Civilization is barbaric. Even today, bloodsports remain popular. From tossing wildlife into the air to chasing foxes with hounds, simpletons everywhere still get their kicks from animal cruelty.
But animal cruelty kicks back.
In order of ugliness, here are 10 of the worst — and how participants have got their comeuppance.
10. Fox tossing
Fox tossing was exactly as its name suggests. Participants in pairs (often couples) stood facing each other in a closed arena, each holding one end of a rope slack to the ground. Then a captive fox or other wild animal would be released. The aim was to pull the rope taut the moment the animal ran over it, tossing it in the air. Apparently they could reach bone-breaking heights of more than 20 feet.
If the animal didn’t die on hitting the ground, it either tried to escape or attacked its tossers. However, this was all part of the fun. Fox tossing was often a festive affair with dozens of participants, hundreds of animals, and even fancy dress.
But not everyone got off lightly. In 1648, Poland’s King Augustus II hosted a toss that killed 647 foxes, along with 533 hares, 34 badgers, and 21 cats. He was clearly addicted, since by the end of his reign, Poland was greatly diminished. The country lost its status as a European power and, in spite of his wishes, he failed to leave a strong monarchy to his son. Unfortunately, though, it wasn’t for another century and a half that fox tossing was finally banned.
9. Cock throwing
Also known as cock threshing, cock running, and throwing at cocks, this old British pastime involved throwing sticks at cocks until they died. Sometimes it was hens; it didn’t seem to matter. But either way, they had to be tied to a stake by one leg, which even at the time many felt to be “unsporting.” Officially, that was why it was banned. (Really, though, for the aristocratic, fox-hunting, game-shooting law-makers, cock throwing was too working class.) By the end of the 18th century, the sport was no more.
There aren’t many tales of cock throwers getting their comeuppance, unfortunately. But, given its use of projectiles, we assume things often went awry. In 1766, for example, some kids were cock throwing in a churchyard when they missed and hit a woman walking past. There’s also the 1753 riot in Dublin, which broke out when soldiers expressed disgust at the sport.
8. Goose pulling
If you’ve ever been hissed at by geese and wondered why they’re so damn foul-tempered (no pun intended), look no further than a) foie gras, and b) the centuries-old tradition of goose pulling. Especially popular on the Iberian peninsula but common throughout Europe, it involved galloping on horseback toward a goose on a rope and attempting to pull off its head.
Nowadays, dead or even fake geese are used but it was only in 2005 that the Basque fishing town of Lekeitio stopped using live birds. Their tradition is also slightly different, seeing participants (men and women) leaping off boats towards a goose strung over the harbour.
Despite there seemingly being no record of mishaps for participants, the seventeenth-century Dutch poet Bredero did recall a knife fight at one goose pulling event that left a farmer dead. More decisively, goose pullers have been forbidden from using live geese everywhere but Lekeitio since the 1920s.
But don’t expect those hissing geese to forgive us any time soon.
7. Human baiting
Human baiting involves brutal combat between a human and an animal, usually a dog. The most notorious example — the 1874 fight between a “dwarf of extraordinary strength” called Brummy and a bulldog called Physic — took place in Victorian England, but was reported on by the American press as well. Each combatant was chained to the wall so they could reach each other to attack but also keep back out of reach as needed. Like the dog, Brummy fought on all fours and mostly naked, except for his trousers. The aim wasn’t necessarily to kill the other but to knock them “out of time,” meaning they were so beaten they weren’t ready to fight again in 60 seconds.
Brummy was no innocent; he arrogantly claimed that no dog “could lick a man,” even a bulldog. He also provoked and taunted his opponent by hissing and making faces, driving it into a frenzy. Nevertheless, among the crowd the dog was the favorite to win. In the end, the human won. But for what it’s worth, his life wasn’t easy, replete with grudges and troubles with police.
Other human baiting examples have led to more decisive comeuppance. In 1877, two drunk men were arrested for “worrying” a dog in a kennel; one of the men, wearing only his trousers and wielding a knife, was fighting the dog for 20 minutes before police arrived, while the other was holding his clothes. The fighter’s arm was mauled and bleeding, and both men were given 21 days in the clink. And, on another occasion, a “gentleman” fighting a bulldog almost had his bowels torn out.
6. Octopus wrestling
Few sports say early 1960s American macho like the World Octopus Wrestling Championship. Established (and shortly thereafter terminated) at Tacoma on Washington’s Puget Sound, it involved divers wrangling and “rassling” octopuses from the bay. The more they weighed, the more points they scored — times three when caught without diving gear.
In 1963, when the event was televised, more than 100 divers and thousands of spectators were present. But, while almost 30 octopuses were wrestled, nobody got what they deserved — until the following year when a man got entombed inside a 50-pound octopus forcing his son to help him out.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t until 2013 that a man beating an octopus to death in Puget Sound was globally shamed for the killing. Hunting was subsequently banned.
5. Fox hunting
Fox hunting is cruel to all animals involved. The foxes that are chased to exhaustion and torn apart by the hounds, the hounds that are beaten and unceremoniously shot dead by the humans they trust, and the horses that fall and get injured (and are punched in the faces by riders). Even humans often lose their lives. It’s a despicable sport that, secretly, symbolizes the dominion of the wealthy over the land. The fox is their excuse to trample over borders and fences, block traffic, and so on, in pursuit of their terrified prey (the blood of which they smear onto children).
It’s also pompously, pedantically bureaucratic. Fox hunting groups’ micro-management extends even to the minutiae of how many buttons participants can have (according to rank), how women should wear their hair, and how to say the most basic of things. If a gate is left open, for example, they can’t just say so; they have to say “gate please” to others.
As mentioned, many participants are killed in the sport — often when horses fall on top of them. Increasingly, they’re also facing criminal charges for continuing to break the law forbidding the hunting of foxes (in place since 2004). Generally, this is no thanks to the police but to the tireless work of fox hunt saboteurs, who pursue and record the often violently abusive fox botherers. In Scotland, the ban is taken more seriously with new legislation to enforce it.
4. Bullfighting
The most iconic of bloodsports worldwide, bullfighting has a veneer of respectability about it — though it’s not clear why. Every year, 180,000 bulls are tormented and killed in arenas by men and women in glittery clothing. When it finally comes time to end the bull’s suffering, the ideal conclusion is a “swift clean kill” from a sword between the shoulder blades. In practice, however, most matadors miss and instead injure the lungs, causing the animal to choke up blood and suffer even more.
In Indian bullfighting, or jallikattu, the ordeal is no better. Here, in a country famed for its alleged love of cows, crowds of men taunt and torture a bull — beating it with nail-studded sticks, throwing chili powder in its eyes, and forcing alcohol down its throat.
Bulls are no pushovers, though, even with the odds stacked against them. Bullfighting is as dangerous as it’s ever been, and participants frequently get their just deserts. One Spanish bullfighter, for example, tripped in the ring and was gored by the bull, while another was gored in the lung. These are just some of the most recent incidents. In India, participants dying is pretty normal. Even spectators don’t get off lightly. Several people die every year running from bulls in Pamplona, Spain, and, in India in 2023, more than 100 people were injured between just two events.
3. Baiting
Baiting has involved all kinds of animals, but in Shakespearean England bears were all the rage. The unfortunate animal would be chained in an arena by its leg or neck and pitted against bulldogs or mastiffs.
Seeing an opportunity to monopolize the evil sport, Sir Sanders Duncombe filed a patent for “the sole practisinge and making profitt of the combatinge and fightinge of wild and domestick beasts within the Realm of England for fowertene yeres.” Once he’d received it in 1639, he immediately set to work on a “bear garden”. But it didn’t go according to plan.
Not only did the unfinished structure get blown over by the wind, humiliating the knight and putting his project on hold; but Duncombe also hit the papers when his bearkeeper was killed by a bear. It happened during feeding after the animal broke out of confinement. There were thousands of horrified eyewitnesses. And while they weren’t sympathetic to the bear, killing it in revenge, Duncombe’s reputation was ruined.
2. Cockfighting
Somehow, cockfighting — the pitting of roosters against each other in an enclosed pit to fight to the death — remains popular around the world, including in the US. Defenders argue that cocks are natural fighters; but rarely in nature do they fight to the death or, as is often the case in cockfights, mutual destruction. Only by humans are they deliberately bred for maximum aggression.
This is to say nothing of the ways that humans have embellished the sport, such as outfitting cockerels with knives — attached to the legs for a little extra thrill. Unsurprisingly, this has proved not to be wise. In India, knife-wielding roosters killed two men in just one day. The first, a handler, was killed when his bird, frightened by the crowd, flew over and slashed his leg, leaving him to bleed out. And the other, a spectator, bled out from a wound to the hand.
In America, one of the biggest cockfighting operations — which also featured knife-wielding roosters — was publicly shut down by law enforcement. By December 2022, seven members of the cockfighting family had been federally charged and jailed for violating the Animal Welfare Act.
1. Alligator wrestling
Alligator wrestling was supposedly a way of life for the Everglades-dwelling Florida Seminoles. But really it was just another packaged “tradition” exploited by whites who built “Native villages” and paid Seminoles pennies to perform to white crowds in the 1930s and ‘40s. Surprisingly, they’re still at it today. And while modern performers claim a respectful, almost spiritual dimension to the sport — feeling at one with their reptile opponents — the truth is the alligators are kept in cramped and disgusting conditions.
So it jerks no tears — even crocodile tears — when things go wrong for the wrestlers.
In 2011, for example, a retired alligator wrestler was showing off to a crowd, holding an alligator’s jaws open and putting his head between them, when he accidentally brushed against the roof of its mouth. Snapping out of its trance, the alligator snapped its jaws shut with the wrestler’s head still inside. Although handlers rescued the man before the gator rolled over and snapped his neck (a so-called “death roll”), he later described hearing his skull crack beneath the “full weight of a Harley-Davidson”.