Blood Sports | 91 taunting, cornering, and so on Dogfighting and cockfighting are typically not considered baiting because the animals are usually not goaded to fight at the time of the event, but rather are trained and bred to fight beforehand The animals subjected to blood sports routinely suffer terribly both during the events and during training for fights Losing animals are often killed In baiting and fighting, the wounds animals suffer are often intentionally grisly and painful Fighting animals are chosen for the damage they can to each other, and they are bred and trained to be relentlessly savage When using weapons to hunt, sport hunters usually try not to inflict intentionally ghastly wounds on the animals they kill In most communities, making prey suffer is frowned upon However, the deaths of animals killed during coursing (using predators to hunt prey) can be more gruesome Sport Hunting Hunting is one of the longest-standing ways in which humans interact with other animals Much prehistoric art depicts commonly-hunted animals and sometimes even hunting scenes Hunting in general has greatly affected animal populations and the environment Hunters themselves have long been quite active on both sides of land and animal management programs: Avid hunters were among the pioneers of land management (and many are still among the most active), and yet poaching (and sometimes other forms of hunting) continues to push animals to extinction in many parts of the world Although humans and our ancestors have hunted since at least the Paleolithic era, hunting simply for entertainment probably established itself with the advent of domestication and agriculture Early sport hunting was largely restricted to the upper class, who had the time and resources for it These privileged classes typically approached a hunt as they would a battle, and hunting was probably regarded as practice for war Destroying powerful animals made the royalty appear powerful to their subjects and probably even to themselves In medieval Europe and in the East, hunting became associated with land ownership Although falcons, bows, spears and even swords continued to be used in hunts into the 1600s, hunting with dogs became the most common way to hunt Coursing dogs were followed as they chased their prey The hunters usually did not kill the animals themselves; instead they watched as their dogs tore the animal apart Most types of coursing were illegalized in England in 2004 As weapons became more effective, complex hunting codes were used to make sport hunting more difficult, in order to ensure that a wounded animal was killed Nonetheless, the casual cruelty to animals that pervaded many aspects of human life affected sport hunting Animals were sometimes herded into confined areas and shot wholesale Whereas subsistence hunters try to kill an animal as efficiently as possible, sport hunters may not A sizable minority of sport hunters in the United States, for example, prefer the challenge of hunting with bows or black powder rifles instead of more effective, modern weapons Sometimes sport hunters use modern weapons, but in ways that make clean kills difficult, forcing wounded animals to die slowly Bison, for example, were shot en masse from moving trains; in Alaska wolves are currently shot from airplanes