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A blood sport or bloodsport is a category of sport or entertainment that involves bloodshed. Common examples of the former include combat sports such as cockfighting and dog fighting, and some forms of hunting and fishing. Activities characterized as blood sports, but involving only human participants, include the ancient Roman gladiatorial games.

Etymology

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 Stephens Salt.

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 for fighting. In the Victorian era, social reformers began a vocal opposition to such activities, claiming grounds of ethics, morality, and animal welfare.

Current issues

Online videos

Many online video-sharing websites such as YouTube do not allow videos of animal bloodsports to be shown on the site, except for educational purposes, such as in public service announcements.

Animal fighting

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., bullfighting and cockfighting) but have declined in popularity elsewhere. Proponents of blood sports are widely cited to believe that they are traditional within the culture. 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 event, the bull is invariably killed and the bullfighter is always at risk of death.

Hunting and recreational fishing

Trophy hunting and fox hunting in particular have been disparaged as blood sports by those concerned about animal welfare, animal ethics and conservation.

Recreational fishing was once described as a blood sport by those within the recreation.

In fiction

Blood sports have been a common theme in fiction. While historical fiction depicts real-life sports such as gladiatorial games and jousting, speculative fiction, especially dystopic science fiction, suggests variants of blood sports in a contemporary or future society. Some popular works themed on blood sports are Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, The Running Man, The Long Walk, Fight Club, Death Race 2000, Amores Perros, Squid Game, Bloodsport, and The Most Dangerous Game.

Blood sports are also a common setting for video games, going as far back as the early years of the medium itself. Games about blood sports attracted controversy from newspapers and civic organisations due to their graphic content, in particular the 1976 vehicular combat game Death Race whose game mechanic of scoring points by running over humanoid figures (marketed by Exidy as "gremlins" in their official literature) generated a moral panic. Contemporary examples such as Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Tekken make up much of the fighting game genre, and first-person arena shooters such as The Finals, Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament, as well as vehicular combat games like Twisted Metal likewise depict some form of armed combat with firearms in a gladiatorial setting. Such games typically offer a laconic if not nominal plot or backstory to flesh out the characters and settings, which often take place in a large tournament attracting combatants from various locales. While Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena do portray the game's violent combat as a "real world" blood sport within the games' fictional settings, some, such as The Finals, attempt to downplay the games' violent themes by presenting the game as a virtual reality simulation within a fictional game show instead, devoid of any in-story human casualties. The film Battle Royale also notably inspired the battle royale genre, where players compete against each other for survival in a shrinking area, popularised by games such as PUBG: Battlegrounds (2017), Fortnite Battle Royale (2017), Apex Legends (2019) and Call of Duty: Warzone (2020).

List of blood sports

Human – human

• Academic fencing
• Ancient Greek boxing
• Bare-knuckle boxing
• Boxing
• Folk wrestling
• Gladiatoral spectacles
• Hardcore wrestling
• Human hunting
• Jousting
• Kalaripayattu
• Kun Khmer
• Lethwei
• Mardani khel
• Mesoamerican ballgame
• Mixed martial arts
• Muay Boran
• Muay Thai
• Pankration
• Pasola
• Senegalese wrestling

Human – animal

• Alligator wrestling
• Bullfighting
• Cat burning
• Cock throwing
• Fox hunting
• Fox tossing
• Goose pulling
• Human-baiting
• Octopus wrestling
• Rampokan
• Steer wrestling
• Venatio

Animal – animal

• Badger-baiting
• Bear-baiting
• Betta-fighting
• Boar-baiting
• Bull-baiting
• Bull wrestling
• Camel wrestling
• Cockfighting
• Cricket fighting
• Dog fighting
• Donkey-baiting
• Duck-baiting
• Fox hunting
• Hare coursing
• Hog-baiting
• Hyena-baiting
• Insect fighting
• Jackal coursing
• Lion-baiting
• Monkey-baiting
• Organized horse fighting
• Ram fighting
• Rat-baiting
• Spider fighting
• Wolf-baiting

See also

• Animals in sport
• Damnatio ad bestias
• Illegal sports

References

1. "Blood sport". Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (11 ed.). Merriam-Webster, Inc. 2003. p. 134. ISBN 978-0-87779-807-1. Retrieved 20 May 2017.
2. Brooke, Simon (19 August 2007). "Animal cruelty films on YouTube". The Sunday Times. Archived from the original on 19 May 2011. Retrieved 20 May 2017.
3. Clarke, Matt (17 May 2007). "Uproar at fish cruelty on YouTube". Practical Fishkeeping. Archived from the original on 17 September 2008. Retrieved 20 May 2017.
4. Lewine, Edward (July 2005). Death and the Sun: A Matador's Season in the Heart of Spain. Houghton Mifflin Company. p. 231. ISBN 978-0-618-26325-7. Archived from the original on 2 May 2019. Retrieved 20 May 2017.
5. Mitchell, Timothy (July 1991). Blood Sport: a social history of Spanish bullfighting. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 244. ISBN 978-0-8122-3129-8.
6. Stratton, Jim (18 January 2005). "Cockfighting Persists as Underground Sport". Puerto Rico Herald. Archived from the original on 6 October 2008. Retrieved 20 May 2017.
7. "Bullfighting in Spain". October 31, 2018. Archived from the original on August 11, 2019. Retrieved August 11, 2019.
8. Greenwood, George (2015) . "The Cruelty of Sport". In Salt, Henry S. (ed.). Killing for Sport. George Bell & Sons. pp. 1–33. Archived from the original on 13 October 2015. Retrieved 20 May 2017.
9. Wyatt, Bob (2013). What Trout Want: The Educated Trout and Other Myths. Stackpole Books. p. 3. ISBN 978-0-8117-1179-1. Archived from the original on 2 May 2019. Retrieved 20 May 2017.
10. New York Times News Service (December 28, 1976). "'Death Race': Cartoon or Morbid?". The Post-Crescent. p. A-1. Retrieved 2017-08-30 – via Newspapers.com.
11. Young, Larry (December 29, 1976). "Local Safety Authorities Denounce Game". The Spokesman-Review. Spokane. p. 10.
12. "Weekend: That's Nice, Don't Fight (Death Race) Archival Footage". NBCUniversal. Retrieved April 7, 2014.
13. Wilde, Tyler (2009-03-10). "Gaming's greatest blood sports". GamesRadar. Retrieved 2024-11-06.
14. Franzese, Tomas (6 March 2023). "The Finals is the shake-up the competitive first-person shooter scene needs". Digital Trends. Archived from the original on 2023-03-24. Retrieved 2023-03-08.
15. Takahashi, Dean (2023-03-06). "The Finals has frenetic gameplay full of destruction: hands-on preview". VentureBeat. Archived from the original on 2023-03-13. Retrieved 2023-03-09.
16. Wolf, Mark J. P. (2021-05-24). Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming [3 volumes]. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. ISBN 979-8-216-16182-0.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
17. "The Evolution of the Battle Royale Genre". SUPERJUMP. 2023-08-29. Retrieved 2024-11-06.

Further reading

• Don Atyeo, Blood and Guts: Violence in Sports, Grosset & Dunlap, 1979. ISBN 0448220008
• Podcast: Cage fighting and the rise of the UFC, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2012-04-22

• Blood sports
• Animal rights
• Animal welfare
• Cruelty to animals
• Pejorative terms