Blood sport

A bloodsport is a sport or entertainment which by design includes a risk that an animal or human may be killed or wounded.

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 involves blood being drawn, and sometimes results 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.

Animal welfare

Among animal welfare activists, the term may be applied to a wide variety of activities, and is considered pejorative by some. Modern hunters, for example, say that they abide by strict regulations and have the technology for much cleaner, more merciful kills. Fly fishing enthusiasts and others who practice catch and release also consider the term misleading or inaccurate if it is applied to their sport while critics of the method consider it to be quite unpleasant from the viewpoint of the fish.

Use of the term "blood sport"

Animal welfare

List of things that have been referred to as blood sports

Campaigning organisations

See also

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Use of the term "blood sport"

Animal welfare

List of things that have been referred to as blood sports

Campaigning organisations

See also