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Originally Posted by Damien
It's population/pest control for sport. I don't think I am wrong there am I? Also I don't think it was made illegal to kill foxes to protect livestock, just the manor of chasing them and then setting the dogs on them? The first is quick, the latter would distress the animal and then led to a slow death?
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It is population/pest control, yes. It is also sport, yes. Two different aims that are met by the same process. As for 'distress', well during the whole debate over the Act, 540 members of the Royal College of Vet Surgeons signed up to the statement that:
"Hunting with hounds is the natural and most humane way of controlling the population of all four quarry species" (the quarry species being mink, deer, fox and hare).
http://www.vet-wildlifemanagement.or...d=30&Itemid=32
... so, it seems, a lot of people who have expert knowledge of the subject disagree with you.
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No you don't need to post a picture, but animals acting barbaric towards other animals doesn't give us licence to do the same to them does it?
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There you go with the anthropomorphism again. It's so ingrained in your approach to the subject that you don't even realise you're doing it. One animal cannot act with barbarity towards another. That is a moral judgement on behaviour that simply cannot apply.
For centuries, humans have harnessed and used properly trained animals for a wide variety of tasks. Using a dog to kill a fox is in no way different than using a dog to round up sheep.
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Dog's fighting each other is also nature but it's outlawed for humans to train and make them fight for sport, and rightly so.
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Dogs fighting each other is natural, yes, and within a pack of - say - hunting dogs, a degree of fighting may take place as a social order is established. Such fighting between dogs that are under human ownership is not outlawed, and nor should it be.
Fighting in a ring between dogs that have been deliberately bred and brutalised in order to force them to behave contrary to their usual nature is an entirely different matter and is rightly illegal. However you are going to have to do a lot more work to convince me that this sort of fighting is in any way analogous with the practice of hunting with dogs, other than the entirely superficial application of the label 'sport'.