At the weekend,

County Limerick.

John Fitzgerald writes:

Defying a ban on “unauthorised photography” members of the Irish Council Against Blood Sports (ICABS) travelled to observe and film part of the “Ardpatrick and Kilfinane” coursing event in County Limerick, held on Saturday and Sunday.

The footage shows hares being terrorised, struck multiple times and mauled into the ground by the muzzled dogs. A hare can be seen in the clutches of a coursing official following a mauling and this animal is clearly having its neck broken.

This footage is significant because it exposes as meaningless the so-called regulations that coursing clubs and some politicians claim “protects” hares and ensures they come to no harm when they are chased by pairs of greyhounds.

This is the so-called “traditional pastime” that TDs backed last year in whipped votes to prevent its proposed abolition, some of them lauding what transpires at these fixtures held nationwide each year between the end of September and the third week of February.

Irish Council Against Blood Sports (ICABS)

Sponsored Link

40 thoughts on “Mauled

  1. thecitizen

    Will you ever go away and mind your own business. The hare gets chased the whole time. Bunch of urbanites that think food comes from Tesco.

    1. Killian G

      We’ve moved on fro Tesco. Artisan grocers and Farmers’ Markets are all the rage now. You lot can have your Tescos.

      1. Fact Checker

        He makes a fair point.

        Hare coursing is nasty, but so is the process of making the food for anyone who is not a vegan. There are literally tens of thousands of animals who endure cruelty in Ireland every day. The vast majority of them are poultry raised in battery conditions. Hare coursing is UTTERLY insignificant beside this number.

        There are people who pursue the vegan lifestyle. I respect them and maybe John Fitzgerald is one of them.

        But anyone who is not a vegan while at the same time criticising hare coursing is morally inconsistent.

        1. Nigel

          That’s OK. If awareness of cruel sports leads to awareness of cruelty in food production so much the better.

          1. Fact Checker

            I agree.

            However most people do not make the logical link.

            People oppose bullfighting and hare coursing because they are a) visible; b) gratuitous.

            People ignore cruelty in food production because it goes on behind closed doors and serves the purpose of human nutrition.

          2. Nigel

            So that’s more difficult to accomplish than raising awareness about something as obviously and pointlessly cruel as coursing, so it’s not a moral inconsistency it’s an educational one, as well as the sheer size and power of the targets making them more difficult to tackle. So asuming people horrified by this are somehow unmoved by the realities of factory farming is unfair whataboutery, since it fails to take into account the relative enormity involved in the tasks of banning/reforming either.

          3. Fact Checker

            I am not really grounding my point in a concrete world of vested interests

            My point is more conceptual. A is as bad as or worse than B, but A fails to horrify people the way B does.

            This attitude can of course be found for every kind of human activity.

        2. pedeyw

          It’s a fallacy to compare humanely killed animals to animals who are chased, beaten and abused in the name of “sport” before being killed. Battery farmed meat is also pretty awful, but they are two different (though related) issues.

        3. SOMK

          “But anyone who is not a vegan while at the same time criticising hare coursing is morally inconsistent.”

          Aye, the morally inconsistent, they’re the ones!

          boo boos

          You could tell Hitler was a bad ‘un from the Holocaust and the vegetarianism, what was that about?

          “Ja I am ze Hitler und I am ze killing many million und the not eating the bacon und fried chicken”, big warning light there lads.

          Personally I only eat meat that has been certified terrified unnecessarily to death, it is very important for me that they suffer as much as possible, after all by eating meat I am responsible for their death and as death is undesirable it makes sense it should be as miserable as possible, otherwise I’d be morally inconsistent, like Hitler and the disgraceful non-vegan urbanites commenting on here .

          I’d also like to take this opportunity to say what great people farmers are in general, they are in no way weird, ignorant, are immune to cognitive dissonance (it’s okay I don’t know what that means either) and really hate badgers because they spread TB to cows despite the fact that it’s only been replicated once in a non-natural scenario where badgers and cows were kept in close proximity to each other for a period of months (note: I don’t know that I just made it up, if it happens to be true it’s purely coincidental), they are in no way weird, superstitious or bizarrely fixated in the issue of overhead power cables, sure they might skew a bit conservative, but that’s only because notions like homosexuality, travellers, foreigners and blow-ins makes them (on average) deeply uncomfortable.

          You city people, with your tiny lawns (if you even have a lawn ha!) do you ever stop to think where that food you eat comes from? Do you think it falls from the sky? Ha! Ha! Ha! FOOLS No farmers make your food, they also kill hares with dogs, deal with it, your cats do the same thing, do your cats have bells to warn away the birds and rats? I bet they don’t, I bet you’re sitting there in Dublin with a latté made from your own wee wee reading with the guardian open in one tab and broadsheet open in another, in your sandals and repeal jumper, with your ironic hair what do you know of the glory of seeing a dog you don’t let into the house tear an animal into little bits? What’s wrong with taking pleasure from suffering? How dare you interfere with that which is not your concern! You morally inconsistent fools, go away with your bad logic.

          Farmers are THE BEST, the absolutely very BEST people, they are the land itself, and where would we be without the land? We’d have no burgers, milk, we’d have to live on boats, but we’d have no trees to build the boats because there’d be no land. You’d all be absolutely twinkled, except what’s this? Is it a boat-tractor, it’s coming towards you, oh wait it’s manned by farmers, I guess you can’t get on it because you are so attached to your precious hares, “oh no the poor hares, I couldn’t get on that boat it’d be like condoning the murder of the sandwich I couldn’t eat for lunch because there’s no land for the delivery truck to drive it to my mouth.” Well now your drowning, enjoy your moral inconsistency as your lung fill with sea water!

          A little word to your city types, with your concrete and cinemas and broadband and shaved genitals, let farmers be farmers and do farmerly things, don’t try and understand or interfere, farmers are just plain better than you in every conceivable way (unless you’re a vegan, because then you are morally consistent, which is also a great thing to be, as long as you are mortally consistent you can pretty much be moral against anything, there is no flaw in this logic, none, zip, zero and even if there was you’d have to make sure you’re criticism was morally consistent before it was valid, you see? You see? It’s impossible to refute!)

          1. Kelly

            Drop the divisive insults you supporters of this barbarity, it has nothing to do with town or country as such, it has to do with imagination and sensitivity and that shouldn’t be restricted to “urbanites”, though it might be linked to educational attainment I’m sorry to say. Ask what enjoyment these people get from making other creatures suffer. It is a well known & researched fact that many of those guilty of animal cruelty go on to abuse humans, be it domestic abuse or sadistic cruelty directed at other humans. Don’t expect me to quote the studies, no time for that, but what perverts get their kicks from cruelty/sadism? Then think again, think beyond perversion that has to find its outlet, and try to be grown up and civilised in 2017.

          2. Fact Checker

            @Kelly

            Which is worse: a) the suffering of the animal? b) or the humans enjoying the spectacle of suffering?

            There is lots of a) in Ireland and very little b). It is, if you forgive my use of the jargon, very speciesist of you to be more bothered by the humans than by what is happening to the animals

        4. nefD6

          At least the poultry are not suffering in vain. They get to be eaten.

          What does the hare (a protected species) get out of it?

          Nothing, that’s what.

    2. dylad

      ‘Tis the way of the country like incest, building giant houses without planning permission, illegal dumping, animal cruelty and land poisoning.

  2. why?

    Dog Kills Rabbit Shocker

    Next week we expose the murky underground world of nocturnal cats on their avian murder sprees.

    1. pedeyw

      Dog kills rabbit while people cheer it on is the shocking part. Why it’s almost as if people want the animal to suffer horribly before being killed.

    1. Sam

      Oh, is there no greyhound track in Dublin, then?
      What’s Shelbourne Park Greyhound Stadium for?
      Is it where greyhounds go to watch soccer and their favourite rock bands?

      1. JoeJoe

        Without millions of Euros of taxpayers’ money going into the greyhound industry each year Shelbourne Park would have already gone the way of Harold’s Cross. It’s shameful that we are financing the barbarism that is hare coursing. The tide is turning though and we can look forward to a future where we join the rest of the modern world and consign the entire vile industry to the history books.

  3. Gay Tea Shop

    Sure they can’t help it God Love Them; the rural way of life is under attack and the right to drink and drive and torture animals is part of bog standard heritage. Them in Dublin will be outlawing marriage between first cousins next.

    Never an American Sniper at work when needed with these muck savages.

  4. Jesus Wept

    If all food was killed for entertainment first then you could compare hair coursing to, say the rasher on a plate.

    1. Sam

      Just for clarity, are you saying that consider the hare to be your rural friend, or the guy in wellies, probably getting minimum wage to set dogs on them, snap their necks so that someone else can make a fortune on gambling on which dog is fastest?

      1. why?

        Thanks

        I love attacks from mindless, barely literate trolls who have no real life friends and indulge themselves with expressions of perceived superiority over others in obscure online rants

  5. jimmey_russell

    this is racist, coursing is part of Traveler culture we have no right to impose our values on them, Travellers are a separate ethnic group we need more legislation to protect them from online hate speech like this

  6. GoddessDurga

    Coursing is valued for two reasons: it excites a certain type of person to watch a killing, and – far more important to those who want to preserve it – gambling on the death is a multimillion-euro business. I wonder do CAB investigate profits on coursing gambling.

Comments are closed.

Sponsored Link
Broadsheet.ie