[quote1315605574=davidfitness83] The issue with most wild animals is that they are programmed to survive, this is why you see or hear about historic baiting sports the wild animal is always chained. A bear is not going to stick around and try to fight 4 dogs for fun, the bear will make a determination if it is worth it, if it will get food out of it, if not the bear will run away. [/quote1315605574] Yeah the chaining wasn't to protect the dogs, it was actually to make the bear fight better. If it had the option of escape that would be on it's mind and it wouldn't fight, once the bears were conditioned to understand they had to fight, they could focus on fighting and perform better. The chain helped make this clear to them, eventually some bears would learn to look forward to fighting dogs. There's mention in historical texts that bears kept for bear baiting would get excited at the sight of dogs and struggle to get at them and show dissatisfaction and frustration if they weren't free to do so. The truth is the dogs would probably be safer encountering a wild bear in the wild, rather than these eager experienced dog killing bears. People don't realise there were just as many people wanting the bear to win as there were people wanting the dog to win, it was a sporting contest. Someone actually owned the bear and definitely wanted it to win because that would make him a lot of money. It was not just a cruel torture of the bear, however, there were times when things took a nasty turn for the worse. Amateurish bear and bull baits which did become an excuse for the poor people to let out their frustration on the unfortunate animals and just simply torture them. But it wasn't designed like this, this was never the original intention, it was originally a sporting contest, but one people took and did what they wanted with. If they were sadistic bitter psychopaths then the focus could just be on torturing a bear, the "bear baiting" just an excuse to do it. These cases are referenced in history as well, more so with bull baiting. But there were people back then who would be offended by this cruelty and poor sportsmanship too, you will sometimes read from people who were strongly pro bull and bear baiting, but then annoyed and disgusted by how some people did it, with no consideration for the "sport" of it and instead just torturing animals. Obviously it was usually performed in a more fair manner and there was less cruelty involved. So yeah basically you shouldn't define bull and bear baiting by the worst cases in history, even though at the best of times it wasn't a good thing. It was awful to be keeping bears for the purpose of fighting dogs ofcourse, even if lengths were taken to make it a fair and sporting contest, it's clearly a terrible thing. But that doesn't mean we should just go by the worst cases in history (or today- as you can see in pakistan) and think this represents bear baiting as the norm for it. There really hardly is a norm for how it was done, it came under many guises and in many different forms. Some were just disgustingly unfair torturings of bears, others would sometimes lean in the other direction, with the dogs disadvantaged (remember dogs would have been a lot cheaper than bears, and seeing a bear mow through dogs was a spectacle people would pay to see). Other times it was as simple as a dog having a fight with a bear, probably this was achievable after a bear had become experienced and developed a love for fighting dogs, and was no longer inclined to try and flee. Don't get me wrong, ask me "bear vs dog?" and I favour bear. But I think it's undeniable that dogs have the potential to survive going toe to toe with bears, and to even get the better of them in scuffles. A good dog can potentially control a bear in a fight, at least for a while.