Crimes against non-human animals: Examining dog fighting in the UK and the USA through a green criminology perspective

Abstract

This article reviews the social scientific literature published between the late 1990s and 2021 on the illegal ‘sport’ of dog fighting in the UK and USA. Adopting a green criminological perspective, it argues that studying dog fighting is important for understanding the ways in which this form of animal cruelty contributes to a range of social and animal harms. The review is structured in five sections. The first situates the review theoretically by introducing key ideas within green criminology that will inform the discussion. The next section presents a typology of the different levels of dog fighting in both countries. The third section then explores both the motivations of contemporary dog fighters, as well as the justifications they deploy to defend their ‘sport’ to outsiders. The fourth section then adopts a green criminological perspective to explore the various social and animal harms associated with dog fighting. The final section then brings the threads of the discussion together and highlights some directions for future research.