BAD TO THE BONE: Why Do Some People Love Watching Animals Fight?
YouTube videos of people feeding live prey to their exotic pets have become enormously popular. In China, visitors to tiger farms can hurl live chickens from buses and watch the big cats swat the hapless poultry from the air and devour them.
RICHARD PALLARDY: Animal violence has long delighted humans. Brawls between creatures of all sorts have provided a source of entertainment since the dawn of domestication… Enthusiasm for dogfighting emerged in the wake of the Roman conquest of the British Isles… For public enjoyment, Roman emperor Trajan pitted 11,000 animals against each other between A.D. 108 and 109. Later on, the Elizabethans favored bull and bear baiting — arenas that featured these conflicts gave Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre a run for its money. People also have forced bettas, canaries and even crickets to fight for entertainment.
Beginning in the 19th century, mounting criticism slowly brought a stop to these practices in much of the world (at least, officially). Many countries now prohibit animal fights, but regulations frequently go unenforced. Enthusiasm for these bouts persists and fighting rings still flourish underground where they facilitate lucrative gambling enterprises…
While they aren’t universally accepted, staged animal conflicts appear to be a human constant. In some places, proponents claim that animal fights hold cultural significance. Legislators in Puerto Rico, long a cockfighting stronghold, have sought to overturn a federal ban enacted in 2018. Advocates have gone so far as to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the prohibition on a states’ rights basis.
Even the ‘food chain’ draws a crowd. YouTube videos of people feeding live prey to their exotic pets have become enormously popular. In China, visitors to tiger farms can hurl live chickens from buses and watch the big cats swat the hapless poultry from the air and devour them… Marty Stouffer, host of the popular PBS nature program Wild America, cynically exploited this attraction to the spectacle of predation and conflict — in the 1990s, he was accused of forcing fatal animal encounters and passing off the recordings as natural events.
Of course, many of us relish watching violence between other humans, as well — whether it be a boxing match or a viral video of two people duking it out in a parking lot. The reasons why these phenomena are so stimulating to some, and so revolting to others, are still debated… What is it about the dog-eat-dog dynamic that gets us going?…
The appeal of grisly fights, either animal or human, could be explained by the pain-blood-death complex, according to a 2006 paper by the late Victor Nell of the University of South Africa. He linked it to the early adaptations of predatory animals: Because predation brings significant risks, he reasoned, the brains of predators must have evolved to positively reinforce what they might otherwise fear.
We do know that sounds of distress and the smell of blood trigger positive responses. Aversion to them would be maladaptive — if a lion wimped out on attacking a zebra, it wouldn’t be able to hunt. The same could be true of our own species because our ancestors lived in small groups that inevitably came into competition with others. And, of course, some animals posed a significant threat. Arousal by stimuli associated with violent activity has remained a useful tendency, Nell concluded, and its persistence explains why some react so positively to violence today.
But his hypothesis is controversial. Many psychologists feel that his theory ignores social factors that reinforce or discourage violent behavior in humans… Studies of violence in athletic competitions suggest that staged conflicts may be advantageous in an evolutionary sense, since they allow humans to channel their natural aggression in a contained environment… Spectators, they argue, enjoy a cathartic, energizing effect. The same may be true of animal violence…
Of course, not everyone savors violence — many are actually repulsed by it, even in natural contexts like a lion hunt. Sensation-seeking tends to vary in the general population, meaning that some people eagerly pursue novel and highly stimulating experiences and others avoid them. Certain groups tend to exhibit higher sensation-seeking tendencies, according to psychological surveys… Individual differences in brain chemistry and structure likely play a role here…
Still, our reactions to violence don’t occur in a vacuum. Feelings toward animal clashes are socially moderated on both individual and population levels. Exposure to animals at a young age likely increases empathy toward them, Marsh says. Similarly, societies that emphasize altruism in the human sense tend to extend those sensibilities to animal welfare. The inverse is also true. SOURCE…
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