Dog Fighting Blood Sport

        There have always been cases of animals being used as “Sports” in our history and pretty much ever since humans have had the ability to settle down and prosper, they have pinned their animals in fierce competitions with one another to see who owned the most superior pet. There are four major divisions of animal fighting that are animals against other animals, humans against other animals, feeding prisoners to animals, and staged animal hunts. The large scale animal sports events began to arise in Rome inside the Colosseum where prisoners would have to try to ward off and kill lions that ended up being harmful to not only the lion but those inside the cage of a starved lion. Many events were held at the stadium involving animal competitions, and the public’s opinion of such animal care was very minimal in protesting. They viewed it as a sport worth watching and those that were more educated and may have thought differently about such barbaric events usually attended the theater and not the Colosseum.

        There then began the sport of baiting where dogs would be trained to bait a bull or a bear into submission and would gang up onto it until it died. This usually involved the acts of removing all of the defensive tools that the bears and bulls had such as the horns and the claws so that they would not cause critical harm to the dogs. It was a much-unmatched fight, and it eventually caused a shortage of bulls and bears. In 1835, the passage of the III Treatment of Cattle Act tried to rid the use of bull baiting due to concerns of animal cruelty, so this was when all the dogs that were trained to bull bait were forced to fight against one another because dog-dog fighting was legal. These bulldogs were bred with smaller terrier type dogs to get a more agile dog for fighting against one another, and they were especially adapted to fighting in the pit. This is why these dogs that are known to be fighting dogs are pit bull terriers. Dog fighting has seen its ups and its downs in the last 200 or so years of its creation and at the very beginning it was seen as a formal event where the upper class would attend. As it became more frowned upon however it moved underground where only the people that wanted to see it knew how to see it.

        The dog registries were highly involved with this dog fighting operations at the beginning but in the 30’s and 40’s they became highly against such sports and the popularity of the sport went down tremendously. It just shows how influential the registries are to the everyday public who strive to follow a respected higher authority on such topics. It began to arise again in the 60’s, and 70’s however because of Sporting Dog journals and registries nominating and revering such animals. Unfortunately, it is still a very popular sporting event for people to attend and has become increasingly difficult for law enforcement to crack down on because the fighters are trying to hide their craft more and more every day.

        There have been many wrong and despicable things that humans have thought up of to entertain our selfish needs, but very few things come close to the cruel and unusual punishments that we place upon these pit bull dogs when they fight one another. We have always tended to do something horrible to things that we find lesser, and that does not stop at the pit bull. The owners of these dogs believe that they are doing what is in the dog’s interest and that they enjoy being fought against with one another but this is usually not the case. The dogs tend to be aggravated before the fight begins and then placed into the pit with another dog to essentially fight until the fight handler removes the dogs from the pit that rarely tends to happen until at least one dog, if not both, are seriously injured. The owners tend to see a lot of their flaws and accomplishments within their dog, so if the dog wins the fight it is praised by the owner but if it loses then it usually is tossed to the side and beaten by its owner later on that night.

        I think this is no way to treat an animal that is strictly trying its hardest to please his or her owner in any way possible even if that means trying to injure and kill another dog. These dog fighting rinks also have placed a bad stigma to the public about what a pit bull type dog is and that it is some vicious monster that is going to try to kill everything the instant it gets off of its leash. Whereas most pit bulls are the most compassionate and loving dogs, there could be, the select few that are unfortunately placed in the wrong hands and forced to fight are making the stigma of pit bulls an even harder one to overcome. There also now seems to be the act of “Trunking” where you place your pit bull, and another’s in the back trunk of your car to fight to the death while you both sit in the front driving around the city. It must give the fighters even more of a euphoric state since they are doing something extremely illegal, but all the pedestrians and police officers just see a car drive down the road with no signs of activity.

      When I learned about this I knew that this dog fighting sport will never fully be cracked down on because it is a lot easier to infiltrate and record information at a set building and group but when there are only 2-3 people involved and the location is the back of a car it is near impossible to infiltrate that operation. I find the act of dog fighting one of cruel and unusual punishment and every time I hear about another case I lose a little bit of respect for human society. We shouldn’t be allowed to continue these acts of dog fighting the law enforcement needs to be given the opportunity to rank this higher on their to do’s list.