Our message of ‘Cool Sports not cruel sports’ was featured everyday on the Conservativehome website for the final week of the Olympic games. We celebrated Team GB’s success and gold medals with pride. Our article on’ Cool Sports not cruel sports’ by Mabarbal was written last December before the Olympic games and we have included it again below. It was also featured on the Network For Animals charity website too ealier this year.
(This article was first published on our website in December 2011)
Next year, in 2012, Great Britain will host the Olympics, a momentous event that is universally regarded as the crowning pinnacle of sporting achievement and prowess. These Olympic Games have come to embody everything that is honourable, desirable, exciting and praiseworthy about sport, so it is a huge honour for a nation to be able to host an event that will be eagerly watched by a global audience of billions. Those taking part are revered as heroes and as inspirational role models for young people the world over, as everyone recognises the effort and discipline required to take part in, let alone win, the awe-inspiring contests between evenly-matched athletes.
Quite simply, there is no spectacle like the Olympic Games, so it simply defies credulity that at the same time as we prepare to present all that is finest about Great Britain to the world, there is a minority of people who are actively campaigning for a return to blood sports, in the form of fox hunting, deer hunting and hare coursing. The act of pursuing these creatures until they’re ripped apart by hounds while still alive for the pleasure of a few onlookers cannot be classified as a ‘sport’ in any sane sense of the word – rather, it is a minority pastime.
These sorry pursuits are hopelessly one-sided, as they pit a pack of around 50 hounds against a solitary animal. Unlike the Olympic contests, there is no clearly-defined field of play, even though these vile pursuits are erroneously called ‘field sports’, while the creature is not only pursued by a pack of hounds, but also by a large club of men and women on horseback and in off-road vehicles. If, by some miracle, the fox finds sanctuary beneath the earth, it will soon find itself torn apart underground by terriers, while deer and stags are regularly drowned when they take to rivers or ponds to try to escape their tormentors.
You do not need to be an athlete or sportsman to take part in these ‘field sports’ or ‘blood sports’. Anyone that can sit astride a horse or a quad bike, anyone that cares to cruise along in comfort in a four wheel drive vehicle is welcome to take part, while there are no laws, rules or penalties, and certainly no referees or umpires to impose them. There are ‘trophies’ in the form of severed heads and tails, dripping with blood that is traditionally sometimes daubed on the faces of children, but these primitive rituals have no counterpart in the Olympic Games.
In the hunting of deer, hares and foxes, one side cannot fail to win, while the other cannot fail to lose, a sorry state of affairs that could not possibly be further removed from the Olympic ideals and values that are cherished by so many people the world over. It would be beneath the ideals of any true sportsman or sportswoman to stoop to taking part in such an unfair, one-sided contest, so the mere suggestion of repealing the hunting ban is something that threatens to compromise our reputation of pioneering higher animal welfare as a nation, at a time when we should all be holding our heads high, standing proud and enjoying the greatest and most uplifting spectacle.
