisanal fishers. Experts worry that demand for sawfish spurs could drive more sawfish killings than the species can support.
Martín Maceda can still rattle off the exact date of his most memorable fishing encounter. On March 1, 2014, he was 8 kilometers (5 miles) off the north coast of Peru, hauling in the catch like he had every day for decades, when he saw a colossal sharklike creature trapped in the net. He quickly realized it wasn’t a shark, swordfish or any animal he’d ever encountered before.
“I’m 57 years old and have been fishing since I was 12, and I’d always heard of pez sierra [sawfish] and that, before, there used to be a lot of them,” the artisanal fisher recalled. “I had only ever seen photos in books until that day.”
The largetooth sawfish (Pristis pristis) that Maceda and his crewmates had accidentally ensnared was nearly 5 meters (16 feet) from the tail to the tip of its chainsaw-shaped snout. The boat’s owner planned to keep the “tooth”-studded beak as a relic. But when the boat’s motor broke and cash was in short supply, he soon sold the sawfish’s namesake feature to cockfighters, who would fashion the teeth into sharp spurs for roosters to wield in fights.
To outsiders, roosters battling for sport with fish parts strapped to their ankles may sound surprising, even outlandish. But in the decade since Maceda encountered the largetooth sawfish, advocates for the species have increasingly realized that cockfighting plays a role in preventing or hastening its demise in Peru.
A mysterious giant
Largetooth sawfish are slow-growing gentle giants. They’re the only one of the five sawfish species historically found in Peru and are considered critically endangered by the IUCN. Sawfish are part of a group of sharklike rays sometimes called “rhino rays” for their protruding facial appendages or rostra (“rostrum” in the singular), which sawfish use to detect and hunt prey. The “teeth” that jut out from the rostrum and give sawfish their namesake appearance are actually hardened modified scales. Like rhinos, they suffer from habitat loss, but also from a black market in which their defining feature, the rostrum and rostral teeth, is trafficked. Sawfish are so understudied in certain places, such as along the coasts of Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, that almost nothing is known about them. The largetooth sawfish is now so rare in the region that for several decades it was assumed to be extirpated.
“At the Latin American level, we cannot talk about sawfish populations because no one knows even an approximate number for the populations in their own countries,” Mariano Cabanillas-Torpoco, a research fellow at Brazil’s Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation and sawfish expert, told Mongabay.
In 2016 and 2017, Cabanillas-Torpoco led an international team of scientists and conservationists in surveying hundreds of fishers and dozens of cockfighters to learn more about where sawfish once lived and how captured sawfish in Peru and Ecuador are used. Of the 49 Peruvian cockfighters who agreed to be interviewed, more than half had purchased sawfish-tooth spurs at least once in the preceding five years.
The cockfighting connection
Unlike in the United States and many European countries, cockfighting in Peru is not only legal but formalized in arenas throughout the country that look like miniature coliseums, where spectators can watch the toughest gamefowl go to battle. Cockfighting has a 500-year history in Peru, and many cockfighters are fiercely protective of the blood sport’s cultural importance.
In the late 20th century, three types of spurs dominated the cockfighting arenas: plastic, turtle shell (typically hawksbill, Eretmochelys imbricata, another critically endangered species) and sawfish tooth. By 2000, some Peruvian cockfighting leagues began banning participants from using spurs made from animal products. But preventing extinction wasn’t the only reason. Roosters can suffer more severe wounds from sawfish-tooth spurs compared with artificial ones, and using animal-based spurs was viewed as “unsportsmanlike,” according to Victor Negrete, president of the Lima-based Worldwide Gamefowl Breeders Association and a proponent of eradicating sawfish-tooth spurs from the bloody sport.
Cabanillas-Torpoco takes a pragmatic view of why cockfighters are motivated to protect sawfish: “They see it as an opportunity to promote the sport, by saying ‘Cockfighters are encouraging sawfish conservation.’”
Eliminating demand for sawfish products from cockfighting “is a long, delicate process,” Negrete told Mongabay. For more than two decades, he has provided fellow cockfighters in Peru with resources to spread the word about abandoning animal-based spurs, including presentations at cockfighting conventions, flyers posted in arenas and social media.
Kerstin Forsberg, a co-author of the sawfish-cockfighting study and the director of the Peruvian marine conservation nonprofit Planeta Océano, told Mongabay it’s important to understand that cockfighting isn’t the main factor that pushed the species to the brink of extinction in the region — habitat destruction and incidental capture deserve credit for that. But cockfighting “is a factor that has to be addressed” now that the species is so rare, she said.
Forsberg pointed to several links on Facebook and Mercado Libre, a popular Latin American selling site similar to eBay and Amazon, that were openly advertising spurs made of sawfish teeth. Several vendors included their full names and phone numbers. On one 2024 image from a business page in northern Peru showing off several sets of sawfish-tooth spurs, one Facebook user commented, “Aren’t these illegal now?” Most other comments were inquiring about the price. (The post appears to have since been removed from public viewing.) Spurs sold in Peru today can originate from as far away as Brazil and Central America.
Negrete said the fact that prices for sawfish spurs fell from their peak in the 1990s, despite the supply remaining vanishingly rare, proves demand is dwindling. He also noted that cultural shifts can be inherently slow but insisted that cockfighters who still sell and buy sawfish-tooth spurs are now the minority.
“It’s not a change that takes just one day,” he said.
Return of the sawfish
Alejandra Mendoza was collecting data in a northern Peruvian fishing village in 2015 when she got a frantic call from a local fisher.
Mendoza, then a young fisheries scientist fresh from the capital city and now the president of the Peruvian marine conservation nonprofit ecOceánica, arrived at the dock to find a 6-meter (20-foot) sawfish tangled in a gillnet. She didn’t know then that the sawfish would be among the first documented in her country in decades.
“The fisherman who called me wanted to put it in a pond as a tourist attraction,” she told Mongabay. But she was even more shocked to learn that the other fishers hoped to kill the sawfish and sell the snout to cockfighters.
Once she learned how much the fishermen could gain, Mendoza realized that “it’s like winning the lottery for them.” A largetooth sawfish might have up to two dozen pairs of sharp teeth protruding from its rostrum, and each tooth might make up to four sets of spurs. The total payout adds up to thousands of dollars — the equivalent of what many artisanal fishers make in the better part of a year.
That encounter, along with a handful of other sightings reported in the following years, drove local marine conservationists and scientists to advocate for protecting the remaining sawfish. In early 2020, the Peruvian Ministry of Production banned the capture, transport and sale of any sawfish body parts within the country. Advocates say the next step for saving sawfish must include better training for enforcers to detect and recognize the sawfish teeth after they’ve been shaped and polished into cockfighting spurs.
“They’re very easy to transport and sell, and there’s a lack of awareness at every level, including the inspectors,” Forsberg said.
Shifting seas
Although sawfish protections have gained traction, dwindling catches for Peruvian artisanal fishers in recent years could undermine their progress, Mendoza said.
“Ten years ago, fish were abundant on the docks. You couldn’t even walk between the boxes — the fishermen yelled at me, ‘Get out of here, we’re moving fish,’” Mendoza said. “Now you go to the empty docks.” The government’s artisanal catch data for the region, which she has viewed, support this observation, she said.
Edgardo Cruz, a fisherman from the northernmost coastal province of Tumbes, concurred. He told Mongabay that the last few years have been among the worst he’s experienced in his 35 years of fishing, saying “the economic situation is bottoming out.”
Research on exactly what’s driving the recent downturn for artisanal fishers in the region is scant. Peruvian fisheries are famously sensitive to year-to-year shifts in ocean conditions and are also vulnerable to human-caused climate change, while long-term research suggests overfishing is an issue as well.
There’s no organized fishery for sawfish; they’re just too rare. But the allure of the fish’s reputation for being so valuable to cockfighters could sway desperate fishers who would otherwise let the animals live to bring them to shore instead.
Mendoza, who was able to convince the fishers to disentangle and release the sawfish they captured in 2015, said she thinks fishers’ financial woes are substantial enough now to affect the fates of sawfish they may accidentally capture. “With how little income they earn now,” she said, “I don’t know if they could bring themselves to release so much money very easily.”
Cruz, the Tumbes fisher, laughed when asked if he thinks a sawfish captured now would still be easily sold despite its being illegal.
“Of course! It would sell immediately,” he said. “With how the [economic] situation is now, fishermen will catch and sell anything they can.”
Banner image: A judge watches a cockfight in Peru. Image by Peter Baldes via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
Citation:
Cabanillas-Torpoco, M., Forsberg, K., Rosas-Luis, R., Bustamante Rosell, M., Ampuero-Portocarrero, C., Hernando, Á., … Leeney, R. (2023). Status of the largetooth sawfish in Ecuador and Peru, and use of rostral teeth in cockfighting. Endangered Species Research, 52, 247-264. doi:10.3354/esr01279
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