Crimes Against Non-human Animals: Examining Dog Fighting in the UK and the USA through a Green Criminology Perspective

Abstract

This article reviews the social scientific literature on dog fighting in the UK and USA since the 1990s. The review is structured in 5 sections. The first will situate the review theoretically by introducing key ideas within green criminology that will inform the discussion, specifically the concepts of harm, nonspeciesism and species justice. The next section will then begin the review itself by presenting a typology of the different levels or types of contemporary dog fighting found in the UK and USA. In doing so, it will explore how they differ in terms of frequency, level of organisation, visibility, participants, and the nature of the fight itself. Following on from this, the third section will explore both the motivations of contemporary dog fighters, as well the justifications that they deploy to defend their ‘sport’ to (often critical) outsiders. The fourth section will adopt a green criminological perspective to explore the various harms of dog fighting for society in general and, not least, for the fighting dogs themselves. The final section will then conclude by bringing together the threads of the analysis and highlighting some directions for future research