Animals, Violence and the Move towards Prohibition

Opposition towards the use of violence in sports began in Britain, with an organised campaign against cockfighting and bull-baiting. It is significant that the country's first anti-violence movement of any significance was targeted towards animals, rather than any of the human constituencies at risk of violence - children, wives, apprentices or servants.

Many religions have expressed concern about the use of animals, which are after all part of God's creation, for sport and recreation, and Christianity is no exception. Since the sixteenth century, Puritan reformers had been objecting to sports such as cockfighting and bear-baiting - both on the grounds of the time-wasting and gambling implicit in such activities, and owing to the cruelty to animals they involved.^[343] Towards the end of the eighteenth cen­tury, however, a new, secular strain of criticism began to emerge, objecting to the mistreatment of animals not simply as an abuse of God's creation, but upon humanitarian grounds as well. Although these reformers ranged widely over human treatment of animals, as their ideas began to filter into popular consciousness these concerns crystallised around a small number of blood sports. In the process, criticisms of hunting were entirely filtered out, and working-class blood sports such as cockfighting and bull-baiting were tar­geted as the only serious form of animal cruelty that needed to be addressed. From the 1790s, public outrage over the persistence of these two ancient sports continued to mount, and as it did so, parliament soon turned its attention to these sports as well. Criticism that had originated in newspapers and drawing rooms rapidly transmuted into a divisive political and class wrangle that was to last nearly forty years.^[344]

The first bill to attack blood sport was Sir William Pulteney's ‘Bill for Preventing the Practice of Bull-Baiting', introduced in 1800.^{[345] [346]} It had the narrow goal of outlawing (in Pulteney's words) ‘the savage custom of bull­baiting', but despite gathering considerable support in the House, it faced eloquent and lengthy opposition from Sir William Windham, the Tory MP for Norwich.11 Windham derided the bill as evidence of ‘a busy and anxious disposition to legislate on matters in which the laws are already sufficient', and his impassioned defence played a large role in the ultimate defeat of the bill - it was lost by just two votes.12 Windham had successfully tapped into a widely held concern that, by interfering in men's private pleasures, parlia­ment was stepping into new and dangerous waters.

Further attempts to introduce legislation to prohibit bull-baiting were made over the next two decades, but reform was delayed until the 1820s, when Richard Martin - dubbed by his friends ‘Humanity Dick’ - a large Irish landowner and keen practitioner of all field sports, mounted another, this time successful attack on blood sports. His ‘Bill to prevent cruelty to cattle and horses' received royal assent in 1822. This Act outlawed acts of cruelty to farm and draft animals, but did not in fact outlaw bull-baiting in the way Martin and his supporters had hoped: bulls had been expressly omitted from the final act by a government sensitive to the criticism that it was meddling in spheres it had no right to touch.

This omission kept the reformers busy for the next decade, but the precedent set by the landmark 1822 Act made their task rather easier. In 1835 they secured the passage of the Protection of Animals Act, which extended protection from livestock to domestic animals and made it illegal to keep any place for the fighting or baiting of any animal, wild or domestic. Overnight, enjoying a bull-bait, bear-bait or dogfight became a criminal offence, and fines and prisons served to convince anyone who might think otherwise. This Act, consolidated and extended to include cockfighting in 1849, was the first major piece of legislation passed to prohibit blood sports in the Western world.^[348]

The outcome of these new laws was initially mixed. Bull-baiting, being near impossible to hide from the authorities, was relatively easy to suppress. Despite some very public displays of opposition in the immediate aftermath of the Act, local authorities speedily and effectively used their new powers to round up those involved and consign the sport to history.^[349] A cockfight or badger-bait, however, was much more easily shielded from prying eyes, and so its disappearance was far more protracted.

Though the elimination of working-class blood sports proved to be pro­tracted, the general trend was clear: by the end of the nineteenth century, bull-baiting had disappeared, and cockfighting and dogfighting had been firmly pushed underground. Sports that people of all social ranks had enjoyed for hundreds of years had been cast out of the realm owing to the changing values of a small, but powerful, minority who no longer took part. It marks a turning point in the history of blood sports, and one is inevitably led to ask: why did the Victorians impose such an intrusive piece of legislation?

One argument that we have to reject is that this was the spontaneous flowering of a new compassion for animals. It is certainly true that this period did see the awakening of some sensitivities surrounding animal suffering, but most of these views were expressed in poetry, literature and art, rather than in mainstream society.

Even if we were to grant that the reformers were genuinely concerned about animal cruelty, there is something suspicious in the targeting of blood sports. Of all the forms of cruelty that animals might face, cockfighting and bull-baiting were surely the least of their worries. A cockfight was a combat between two evenly matched animals fighting freely. The concept of a fair fight was also intrinsic to the sport of bull-baiting, and by the late eighteenth century, the sport was in any case already very much on the decline. Cockfighting and bull-baiting both bore more than a passing resemblance to all forms of hunting and coursing, as animal combats lay at the heart of these sports too, yet neither attracted criticism of any real note. Furthermore, the systematic abuse and overwork of the millions of horses that powered the English economy was surely a greater evil than any of the uses to which animals were put in the name of sport. Blood sports were marginal forms of cruelty in a society in which the use and abuse of animals was extremely widespread. If the Victorians really cared so much about animals, why did they not focus on more pressing cases of cruelty?

The answer of course may be found by switching our gaze away from the animals and back to ourselves. Early campaigns against blood sports were not about animals, but about the human spectators. Animals naturally fight, but what Britain's early reformers found objectionable about these fights was the fact they were orchestrated by humans for their own pleasure, excitement and financial gain.

Inevitably, it was the poor that needed to be saved, and the oft-used accusation of class bias is not too far from the mark. With the exception of a small but dedicated core of wealthy gentlemen who continued to support cockfighting, the poor were the primary supporters of most forms of animal fighting and baiting by the early nineteenth century. According to one writer, bull-baiting was popular with the ‘the most unfeeling, and least humane, part of the very lowest, and most abandoned orders of the people... brutes; the very scum and refuse of society'.^{[352] [353]} So long as animal cruelty was focused upon blood sports, it could also be categorised as something that other people did.1⁹ By casting the perpetrators of cruelty as ignorant and unenligh­tened, Victorian reformers inevitably defined themselves as the vanguard of progress and civilisation; this was a way for the middle classes to reaffirm their own status as humane and enlightened individuals.

Western Europe followed the British example with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The United States, with its shared Puritan heritage and long­standing concerns about vice and immorality, was the nation most receptive to the British example. Proposing a bill to strengthen the laws governing cockfighting in 1830, the representative of Westmoreland County, Samuel Bushfield, described cockfighting as a ‘kind of vice' and a crime ‘of great magnitude'. He continued,

All kinds of vicious people attended them; some to bet money, some to satisfy criminal curiosity, and many to spend money which ought to be applied to the support of many of their families. Apprentices and the children of honest parents have their morals ruined by attending such gaming places; indeed they are often tempted to steal money to spend it in this way.

Yet despite Bushfield's eloquence, the resulting legislation was a compromise: cockfighting itself remained legal, only the betting on matches was prohibited.^[354] This was a pattern often replicated in the USA during the twentieth century, as legislators struggled with the concept of interfering in what private individuals did in their leisure time.

Just as in Britain, so in the States, the cause of blood sports was subse­quently taken up by the animal protection societies. And once again, although the remit of these societies was animal cruelty in general terms, they proved to be particularly exercised by the use of animals in sport. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded in 1866 and the American Humane Association was established a decade later. Both played an important part in pressuring state legislatures to abolish not simply betting on cockfights, but the organising and watching of such events. But American animal protectionists always faced a greater battle than their British counter­parts, for although there was considerable sympathy for the anti-vice mes­sage of their campaign, there was also much stronger sentiment in favour of personal liberties. Abolition of cockfighting proceeded on a state-by-state basis and it was a protracted process, with parts of the South not outlawing cockfighting until the twenty-first century (Louisiana was the last state to outlaw cockfighting; it did so in 2008).^[355]

In continental Europe the process of eliminating violence towards animals in sport was also highly uneven and encountered resistance of a different nature. Whereas American abolitionists faced objections from those who believed in personal freedom, in parts of Europe animal protectionists were stymied by the power of tradition. In France, for example, cockfighting was prohibited by law in 1951. This was already more than a hundred years after the British example and it included an important exemption: those regions with an uninterrupted local tradition of such fights were permitted to con­tinue the sport. Nord-Pas-de-Calais claimed this exemption and remains to this day home to dozens of cockpits, or gallodromes, and to a lively, and entirely legal, cockfighting scene.^[356] Efforts to outlaw bullfighting in Spain met similar resistance. Whilst cockfighting was abolished in most parts of Spain in the twentieth century, opponents of bullfighting have as yet signally failed to overturn arguments promoting the sport as a unique and ancient national tradition. Here, as in France, successive governments have been persuaded that protecting native tradition is more important than attempting to ban sports which contained elements of violence.^[357] The experiences of both countries are an important reminder that the forces of modernisation and industrialisation do not automatically quell violence against animals in the name of sport.

The partial and piecemeal nature of reform is also evident in the large areas of sporting life that have generally been exempted from reform. Despite the unmistakable hardening of attitudes towards working-class blood sports in most of Europe and North America, attitudes towards hunting have changed far less. Even in the case of hunting with hounds, which generally involves staging a fairly contrived combat between a supposedly wild animal and trained hunting dogs, Western opinion has shifted far more slowly, and indeed in many quarters has shifted hardly at all. Since the nineteenth century, animal protectionists have maintained a strict distinction between ‘blood sports' and hunting, and the ideological insistence that these form separate categories of sport has played an important role in protecting all forms of hunting with hounds.

Once again Britain has been at the forefront of the prohibition movement. The Hunting Act of 2004 banned the hunting of wild mammals with dogs in England and Wales, and still stands out as a rare piece of legislation that restricted hunting through animal welfare, as opposed to conservation, motives. Just as with cockfighting, however, hostility towards hunting in reality encompassed a wide range of concerns, not all of them centred upon violence or cruelty towards animals. The Hunting Act owed as much to the new social and political sensibilities ushered in with Labour's landslide victory of 1997 as it did to concerns about animal cruelty.^[358] Nor have these concerns about hunting translated effectively beyond Britain's shores. In continental Europe and the United States, hunting continues to enjoy a largely unchallenged place in society. In these countries, not only is hunting protected by law, there is very little in the way of public disquiet about the hunters' activities.

Beyond the West, hostility towards the use of animals in sport has been much more muted and animal protection arguments have done little to undermine the popularity of traditional animal combat sports such as cock­fighting and dogfighting. Cockfighting bans have been introduced in parts of South America (Brazil in 1934; Argentina, Chile and Paraguay in the later twentieth century) but through most of Asia the sport remains legal. Across large parts of the globe, concerns about animal cruelty have failed to dent what are widely regarded as ancient and legitimate traditions involving animal combat.

In order to understand the enduring popularity and legality of cockfighting across large parts of the globe, it is necessary to appreciate its ancient roots. In China, for example, evidence of cockfighting has been uncovered from the Zhou period (sixth century bce). In the following 2,500 years, cockfighting has featured in Chinese literature, philosophy and poetry. It has been linked to important spring festivals and been enjoyed by all from the emperor to the masses. Furthermore, cockfighting in China has been situated within the yin­yang principles of Daoist belief.In this belief framework, cocks are given the same yang symbolism as the sun and this provides a space for cockfighting to fill in the renewal spring festival of Hanshi. Hanshi was marked by extinguish­ing of all fires and the eating of cold food for three days, followed by the relighting of fires. Whilst Chinese reformers have long raised concerns about the animal cruelty, crowds and betting they believe to be associated with cockfighting, they have been unable to overturn the sport's very broad social and cultural basis of support.^[359]

In fact, cockfighting has been slotted into a wide variety of very different religious and belief systems across the globe. In Bali, for example, cockfighting is linked with Balinese Hinduism. Here it plays a role in religious purification rituals designed to expel evil spirits, with the blood of the losing chicken offered as a sacrifice to the spirits. Likewise in India, cockfighting has a very long history. It is mentioned in literature from the Sangam period (from 3 bce) and has since then been enjoyed in both secular and religious contexts. In many nations, then, cockfighting is regarded not simply as a recreational pursuit, but as a practice with deep historical, religious and cultural roots. And inevitably, these cultural traditions have not been quickly and easily erased in the march towards modernisation.

The experience of India illustrates the obstacles faced by the animal protectionists. The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act of i960 legis­lated against the unnecessary pain or suffering of animals and included inciting animals to fight within its provisions. The Act provided a clear statement of India's claims to modernity, but the combined forces of culture and tradition have proved more powerful than the rhetoric of modernity and reform. The conservatism of Indian society has stood in the way of effective elimination of the sport and most attempts at repression have focused on the betting that accompanies cockfighting rather than the sport itself. Not only have the police been notoriously reluctant to interfere in cockfights, there have also been disagreements amongst the courts concerning whether or not cockfights are covered by the provisions of the Act, particularly those held within temples or associated with Hindu festivals. The passage of the Act has done little to eliminate back-street cockfighting; indeed economic growth has in some instances provided an impetus to the growth of cockfighting. In Andhra Pradesh, for instance, the annual festival of Makar Sankranti has become the occasion of large, spectator cockfights with high-level bet­ting in excess of Rs 1,000. With local politicians, MPs, prominent businessmen and even film celebrities visiting coastal Andhra during Sankranti to participate, cockfighting became big business in the decades following the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act. Inevitably small fines of no more Rs 25-100 and a local police force which is at best indifferent, at worst complicit, have failed to provide any form of deterrent to those who want to participate.^[360]

It is clear that the elimination of violence from sport is not a linear and universal process. In the West, violence towards animals in sports became increasingly controversial around 1800, though abolition attempts were almost always directed towards animal combat sports rather than hunting and rarely extended to more general concerns about the mistreatment of animals in agriculture and transport. Britain led the way and whilst the pace and motivation of the animal protectionists have varied across Europe and the United States, the general trend is unmistakable. Cockfighting and dogfighting are no longer mainstream activities in the West; indeed in most Western nations organising or watching animal combats is a criminal offence. At the same time, however, many non-Western nations have been far more hesitant to interfere with sports that are regarded as belonging to ancient or religious traditions. Although a number of nations in Asia and in South and Latin America have passed laws outlawing animal cruelty, some have been unclear about whether traditional sports fall within the remit of the new laws and lax enforcement efforts have often rendered the legislation a dead letter. Other countries have not attempted to legislate against popular blood sports. As a consequence, cockfighting and a host of other animal combat sports remain legitimate and popular pastimes across significant parts of the globe.