Canine sports often tainted by cruelty

Dogs may be man’s best friend but in the sporting world man has not always been very friendly to dogs

A 17th-century engraving titled Fox Hunt by Wenceslaus Hollar.

DOGS may be “man’s best friend” but as the Special Commission of Inquiry Into Greyhound Racing has found, humans are not always best friends to dogs.

Throughout the sport’s history doubtful practices have thrown it into disrepute and a counsel assisting the commission has called for greyhound racing to be shut down.

The history of dogs in sport has often been marred by cruelty. Whether they were pitted against wild game or against each other in fighting or racing, dogs were treated badly by many societies, yet in others they were revered for their abilities.

The earliest evidence of a domesticated dog comes from a jawbone found in a cave in Iraq dating back to about 12,000 years ago. The jawbone is shorter than that of a wild wolf, which suggests selective breeding by the humans it lived with.

According to one theory, friendly wolves, ancestors of modern dogs, began approaching human beings as long as 34,000 years ago to scavenge on rubbish. Humans took to the more amenable beasts, adopting them, and then started to notice they had useful traits. One of the first things dogs were selectively bred for was to help with hunting. This was a necessity in hunter-gatherer societies but as humans settled down to become farmers they continued to breed hunting dogs, partly to supplement their diet of meat from domesticated animals but also partly for sport.

Prehistoric humans probably began showing off their animals, pitting them against one another to see which was fastest to catch prey.

The ancient Egyptians, an agrarian society, bred the pharaoh hound for its hunting skills for recreational hunting. There is evidence they revered their animals, which were also bred to look like the jackal-headed god Anubis.

A tomb dedicated to Anubis was found with millions of dogs, some of which wandered the tomb and would have dined lavishly on offerings left
for the god.

The ancient Romans were not as kind to their animals. They bred dogs for warfare but when they invaded Britain in 43AD they found that the Britons had even more savage war dogs. The Romans exported some of the dogs to Rome for use in battle but also to fight for sport in the arena. There are reports of packs of dogs being pitted against elephants, big cats and other animals in the arena.

The ancient Romans were also fond of using dogs for hunting sports. They used a swift breed of dog known as the vertragus, which is thought to be a forerunner of the greyhound.

Medieval Europeans adopted the Roman practice of fighting dogs for spectacle, chaining bears or bulls in the centre of an arena and setting dogs loose on them. The sport became known as baiting. When baiting was outlawed in England in the 19th century people turned to making the dogs fight each other.

By the 16th century dogs were often used, mostly by the nobility, for hunting foxes and hares.

While breeds with a sharp sense of smell such as beagles were favoured by fox hunters, because they were better able to follow the scent of the more cunning fox, speed was preferred by those who ran down hares and rabbits in a sport known as coursing.

Coursing involves testing the speed of the dogs against the swiftness of their quarry. The dogs hunt by sight rather than scent. Forms of the sport had been around since ancient times, as described by Greek philosopher and historian Arrian in about 150AD, but the rules of the sport were refined from the 16th to the 18th century.

Coursing, however, often still involved killing the hare, which some people found distasteful as a sport.

In 1912 American Owen Patrick Smith invented a mechanical hare that could be used as a lure for greyhound racing, hoping to get rid of the cruelty in the sport.

In 1919 he opened the first professional greyhound racing track in Emeryville, California. His aim was to make dog racing as respectable as horse racing.

REGAL GREYHOUNDS

KING Henry VIII kept greyhounds for hunting and even adopted the animal for his coat of arms, his daughter Queen Elizabeth also kept coursing greyhounds. Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert brought a greyhound named Eos as a pet from Germany. The dog is buried at Windsor and even has statues in his honour.

Originally published as Canine sports often tainted by cruelty