Today's topic on Wikipedia is hare coursing - admittedly something I know very little about, but which nevertheless I was ready to leap to an opinion on without learning any more about it. See, even diplomatic, intelligent guys like me aren't immune to judgmental nosedives. I was ready to immediately proclaim that hare coursing - like the pack hunting practiced for sport in England until very recently - is immoral and cruel to animals. Upon reading the entry, however, although I'm still rather inclined against the sport, I'm reevaluating certain aspects of my hangups against hunting (in real-time, no less!)
According to Wikipedia, hare coursing now generally uses sight hounds - hounds that rely on sight and speed to catch the hare - as opposed to scent hounds, which (you guessed it!) rely on scent. It also uses a pair of dogs, as opposed to a pack of them. Why is this an interesting distinction? Because it gives the hare a fair chance, so to speak. If the hounds are fast enough and keen enough to catch the hare, then they've caught the hare. If the hare is faster than the hounds, then it runs away, no harm, no foul. This is in contrast to scent hound haring because the pack of hounds inevitably out-lasts the fox, hare, or whatever animal is being chased and tears it to pieces.
The reason I'm slightly less inclined to condemn this form of hare coursing outright is because it doesn't seem overly different from what happens in nature. The hares caught in hare coursing are used for food, not tossed away, and they're given a reasonable head start. If I came across a wild dog in a forest, saw it chase after a hare and then catch it and eat it, I'm certainly not going to condemn that as being particularly cruel. Is this necessarily so different because we have the capacity to pamper our pets and feed them canned dog food? If I owned a large patch of woodland and chose to supplement my dog's diet with rabbits that they caught themselves, is that animal cruelty?
I guess it would be the competitive aspect of the game that makes it so unpalatable. The notion that there are people in the stands, cheering for the dogs to catch the rabbit and tear it to pieces. Somehow, I'd managed to miss that completely - maybe because the whole notion of a crowd cheering for something to kill something else feels so...totally alien to me. For some reason, the fact that there are spectators at this event evaded me. Now that - that fills me with complete distaste. I'm sure some of those people are cheering because they're enamored with this notion of mastery, of their well-bred dogs overtaking the wild. For them, I'm guessing the hunt is symbolic, a metaphor of man, or perhaps civilization, with our well-trained and well-bred animals, revealing its mastery over the natural world. In that fashion, in the way that the dog breeders take pride in their animals, I'm supposing that it's a matter of honor, however much my own notion of honor might rebel against hunting a relatively defenseless rabbit.
But then there are the other people, the ones who are there for the blood and the kill. Those people who watch cockfights or dogfights and find them exciting rather than massively upsetting. I wonder how excited they would be if someone stuck them into a national park and sic'ced a pair of hungry wolves on them, or gave them a board with a rusty nail in it and threw them into an arena.
Yeah, if it's not obvious, I find that pretty abhorrent.
So in conclusion, I wind right back to where I started. Hare coursing? Not so much. Get your kicks somewhere else.
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