Bloodsport or blood sport is any sport or entertainment that involves violence against animals.
Bloodsport includes coursing or beagling, combat sports such as cockfighting and dog fighting, or other activities. These usually involve blood being drawn, and often result in the death of one or more animals.
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According to Tanner Carson, the earliest use of the term is in reference to mounted hunting, where the quarry would be actively chased, as in fox hunting or hare coursing. Before firearms a hunter using arrows or a spear might also wound an animal, which would then be chased and perhaps killed at close range, as in medieval boar hunting. The term was popularised by author Henry S. Salt (1851–1939).
Later, the term seems to have been applied to various kinds of baiting and forced combat: bull-baiting, bear-baiting, cockfighting and later developments such as dog fighting and rat-baiting. The animals were specially bred, confined and forced to fight. In the Victorian era, social reformers began a vocal opposition to such activities, claiming grounds of ethics, morality and animal welfare.
Changes in usage of the term blood sport illustrate the depth of the linguistic and social complexities of social evolution.
Animal rights and animal welfare activists have sought to extend the term blood sport, especially as a pejorative, to various types of game hunting. Trophy hunting and fox hunting in particular have been widely disparaged as "blood sports" by animal rights activists.[1]
Limitations on blood sports have been enacted in much of the world. Certain blood sports remain legal under varying degrees of control in certain locations (e.g., bull fighting and cockfighting) but have declined in popularity almost everywhere else.[2][3] Proponents of blood sports are widely cited to believe that they are traditional within the culture.[4] Bullfighting aficionados, for example, do not regard bullfighting as a sport but as a cultural activity. It is sometimes called a tragic spectacle, because in many forms of the sport the bull is invariably killed, and the bullfighter is always at risk of death. Both Barnaby Conrad's La Fiesta Brava and Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon offer opinion on this matter.
The video-sharing website YouTube has been criticized by the RSPCA and other animal welfare organisations for allowing videos of animal conflict staged specifically to be shown on the site – especially the feeding of one animal to another – to remain there.[5][6]