The Sensitive Subject Of Animal Sport

Added: 09/18/2007

Animal sport can range from horse racing to dog fighting and in nearly every animal sport there is some group that thinks it is wrong. Since animals cannot speak up for themselves many animal sport participants feel it is okay to try and get away with mistreating their animals. However there is a growing sentiment that is trying to make the penalties for abusing animals much stiffer and help clean up animal sports.

You would have to have been sleeping under a rock for the past 4 months to miss the story about professional football quarterback Michael Vick and his dog fighting scandal. Vick was arrested, and eventually plead guilty to, charges that stemmed from abusing dogs and illegal dog fighting. Vick was accused of not only training dogs to kill each other for sport but also for killing a number of dogs that were unable to fight for whatever reason and for killing dogs that were unwilling to fight as well. As the Vick story played out on televisions all over the world stories about the horrors of this animal sport started to surface. There were stories about people having their small pet dogs stolen so that the smaller dogs could be crippled and forced to fight with the killer dogs so that the killer dogs could get training in their animal sport. It truly sickened many people to hear some of these animal sport stories and it also reminded a lot of people that there are all types of animal sports in the world.

Dog fighting is an extreme example of an animal sport where humans exploit and abuse animals for their own entertainment. It is disgusting and it is also far beyond the comprehension of many people how any of these cruel dog trainers and owners can be involved in such a horrible animal sport. But not all animal sports are necessarily designed to be cruel to animals and in many animal sports, depending on the country, serious legal penalties are levied against people that abuse their animals. For example, in Australia horse racing is extremely popular and there are many laws that are designed to ensure the safety and proper care of the animals. Dog racing in Australia has given the same level of importance to animal sports laws and the care of the animals. In the United States there seems to be a lot of good intentions but the follow through on enforcing animal cruelty laws was weak and seemed less than important. That was until the Michael Vick incident brought out the truth about the serious problem of dog fighting in the United States and now it seems as though the legal system of the United States is starting to get very animal friendly.

When you talk about animal sports you have to spend some time talking about the most majestic of all animal sports and that, of course, is horse racing. Beautiful animals compete to see which one of them is the fastest and while the sport of horse racing is sometimes labeled as cruel by some animal rights groups if you know what you are looking at then it does not seem so very cruel at all. Horses love to run and that is a known fact. When you put a horse in a horse race you are not asking it to do something that it is not capable of doing or unwilling to do. Many horse trainers have been known to say that they can see a competitive spirit in the eye of their horse before it starts a race and many non-trainers have been known to say the same thing. Horses have personalities just like people do and if a horse was unwilling to race then it would not race. It is that simple. The only part of horse racing that many people seem to have a problem with is the whipping the jockey will do to get the horse to go faster. Horse racing owners and trainers will say that the horse’s hide is thick and that putting the whip to a horse during a heated race is like a subtle, but effective, nudge to someone running a foot race. Others say the whip is cruel and causes great pain to the animal. The only ones that know the truth are the horses and, unfortunately, they are not able to give us the final answer.

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