Watching a cock fight, or as you'll hear very shortly, even listening to one being described, can be a very graphic and disturbing experience.

I saw many as a child and the experience helped push me away from my cockfighting family.

My life's very different now and I live an ocean apart from my Texas homeland.

Yet I'm compelled to head back and find out how those I left behind feel the loss of an activity

that's now illegal there and which they still consider perfectly acceptable.

I haven't been to a cock fight for more than 30 years. Right now though I'm

surrounded by hundreds of people cheering on the two beautiful roosters just a few meters in front of me against a backdrop of the

edges of the pit splattered with blood.

These two roasters are doing anything in their power to kill one another.

I'm Carlos Dews and for BBC World Service documentary

I'm in San Juan Puerto Rico to remind myself of the visceral power of such

fights before I travel on to my native Texas where I grew up as part of a family steeped in cockfighting.

This sport, as some people describe it, is now illegal there,

and for the most part I support that. After all I'm a Buddhist, a

vegetarian university English professor living in Italy, but being here it's

impossible to deny just how compelling this bloody spectacle is and how much it

clearly means to the people here and how much I realize now it meant to so many people

where I grew up.

My name is Alberto Albaran,

representative of the Cluka Jisicope, where you come to fight Rooster,

the owner, but each it's going to be like

five hundred dollars and the people in the audience can do bets as well between

...