Animal Fighting Claire Lawson Introduction This chapter begins with a brief introduction to the subject of animal fighting generally before focusing specifically on dog fighting which, unlike many other forms of baiting animals, would appear to have remained popular, despite being illegal in most of the developed world Evidence, which, in this chapter, focuses specifically on the UK and the USA, suggests that dog fighting is the most popular form of illegal animal fighting, and it has also received the most attention from researchers and civil society (Pet-Abuse.com 2016) It is, subsequently, presented, as a case study in the remainder of the chapter to illustrate the nature, prevalence, explanations of, and responses to animal fighting Initially, an outline of the characteristics of dog fighting, its prevalence and the categorisation of dog fighters is presented, followed by an evaluation of the harms experienced by the dogs and the difficulties of measurement The different forms of dog fighting such as the informal and the formal, as well as the rise of a cultural element imported to the UK from Pakistan, will be discussed Thereafter, the subculture of dogmen (a term C Lawson (*) Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals & Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom e-mail: LawsonCE@cardiff.ac.uk © The Author(s) 2017 J Maher et al (eds.), The Palgrave International Handbook of Animal Abuse Studies, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-43183-7_16 337