Related Sporting Activities
Finally, a word must be said about sports-related activities that did not directly seek the death of non-human animals but did expose them to violence as an incidental matter of course.
Foremost among these pastimes was the joust. Jousting survived as a courtly exercise into the mid 1500s in France and the early 1600s in England, its decline hastened by the improvement of gunpowder weapons and the gradual demilitarisation of the nobility. The risk jousting entailed to both men and horses is exemplified by Henry VIII's life-altering tournament injury of 1536, when, ‘the King being mounted on a great horse to run at the lists, both fell so heavily that everyone thought it a miracle he was not killed'. Henry lay unconscious for two hours after the accident, and during the mishap itself his horse likely fell upon him, aggravating a leg injury that would cripple him for the rest of his days.[855] [856] (The horse's fate is unrecorded.) Coupled with broader trends, such incidents helped diminish enthusiasm for jousting, and during the 1600s other equestrian exercises - especially dressage and horse racing - arose to take its place.These new sports proved generally safer and more humane than their predecessor. But ‘safer', in this case, did not quite mean ‘safe'. As Peter Edwards notes, ‘In one race in Lancashire, held on 18 March 1671/2, Wagtail, belonging to Mr Egerton, won but in the process was “bloodied from shoulder to flank”', while ‘In another race, held at Nottingham in 1714, Mr Holbeck's horse broke its shoulder, reputedly because another horse had deliberately crossed its path.' Nor did ‘more humane' quite mean ‘humane'. It is true that sixteenth-century riding masters sought ‘to instill fear' and ‘to break a horse's spirit' with cruel bits, whips, and other implements, and also true that ‘by the seventeenth century techniques had softened'.
But even though later training manuals increasingly insist upon ‘securing a horse's cooperation rather than beating him into submission', this very insistence ‘suggests that the latter was a common enough practice to require chastisement'. In fact, sport seems to have encouraged the maltreatment of horses, given that ‘[m]embers of the upper classes were particularly inconsiderate of their horses when engaged in a sporting or recreational activity and focused solely on their own pleasure'.[857]In addition, domestic animals were subjected to various kinds of mutilation, often for sports-related purposes. Horses' tails were docked on the faulty logic that ‘the reins are liable to get under [undocked tails], and cause kicking and running away'. The ears of fighting dogs and the crests of fighting cocks were cropped ‘to prevent their being torn and mangled' during combat. Horses' nostrils were slit ‘in the erroneous belief that the horse can [thereby] inhale more air when going at a fast pace'.[858] And to this already incalculable mass of violence and suffering, we must also add numberless acts of casual cruelty inflicted on non-human animals by people intent upon their sport, incidents that can only be represented metonymically, by one last anecdote. Thus William Hinde recalled in 1641:
I once saw a Gentleman being about to feed his Hawke, pull a live Pidgeon out of his Faulkners-bag, and taking her first by both wings, rent them with great violence from her body, and then taking hold of both leggs, pluckt them asunder in like manner, the body of the poore creature trembling in his hand, while his Hawke was tiring upon the other parts, to his great contentment and delight upon his fist.[859]
It is hard to imagine a stronger argument for the justice and necessity of a species' extermination than this conduct of humanity as a whole toward the weaker beings thrown upon our mercy, behaviour richly justifying Jonathan Swift's verdict upon us as ‘the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth'.[860]