28 - Violence, Animals and Sport in Europe and the Colonies

Summary

Early modern European sport victimised animals in two broad ways, both building on medieval and classical precedent: through hunting methods and traditions, and spectator sports such as cockfighting, bear-baiting and bullfighting. With hunting, early modernity witnesses the decline and/or transformation of medieval practices in response to the introduction of gunpowder weapons. The shift to firearms leads to increased carnage as European hunters deplete the supply of indigenous game and export their methods to colonies in the New and Old Worlds. Likewise, European imperialism induces a shift in the social function of hunting, as colonists leave Old World countries where the sport is an attribute of privilege and travel to colonial settings where it figures as an essential life skill. Like hunting, animal-based spectator sports developed out of earlier practices, and these sports, too, participated in systems of hierarchy and privilege. As with firearms, they were exported by European colonists, but with varying results: bullfighting, for example, survives in Latin America, whereas the bear-baiting introduced to North America by English colonists has largely disappeared under Protestant sectarian pressure. Likewise, back in Europe, sectarianism influenced festival pastimes, such as Katzenmusik processions, deriving originally from pagan practice.