Dr. John B. on Coursing

Occasional contributor John Burchard sent me an ominous note on new threats to coursing, which I will report on as they develop. Meanwhile, he has a few other typically wise thoughts on the subject to share.

"Here's a para from something I wrote earlier today, in answer to an obnoxious troll on one of the Greyhound lists (this guy is constantly denigrating U.S. coursing, insisting that only the British version, now banned, is fair and
sportsmanlike).

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"Once again: it is disingenuous and dishonest to pretend that coursing is not a form of hunting. The piously stated intentions of the participants really have nothing to do with the case. As Julia wrote, when you slip hounds at a hare, you accept the chance that the hare will be taken. You may manipulate that chance, or try to, but it is still there. Arrian also understood that perfectly well, as is clear if you read his entire text, and not just the one paragraph everyone is fond of quoting. The meat of the matter is what Arrian called the "contest" between the hound(s) and the hare. We may, since it is no longer a matter of survival (or even, too often, of dinner), rejoice when the hare escapes, and we may try to arrange things so that happens more often than not. We may - and it is here, actually, that we venture onto ethically questionable
ground - shift the emphasis toward the "competition" between hounds - a competition which exists more in the minds of the human participants than in those of the hounds, who are bent on catching the quarry - and use that "competition" as a vehicle for betting (as in Britain, and almost certainly also among the Celts who were Arrian's mentors) or for the accumulation of trophies and ribbons. That brings us perilously close to the domain of hunting as a "sport" which is, to put it bluntly, IMO a trivialization of something much too serious to be trivialized in that way. Tennis is a sport. Baseball is a sport. Hunting is not, and should not be. Hunting was the primary basis of human survival during 95% of the time our species has existed on earth. It is in our genes. There's nothing wrong with that (after all, love is also in our genes, along with the works of Darwin and Einstein, and of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven) but please, let us not degrade it to a "sport" - or repudiate it altogether, as the Animail Rites [see below for spelling justification-- SB] contingent wants us to do".