Blood Sports Flashcards
Blood Sports
-Any sport that involves animals being killed or hurt to make the people watching or taking part feel excitement.
-Blood sports often result in the death of one or more animals.
Bull fighting weaknesses
-Bull fighting is probably the most barbaric exploitation of animals that is still legally practiced.
-The idea that there is a fair match between the bull and the matador is laughable. The bull dies at the end of every single bullfight (it is either killed by the matador or slaughtered afterwards if it survives).
-During bull fights the animals are taunted and goaded, and have sharp spears stuck into their bodies until eventually they collapse from their injuries and exhaustion.
-Matadors are not heroes or artists, they are cruel cowards.
Bull fighting strengths
-To condemn bull fighting is to fail to be sensitive to cultural differences and to the true nature of the sport.
-Bull fighting is an integral part of traditional Spanish culture that should therefore be respected in the same way that any other minority activity (such as the slaughtering of animals according to certain Jewish or Muslim ritual laws) would be.
-The bull fight is a symbolic enactment of the battle between man and beast; the matador is a highly trained and highly skilled artist and fighter and takes his life in his hands when he enters the ring – it is a match between man and animal.
-Finally, since the bull would be killed anyway, it is of little consequence how it is killed.
PETA
Groups like PETA believe that animals have rights to live their lives peacefully – they shouldn’t be used as a food source or for sports.
Tom Regan
-is an American philosopher who specializes in animal rights theory.
-Regan is the author of numerous books, including The Case for Animal Rights (1983), which has significantly influenced the modern animal rights movement.
Regans Book
-In the book, The Case for Animal Rights (1983) Regan argues that at least some kinds of non-human animals have moral rights because they are the “subjects-of-a-life”, and that these rights adhere to them whether or not they are recognised.
Regans kantian position
-Regan’s position is Kantian (though Kant himself did not apply it to non-humans), namely that all subjects-of-a life possess inherent value and must be treated as ends-in-themselves, never as a means to an end.
-He also argues that, while being the subject-of-a-life is a sufficient condition for having intrinsic value, it is not a necessary one: an individual might not be the subject-of-a-life yet still possess intrinsic value.
Should humans be cruel to animals?
-Human beings have an awareness of moral ideas and understand the difference between right and wrong.
-Human beings accept that certain things are morally wrong and should not be done - regardless of whether the victim has any rights or not.
-Causing pain and suffering is morally wrong, whether the victim is a human animal or a non-human animal.
-This is not because it violates the rights of the victim, but because causing pain and suffering is inherently wrong.
-Causing pain and suffering therefore diminishes the moral standing of the human being that causes it.
-Therefore human beings should not be cruel to animals.
How far can this argument go?
-The argument can’t be pushed too far: the absence of cruelty does not make an act morally good, even if it does remove one ingredient that would make the act morally wrong.
-And acts that are not cruel - even acts that are kind - can be morally wrong.
Animal rights
-Animal rights and animal welfare advocates have sought to extend the term blood sport to various types of hunting.
-Trophy hunting and fox hunting in particular have been disparaged as “blood sports” by those concerned about animal welfare, animal ethics and conservation.
-Groups like PETA believe that animals have rights to live their lives peacefully – they shouldn’t be used as a food source, for sports or as a source of entertainment as the expense of the animals’ suffering.
Limitations of blood sports:
-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.
-One common argument against blood sports, is that using animals for survival (as a source of food or to test for life-saving treatment) can be permitted as a king of necessary evil.
-It would be better if we did not have to kill animals to eat, but we need to hence it is acceptable.
-Using them for entertainment however, in an era where Netflix offers several high qualities on demand television dramas, is just unwarranted.
-In civilised society and as civilised people, there should be no such need for uncivilised brutality. Violence against animals may encourage brutalised behaviour towards other human beings.
Bulls in bullfighting - tortured
-Bulls who are used in bullfighting are deliberately weakened before the fights by being drugged and sometimes having their horns shaved down in order to disorient them, sandbags dropped on their backs, and petroleum jelly rubbed into their eyes to blur their vision.
-The tortured bulls never stand a chance against the matador, who tries to kill them slowly with repeated stabbing.
Animals used in dog and cock fighting
-Animals who are used in dogfighting and cockfighting are typically kept chained outdoors in horrific conditions with little or no shelter.
-They are starved, drugged, and beaten to make them aggressive.
-If they don’t die in the fighting ring, the “losers” are killed by their trainers—often by being drowned, burned, or shot.
-Many others are abandoned to die slowly from their injuries.
Animals used in racing
-Animals who are used in racing—including horses, greyhounds, and dogs used in dog-sled racing—are often drugged to mask sickness and injury and are forced to race.
-Between races, they are typically confined for most of the day to cramped stalls or crates with barely enough room to turn around in or, in the case of dogs used for dog-sled races, chained up outside.
-When they stop winning races, most of these animals are euthanized, sold to laboratories for experiments, or sent to slaughterhouses.
Hunting and fishing
-Hunting and fishing are unnecessary, violent forms of “entertainment” that tear animal families apart and leave countless animals dead, orphaned, and/or badly injured.
-Most people who hunt or fish do so under the guise of “saving deer from starving to death in the winter” or to help “regulate the population” or simply for the pleasure that killing gives them—not because they need to in order to survive.
