Cock throwing

The First Step of Cruelty , engraving by William Hogarth (1751).

Throwing in a cock ( English cock throwing ) - the bloody fun practiced in England until the end of the XVIII century .

The fun was that the audience threw sticks at a potted rooster until the bird died. Usually this action took place on Fatty Tuesday ( carnival time). In some cases, the bird was tied to a log or blindfolded by throwing sticks. In Sussex, a bird was tied to a peg with a five to six foot fishing line so that it could peck a person.

Unlike cockfights , cocking was common among the lower classes. When in 1660 the authorities of Bristol tried to ban this entertainment, apprentices rebelled in the city. Some wits wrote that the rooster in this fun symbolizes the old enemy of the British - France (the rooster is one of the national symbols of France ^[1] ).

In the Enlightenment, this occupation was ridiculed in the press as a relic of medieval barbarism and, as a result, gradually came to naught.