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Laughing Cocks Give a Lesson in Value

By webadmin on 11:19 am March 25, 2011.
Category Archive

Vento Saudale

ARp 5 million ($575) rooster may sound like serious business, but for Mustopa Mughni, it’s a laughing matter.

Mustopa doesn’t raise ordinary farmyard fowl. He looks after a special breed of roosters whose crowing is not so much “cock-a-doodle-doo” as it is “ha ha ha.”

These are laughing cocks, raised and trained to make sounds that mimic human laughter. For their owners, they are a source of pride, pampered with ornate cages and special high-protein feed to prepare them for laughing contests.

“I first got really interested in these laughing roosters when I saw a friend raising them,” Mustopa tells the Jakarta Globe during a visit to his pen at the Daarul Mughni Al-Maaliki Islamic school in Bogor. “So I thought I’d try my hand at raising some.”

He wasn’t kidding. He prepared a 2,000-square-meter lot where he now has 100 of the cackling fowl strutting their stuff.

These birds, Mustopa says, originated in South Sulawesi.

“They’re called ayam raja [king chickens] over there because only the Bugis kings were allowed to breed them,” he says.

Now it’s the students at Mustopa’s school who are getting their hands dirty feeding the valuable birds and cleaning out their cages.

Umam, 16, says feeding and cleaning take place twice a day, at 6 a.m. and 4 p.m. “The cages always have to be clean because this breed of chicken tends to fall ill quite easily,” he says.

Each of these pedigreed birds gets a cage that is 1.2 meters tall. They are fed a mishmash of soybean pellets and fibrous plants.

The high cost of this breeding is easily covered by selling the hatchlings and adult birds to other laughing cock enthusiasts. A day-old chick sells for Rp 100,000, while a 3-month-old chick goes for Rp 300,000 to Rp 500,000.

But it’s the roosters — with gleaming tail feathers and erect combs — that are the real prize, Mustopa says. “For a mature bird, aged 9 months and up, the price ranges from Rp 3 million to Rp 5 million.”

The birds are differentiated by the tempo of their laughter. The first is the slow type, which crows with a drawn-out staccato of four to 12 guffaws at a time. Then there is the dangut type, which as its name suggests, crows in a machine gun-like burst. This type typically sells for more.

Besides feeding and caring for the chickens, the students at the Daarul Mughni Al-Maaliki school also breed them. It’s a delicate process that requires matching the cocks with the best voices with the most fertile hens, then getting them together in a cage — early morning is best, Mustopa says — and letting nature take its course.

For the students, raising the unique birds is meant to help instill a sense of entrepreneurship, says Abdul Hadik, the manager of the Islamic school’s business program.

“We’ve got to get them interested in entrepreneurship from an early age so that when they graduate, they’re ready to face the world,” he says.

“Usually if you graduate from an Islamic high school, your only option is to become a religious teacher or cleric. But we want to show that the students can be entrepreneurs, journalists or even artists if they so choose.”

The school also raises and sells a Malaysian breed of chicken, known as Serama, that is reputed to be the smallest chicken in the world.

The school sells the birds of a smaller feather for Rp 2.5 million each, Abdul says.

 


Additional reporting by Antara

Students from Daarul Mughni Al-Maaliki Islamic school in Bogor posing in front of one of their caged laughing roosters.   JG Photo/Vento Saudale

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Laughing Cocks Give a Lesson in Value

By webadmin on 11:19 am March 25, 2011.
Category Archive

Vento Saudale

ARp 5 million ($575) rooster may sound like serious business, but for Mustopa Mughni, it’s a laughing matter.

Mustopa doesn’t raise ordinary farmyard fowl. He looks after a special breed of roosters whose crowing is not so much “cock-a-doodle-doo” as it is “ha ha ha.”

These are laughing cocks, raised and trained to make sounds that mimic human laughter. For their owners, they are a source of pride, pampered with ornate cages and special high-protein feed to prepare them for laughing contests.

“I first got really interested in these laughing roosters when I saw a friend raising them,” Mustopa tells the Jakarta Globe during a visit to his pen at the Daarul Mughni Al-Maaliki Islamic school in Bogor. “So I thought I’d try my hand at raising some.”

He wasn’t kidding. He prepared a 2,000-square-meter lot where he now has 100 of the cackling fowl strutting their stuff.

These birds, Mustopa says, originated in South Sulawesi.

“They’re called ayam raja [king chickens] over there because only the Bugis kings were allowed to breed them,” he says.

Now it’s the students at Mustopa’s school who are getting their hands dirty feeding the valuable birds and cleaning out their cages.

Umam, 16, says feeding and cleaning take place twice a day, at 6 a.m. and 4 p.m. “The cages always have to be clean because this breed of chicken tends to fall ill quite easily,” he says.

Each of these pedigreed birds gets a cage that is 1.2 meters tall. They are fed a mishmash of soybean pellets and fibrous plants.

The high cost of this breeding is easily covered by selling the hatchlings and adult birds to other laughing cock enthusiasts. A day-old chick sells for Rp 100,000, while a 3-month-old chick goes for Rp 300,000 to Rp 500,000.

But it’s the roosters — with gleaming tail feathers and erect combs — that are the real prize, Mustopa says. “For a mature bird, aged 9 months and up, the price ranges from Rp 3 million to Rp 5 million.”

The birds are differentiated by the tempo of their laughter. The first is the slow type, which crows with a drawn-out staccato of four to 12 guffaws at a time. Then there is the dangut type, which as its name suggests, crows in a machine gun-like burst. This type typically sells for more.

Besides feeding and caring for the chickens, the students at the Daarul Mughni Al-Maaliki school also breed them. It’s a delicate process that requires matching the cocks with the best voices with the most fertile hens, then getting them together in a cage — early morning is best, Mustopa says — and letting nature take its course.

For the students, raising the unique birds is meant to help instill a sense of entrepreneurship, says Abdul Hadik, the manager of the Islamic school’s business program.

“We’ve got to get them interested in entrepreneurship from an early age so that when they graduate, they’re ready to face the world,” he says.

“Usually if you graduate from an Islamic high school, your only option is to become a religious teacher or cleric. But we want to show that the students can be entrepreneurs, journalists or even artists if they so choose.”

The school also raises and sells a Malaysian breed of chicken, known as Serama, that is reputed to be the smallest chicken in the world.

The school sells the birds of a smaller feather for Rp 2.5 million each, Abdul says.

 


Additional reporting by Antara

Students from Daarul Mughni Al-Maaliki Islamic school in Bogor posing in front of one of their caged laughing roosters.   JG Photo/Vento Saudale

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