Читать книгу American Pit Bull Terrier Handbook - Joe Stahlkuppe - Страница 33

It is easy to sit in twenty-first century America and look back on the seventeenth century English and caustically criticize them for the wide variety of “blood sports” that were in evidence in that time. Without offering any defense for these bloody spectacles, an historical overview of the time may shed some light on why they did what they did. Perhaps this overview can also give some glimpse into the society that produced the bulldogs that fought bulls and bears (and other animals) and that provided the genetic framework, with or without the help of terriers, of the ancestors of the APBT.

Any student of English history during this period knows that life in the British Isles was quite harsh for the majority of the people. This majority excluded those of royalty, nobility, and wealth. Average Britons were abysmally poor. They could not read. They worked from dawn to past dusk at backbreaking work in mines, on small landholdings, at the docks, in factories, and as servants to the large landowners. Their lives were hard and short. In Ireland and Scotland, existence was even more precarious. Opportunities for pleasure and relief from drudgery were rare.

Perhaps as an opiate to their lives of pain and bleakness, the British developed a callused view of life. Cockfighting was brought to its highest zenith in the British Isles. Bulland bearbaiting were the only major diversions many common people had in their entire lives. When these activities were outlawed in 1835, they continued to be held clandestinely. But bears and bulls cannot be baited quietly in some out-of-the-way place. More often, a simpler form of blood sport, dogfighting, replaced bull-and bearbaiting. The British people’s hard and brutal lives were sometimes reflected in the hardness and the brutality of the only spectator events they were able to see.

In bullbaiting and later, in dog-fighting, the element of chance was always there. The much smaller dog might somehow triumph over the much larger bull or bear, just as a poor person might somehow one day become a person of wealth. In dogfighting, a poor dogfighter who could develop a great dog could go head to head vicariously with the son of an earl or with the rich landed gentry. Just this glimmer of hope was enough for many poor Britons.