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Bloodsport or blood sport is a term coined or popularized by author Henry S. Salt (1851-1939) to describe sport or entertainment which he believed to be cruel, involving needless animal or human suffering.
The term can refer to chase sports such as coursing or beagling, combat sports such as cockfighting, or other activities. It also includes spectacles that involve pitting one animal against another in a fight. These usually involve blood being drawn, and sometimes result in the death of one or more animals.
Use of the term "blood sport"
According to the Oxford English Dictionary the earliest use of the term is in reference to mounted hunting, where the quarry would be actively chased as in fox hunting or hare coursing. Before firearms a hunter using arrows or a spear might also wound an animal, which would then be chased and perhaps killed at close range, as in medieval boar hunting.
Later the term seems to have been applied to various kinds of baiting and forced combat: bear-baiting, cockfighting and then later developments such as dog fighting and rat-baiting. These were appreciably less like a modern human sport in that animals were not willing participants, but had to be specially bred, confined or forced to fight. It was after the development of such activities in the Victorian era that social reform activists actively opposed them on grounds of ethics, morality and animal welfare.
By further extension other activities may now be called "blood sports". Sometimes this is clearly figurative, as when politics is likened to a blood sport. Sometimes this is anachronistic, as when the term is applied retroactively to Roman gladiators. Sometimes it is rhetorical, as when professional boxing is compared to the fatal combats of Ancient Rome.
Current Issues
Fair Chase Hunting
Animal welfare activists have been persistant in efforts to expand this term (especially in its pejorative sense) to a wide variety of activities not intended by its originators in the nineteenth century. Its usage to describe modern hunting is opposed by a significant number of the participants in that sport, who agree more with the term's originators [1] than present-day activists. The point of modern hunting is to preserve the ethics of fair chase rather than to impose needless animal suffering. This point is fiercely denied by anti-hunting activists.[citation needed]
Bull fighting
Today, under lobbying pressure, strict limitations on blood sports apply. Certain rare ones remain however legal under strict control (e.g. bull fighting in Spain), but are facing an important decrease in the world, despite their supporters' vocal minority.
Fox Hunting
In England, for instance, fox-hunting has become recently fully illegal and banned. This was widely supported by the vast majority of the population. This legislation is now in place and often enforced.
Notes
- ^ Greenwood, George (1914). "Bloodsports". Stag Hunting pp 1-33 in Killing for Sport: Essays by Various Writers, edited by Henry S. Salt. George Bell and Sons, Ltd, London. Retrieved 2006-12-17.
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