MVN - Most Valuable Network

Blood Sports are Savagery, not Fair Competition

This installment of The Last Page is by Anthony Brown, who writes for MVN at Hog Heaven, a look at the Washington Redskins. He writes about blood sports, and how they have no place in society…

Maybe it’s seeing the silver lining in a dark cloud, but one good thing will emerge from the Michael Vick dogfighting scandal — a national debate on what is animal cruelty. We are not sure of what “Ookie” Vick is guilty of, but the federal government accuses Vick of crossing state lines to finance and organize a large-scale dogfighting ring, including one instance when Vick personally participated in the killing of eight young dogs too untalented to fight. The indictment did not label the young dogs as “puppies,” but Michael Vick will surely be tagged puppy-killer at some point.

Michael Vick has his supporters. Few of the Vick-backers whose statements I have read raise the innocent-until-proven-guilty argument. Instead, they reason that the charges should not be felonies because dogfighting is no different than hunting and fishing. One caller to a Washington, DC, sports talk radio station equated dogfighting to horse racing.

Let’s take a look at that contention. Without going into the morality of cruelty, can dogfighting be called a sport like hunting?

Where is the Sporting Chance?

Blood sports are not sport. Sports are characterized by fair competition, where the contestants have a more-or-less equal chance to win. Athleticism, skills, and “the breaks” shape the outcome. Contests are fought in an environment that favors neither side, home field notwithstanding. To be a sport, there must be a sporting chance for both sides.

Hunting pits a well-armed hunter against well-equipped prey and is fought in the prey’s environment. The hunter’s high powered weaponry and technology does not assure a successful hunt. The prey has sensory superiority and is more familiar with the ground. It has ample opportunity to escape. That’s a key point. The ethics of hunting demand a fair chase. The hunter must beat the hunted on its own ground. That requires knowledge of the species, fitness to track, and sufficient weapons skills to achieve a clean kill. The hunted must have freedom of movement and full use of their instinct and senses to avoid detection, or to escape. The hunted should have full use of their natural defensive tools, entailing some risk to the hunter. To be a sport, there must be a chase, a fair hunt. To the Boone and Crockett Club, the fair hunt means that the hunter does not have an unfair advantage over the prey.

The fair hunt applies to fishing. A rod, reel and hook are inefficient for harvesting fish. They give the fish a sporting chance to escape (usually after stealing my bait). The fish has to voluntarily take the bait. Moving in their environment gives skittish fish the advantage. Fishing tackle is matched to the target fish: light tackle for pan fish; heavy tackle for game fish. It would be unethical to pull a perch with a tuna rig. Landing a large game fish is a test of strength and endurance. Landing a small fish with light tackle is a test of skill.

Many fishermen release their catch, but the frequency of fish escaping on their own gives rise to all those “fish stories.”

Hunting and fishing are legal activities with the authorities regulating: when it takes place, which prey you may take and where it can be taken. Participants are required to be licensed and firearms registered. Hunting and fishing are openly done with the government maintaining an interest in the welfare of the hunted species. The open environment, the fair hunt and government oversight provides a sporting chance to the hunted and healthy population of the species.

No Ethics, No Sport

Recreational fishing is a sport. Shooting fish in a barrel is not. Confinement and absence of ethics are the main distinctions between blood sports and true sports. The fighting animal is forced to contend in an artificial environment that frustrates the instinct to evade or escape. Steps are taken to provoke the animal to perverse behavior, and to impair its ability to defend itself. Steps that remove the ethic of the fair hunt remove the sporting chance element from blood sport.

Bullfighting is the ritualized killing of an animal doomed to the slaughterhouse. As practiced in Spain, the killing begins before the animal enters the bull ring. As the web site Animals for Sport describes it:

Studies have proven that before the bullfight even begins, the bulls are weakened with drugs. Their horns are shaved to throw off their equilibrium and they are kept in total darkness before the event so that they are blinded when they are forced to enter the arena. During the first stage, picadors, men on horseback, drive pics into the bull’s neck to start the flow of blood and to anger him. Next banderillas gouge brightly colored spears into the bull’s neck to lower his head in preparation for the kill. The barbed spears continue to move and dig into the bulls’ back throughout the fight, causing bleeding and tissue damage.”

Cockfighting, like dog fighting, involves breeding a hyper-aggressive strain of the game cock beyond what occurs in nature. While two roosters will fight to establish who’s “cock of the walk,” fighting cocks are equipped with weapons, a metal spike or blade attached to the legs intended to maim or kill the opponent. In the wild, roosters will fight until one has established dominance. In the cock ring, game cocks fight until one is no longer able to continue. Both opponents might have suffered severe injuries.

The Humane Society reports that a dog fight may last an hour or more. Rather than time limits, rest period, and evaluations by judges using a point system, the dogs have at it until one is no longer able to continue. There is no escape from the dog pit. Indeed, the indictment against Michael Vick makes clear that dogs that do not show sufficient inclination or ability to fight are destroyed. Those are dogs that might make good pets and good ambassadors for the American Pit Bull Terriers — a breed sorely in need of good ambassadors.

Underground Pit Bull breeders selectively breed a strain with heightened aggression and viciousness for the fight. Descendants of these animals will be coming to a neighborhood near you, and more important, to a neighborhood near me. Those breeders are doing to the Pit Bull what they once did to German Shepherds, Dobermans and Rottweilers; cater to the thug dog market.

About Pit Bulls

Pit Bulls were not developed to be fighting dogs. They were meant to be bull baiters, a herdsman’s tools to control cattle. That led to the “sport” of bull-baiting, in which the bull was tethered as it was attacked. When Britain banned bull-baiting, dogfighting, using the former “bull dogs,” filled the void.

Pit Bull dogs were brought to the United States in the mid-19th century where they had a role in hunting big game, specifically to hold the prey until the arrival of the hunter. The Yearling, a 1946 movie starring Gregory Peck, Jane Wyman and Claude Jarman, Jr., depicted this scenario when Penny Baxter (Peck) and son Jody (Jarman, Jr.) go after “Ole Three Toes,” a marauding bear, with their dogs, a hound and a pit bull type catch dog. In one of the movie’s highlights, Ole Three Toes gets away after a hell of a fight with the dogs. (The movie producers stated that no animals were harmed in filming that sequence.)

In a simulation of that hunting style, The Humane Society cites the growth in Southern rural areas of hog-dog fights. Feral hogs are captured and confined to a pen to face a fighting dog, usually a Pit Bull, that seeks to pin it to the ground. To avoid injury to the dog, the hog’s tusks are removed. In this “contest” the hog has neither the means to defend itself nor to escape. In these contests, the outcome is certain.

Certain Outcomes Are Not Sporting

From hunting to horse racing, uncertain outcomes are the hallmark of true sports. That’s why collegiate wrestling is a sport, and the WWF is entertainment. There is no doubt of the outcome in blood sports. Confinement, impairment, the absence of an ethical sporting chance for the prey animal, and the lack of governing oversight are why blood sports are not sport. The entertainment isn’t from the contest. It’s from the savagery.

Anthony Brown writes about the Washington Redskins at Hog Heaven. His contact information can be found at Hog Heaven and he welcomes all feedback. Feel free to e-mail or leave a comment.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 5th, 2007 at 1:32 am and is filed under The Last Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.