AHC: Preserve animal-combat-based sports.

[Walpurgisnacht]

The UK has a rich tradition of sports relying on animals fighting each other, from medieval bear-baiting to Victorian ratting. Sadly, the nascent animal-rights movement gradually rendered them illegal, with ratting—since the terriers and sometimes chimps were up against unprotected vermin—being the last to fall in the 1880s. How could this be prevented? Could these bloody sports have survived into the modern era, or were they always doomed by upper-middle-class moral outrage?

 

[Ricardolindo]

The UK has a rich tradition of sports relying on animals fighting each other, from medieval bear-baiting to Victorian ratting. Sadly, the nascent animal-rights movement gradually rendered them illegal, with ratting—since the terriers and sometimes chimps were up against unprotected vermin—being the last to fall in the 1880s. How could this be prevented? Could these bloody sports have survived into the modern era, or were they always doomed by upper-middle-class moral outrage?

No offense, but I'd question your assertion that the end of those sports was sad.

 

[Walpurgisnacht]

I threw in the “sadly” as a bit of a dark joke, I’m not that pro-bloodsport.

 

[JesterBL]

Cockfighting is probably an instructive example- where it has survived it has been tied up with local/national pride AND with money from gambling.

I think in the UK it would probably require that ratting not be isolated from the other baiting traditions which have a chance to be glorified and ennobled. Once it was just ratting, it was easy to identify it as just something poor people do and to malign the gambling around it (unlike dignified gambling like with chemin de fer or the sport of kings, no, wholly unlike that).

Defeating that first bill that banned all of them other than ratting is a good first step, but it is a delaying action after that. Possibly a more cash strapped and tourist hungry UK (or simply England)? That helped to maintain bullfighting traditions- the money from tourists, that is.

 

[Coiler]

It's harder as standards of living rise. This has actually been the case with human-based combat sports across the world (postwar prosperity caused boxing's decline in the US), and people for whatever psychological reason often view animals as more innocent (some weird bizarro in-group? A reasonable belief that they're being forced into it? Romanticization?).

One weird POD would be to inhibit the development of human combat sports for whatever reason and thus give it less competition.

 

[JesterBL]

It's harder as standards of living rise. This has actually been the case with human-based combat sports across the world (postwar prosperity caused boxing's decline in the US), and people for whatever psychological reason often view animals as more innocent (some weird bizarro in-group? A reasonable belief that they're being forced into it? Romanticization?).

One weird POD would be to inhibit the development of human combat sports for whatever reason and thus give it less competition.

Was it really rising incomes or items specific to boxing and to other sports? My understanding is that boxing post-WW2 actually did pretty well before being dragged down by competing bodies and by more television friendly sports.

Arguably, American football is a combat sport and it only went from strength to strength in the same era.

 

[Coiler]

Was it really rising incomes or items specific to boxing and to other sports? My understanding is that boxing post-WW2 actually did pretty well before being dragged down by competing bodies and by more television friendly sports.

Arguably, American football is a combat sport and it only went from strength to strength in the same era.

Boxing did have a lucrative range of success in the late 1940s to mid-late 1950s on television. Fights did get a huge viewership share and made lots of money for all involved. However, at the same time, the talent pipeline was squeezed. There's a huge unanswerable chicken and egg question as to how much was demographics/income (people moving to the suburbs and away from the urban gyms and clubs that made up the lower rungs on the latter, or just being able to get jobs that didn't involve being punched repeatedly) and how much was television (why bother going to see two locals fight it out when you can stay home and watch high-level pros on TV?)

However, changing demographics/tastes played a big role in the fall from its temporary rise in a way that no other major sport experienced. Boxing had an organic, natural decline to the point where, by the 1960s, it had its rights sold off to another channel and moved to a worse timeslot. This was before the death of Benny Paret and before the rise of the infamous "alphabet organizations". Not a total role, but still a large one.

Granted, the other sports avoided this contraction in different ways. Basketball and football were hugely popular as college sports before they were so as pro ones, so their pipeline stayed intact and was arguably even bolstered (which helped a lot). Baseball saw its independent minor leagues (including the remnants of the post-integration Negro Leagues) implode because of TV/radio competition, but the major league teams by this point had robust farm systems.

My initial post may have been too oversimplified, but I still think rising incomes did play a major role. And I think it'd be the same if not more so for animal fighting, as incomes and technology makes pets more viable and people will have more energy and money to devote to social causes.

 

[Charles EP M.]

The big combat sports for telly seem to be professional wrestling (theatrical performance pretending to be a real fight) and, as Jester says, American football (NO NO WE'RE JUST A BALL SPORT), and you can't really make animal combat sports into theatre or no-it's-not-a-fight. Bullfighting gets away with it because the animal's fighting a human, making the animal the Goliath to the human's David when you look at it.

 

[Coiler]

Ok, reviving this after having done far too much research into formal dogfighting (at least in the American context, though most western places follow the same style/rules/legal issues), I can say that getting it to stay in public appeal is about as likely as Sea Lion succeeding. There's a reason it retreated to the periphery even before it was formally banned. As for why:

1. The obvious of doggies ripping each other and bleeding for hours. While the number of fighting dogs outright dying in the ring is smaller than one might think (though not unheard of), them being maimed and dying afterwards is far more common. Either way, it's called a "blood sport" for a reason.
2. Even beyond that, the sport is not very photogenic. Like if willing humans reenacted the basic motions, you'd have a very dull wrestling match. Especially because...
3. It's open-ended in terms of time and matches can take hours. This is every broadcaster's worst nightmare by itself, and puts yet another ceiling.

This shouldn't come as a shock, but people who attend underground dog fights do not do so for the same reasons that conventional sports fans attend events.

 

[Hendryk]

I would say it's part of the long term societal trend towards shielding ourselves from the sight and even the thought of animal suffering, which, while arguably hypocritical, is not really a bad thing. We do still--uneasily--live with the reality of industrial livestock rearing and slaughtering, but with the rise of humanist ethics, we increasingly consider that causing pain to animals for our amusement crosses a moral line. For the same reason that hunting as a hobby is now viewed with distaste by the general population, throwing animals into a pit and forcing them to fight until one is severely injured comes across as gratuitously sadistic.

Likewise, using animals in circus shows has also largely fallen out of favor, once the general public became aware of their inhumane living conditions.

 

[SinghSong]

Do these sorts of animal combat-based sports count, BTW?

And if it's battles between insects, and other similarly 'non-bloody' animals fighting one another- posing far more of a challenge for us humans to anthropomorphize and emphasize with the suffering of- might it still stay in public appeal? And even if it's animal-based combat between 'higher-order' animals, one can only ponder, especially looking at how the Victorian-era 'dog-show' fad led to an explosion in the number of dog breed, utilizing darwinian-era proto-genetic engineering...

Genes unleashed: how the Victorians engineered our dogs


Makes me imagine the possibilities of an AH 'gene-punk' TL, where the Victorian-era hunting craze combines with and earlier development of proto-genetics and anabolic steroids, to have purpose-bred and steroid-enhanced super-predators fighting one another in specially-built arenas, with the audience thus being de-sensitized to the animals' suffering since "they're not really animals, God didn't create them, WE created them ourselves, they're MONSTERS"...