Beastly pleasures : blood sports in England, c. 1776-1876

Abstract

This thesis explores the history of 'blood sports', specifically those involving animals, from 1776-1876. Its aims are to account for the nineteenth-century legal innovation that made certain sports unlawful; to explain the increasing prevalence of a notion of 'cruelty' to animals; and to contribute to the history of masculinities. Drawing on recent work which has synthesised multi-disciplinary approaches to moral reform, I examine blood sports and cruelty to animals as a microcosm of this theme, suggesting some new possibilities for interpreting the nature and implementation of these moral reform initiatives. I assert that manly virtue was a more prominent issue than animal welfare for those concerned with reforming the morals of a society perceived to be ridden with animal cruelty. Sociological and anthropological research has stressed the importance of plural masculinities in gender analysis and the power dynamics involved in contests for hegemony. Blood sports provided a setting for such a contest. The anti-cruelty movement, especially the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, essentially was the purveyor of a manly ideal type. Its reforming efforts, while superficially about animal protection, were more deeply concerned with civilising men. Manliness, in its various forms, was central in defining notions of national and local identities, constructions of propriety and fair play and competing ideas of 'civilised' behaviour. In contesting the meaning of manliness, these related issues also came under scrutiny. Ever since Keith Thomas's Man and the Naturat World historians have understood the importance of animals to human history. This study suggests that the relationship between man and animals had to be renegotiated in order to realise a 'civilising process' in the morals of men. Ways of 'seeing' animals had to change if men were to be persuaded to behave according to new ideals of manliness and national character