The survival of popular blood sports in Victorian Ulster

Abstract

Despite legislation making pastimes such as cock-fighting and animal-baiting illegal in Victorian Ireland, these activities persisted through the nineteenth century and beyond. In part, their survival in Ulster reflected the inadequacy of the law and the problems associated with its enforcement. However, the enduring popularity of such practices might also have been a product of the socio-economic conditions of the province during that period. Ulster remained a predominantly rural society, in which animals and their sufferings were familiar to the majority of the population; and where both religious and secular ideas of treating animals with humanity received little popular support. Moreover, the failure of the authorities to suppress these pastimes, and the refusal of many in the population to abandon them, may indicate much about prevailing attitudes to the law. Catholic estrangement from the criminal justice system in Ireland has been asserted by many historians, who argue that it resulted from Protestant manipulation of the processes of the law and domination of the organs of the state. In this case, however, it may be that while opposition to the law was affected by sectarian considerations, innovations in legislation ran contrary to established cultural norms, and were just as important in generating resistance to it. In essence, substantial numbers of the Irish population saw the law as irrelevant and illegitimate, not because it was the tool of a rival faction, but because it required them to act in ways that were contradictory to established traditions, and for reasons with which they had no sympathy. Introduction As early as 1714 there seem to have been suggestions that blood sports in Ulster were facing some opposition. A pamphlet published in Belfast in that year noted that, for some, hunting was 'a compound of noise, dirt and fatigue, danger and expense'.1 Fifteen years later, the Bishop of Deny wrote to a confidante that the obsession of the Ulster gentry with shooting and hunting was such that his 'aversion to misery' prevented him from 'joining in the amusements of the place'.2 In 1756 an article in the Belfast News-Letter condemned the 'barbarous and inhuman custom of throwing at cocks and hens' as 'a practice shocking to humanity'.3 John Tenant, the son of a dissenting clergy* Author's e-mail: n.garnham@ulster.ac.uk 1 Arthur Stringer, The experienced huntsman (Belfast, 1714, repr. 1977), 142. 2 James Dallaway (ed.), Letters of the late Thomas Rundle, LL.D. Lord Bishop of Derry in Ireland to Mrs Barbara Sandys, ofMiserden, Gloucestershire (Dublin, 1789), 103-4. 3 Belfast News-Letter (henceforth BNL), 24 February 1756. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Vol. 107C, 107-126 © 2007 Royal Irish Academy This content downloaded from 157.55.39.231 on Wed, 05 Oct 2016 04:08:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms