To ban boxing and hunting would impoverish our lives. - Stephen Moss (The Guardian)

There is no rational argument for permitting boxing. Allowing two men (or, increasingly, women) to stand toe to toe punching the living daylights out of each other for the enjoyment of others is insane and barbaric. Similarly, with hunting: it is monstrous that several hundred people and a pack of hounds should get an afternoon's enjoyment out of pursuing a terrified fox for several hours before tearing the exhausted animal apart.

In the case of boxing, the British Medical Association's arguments cannot be resisted. Boxers' brains are reduced to mush by the constant pounding: even if they manage to escape the sort of catastrophic blood clot on the brain that overwhelmed Paul Ingle as he defended his world featherweight title on Saturday, they may face a lifetime of slurred speech and slowed movement.

Most boxers don't even get rich out of it: the game is littered with great champions, notably Joe Louis, who ended up penniless and propping up bars, grizzled relics of great careers. Promoters and TV companies cream off most of the money, and every champion has his retinue of hangers-on looking to cash in on his courage. As for the journeymen, many are being paid to act as punchbags for young hopefuls who want a 20-0 record to get a crack at a title.

Forget all the nonsense about the noble art. It's a nobbled art. Many fights are, in effect, fixed: nine times out of ten, the winner will be known in advance because the matching is so precise. Bright prospect versus gnarled veteran looking for one last pay day is the classic match: the latter will put up a good show and go down in the seventh, boosting the ranking and TV drawing-power of the former. It stinks.

As for the titles these young hopefuls are gunning for, they stink too. An alphabet soup of self-interested governing bodies offering tacky belts that they will take away from champions who refuse to play ball with their match-making. Boxing has always been corrupt and driven by money, but the proliferation of governing bodies in the past 20 years has raised it to a new level.

The route-out-of-the-gutter argument is largely bogus. Few boxers make a packet; some of those who do lose it all anyway; many of those who don't end up punchy. The latter are often found hanging around in boxing gyms - warm, supportive places that provide a surrogate family for the old pro. But why couldn't an amateur-based system provide the same support? Professional boxing appears to exist largely for promoters, pay-per-view TV companies and overweight punters in bow-ties.

Similarly, with hunting: there are no rational grounds to retain it. The conservation argument is tenuous: as Matthew Engel pointed out in these pages last week, hunts can't be allowed to get away with claiming that they both eliminate vermin and sustain the fox population. Hunting is a ludicrously inefficient way of controlling foxes. Hunts exist for hunters, not for farmers whose land they cross, and certainly not for the welfare of the hunted.

Some argue in favour of boxing and hunting on libertarian grounds: that those who engage in them do so freely and without affecting the rights of others. The argument is unconvincing. A fox is a living thing with the right to a humane death: if hunting is acceptable, why not badger baiting and cock fighting? And if boxers are free to maim and kill each other, why not permit so-called total fighting, in which there are no restraints, or bring back gladiators? There would certainly be an audience.

I have hunted and boxed, and feel ambiguous about both. They are fascinating, inward-looking worlds full of courageous individuals with a deep love of what they do. They have rich, superbly documented traditions; to lose either would be like losing a language - an accumulation of meanings that offer an insight into human behaviour. I think of the old master of foxhounds I rode with who had no interest in being up with the thrusters to witness the kill, but wanted to watch the hounds working and listen to them calling to each other as they trawled through a copse. I think, too, of the former boxer damaged by too many hard fights but still anxious to box because only in the ring could he truly express himself.

The only argument for boxing, as for hunting, is aesthetic (jarring though the word is, as a boxer lies fighting for his life in a Sheffield hospital). Not in the sense of beauty, though many would claim that boxing - the "sweet science" - is beautiful when a Muhammad Ali or a Sugar Ray Leonard is performing; and some would even make the same claim for hunting when the hunt gathers in the frosty light of a crisp December day.
Boxing and hunting are worlds entire unto themselves: ban them and you eliminate a way of being. That is why hunting, feeling itself hunted, has responded so ferociously: it is not a sport under attack but a way of life. Boxing would feel the same way; boxers have nothing else.

Boxing and hunting are insupportable on rational grounds, yet both offer rooted, cherished narratives of how people choose to live. Both are long established and are the preserve of self-contained social groups. The social self-sufficiency - with its unique codes and language - has produced a way of seeing, a portrait of a world.

Boxing has the greatest literature of any sport. William Hazlitt, Paul Gallico, George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, Hugh McIlvanney, Joyce Carol Oates and David Remnick have all written brilliantly, and by no means blindly, about the sport: its heroism and its hellishness. Hunting, too, has attracted good writers: it dominated the sporting magazines of the Victorian age, RS Surtees wrote entertaining novels based around the hunting field, and Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man offers a wonderful depiction of a youth devoted to the sport. The fact that boxing and hunting have inspired great writing does not mean either is great, but should make us aware that in banning them we would be losing something profound.

Boxing and hunting have no place in a rational world, but do we live in a rational world? In a rational world, half its people wouldn't starve while the other half eat in fancy restaurants; palaces would be pulled down so that Peckham could be revitalised; there would be no conflict between religions because we know that every faith is founded on sand; the world's self-proclaimed greatest democracy would bother to count the votes cast in elections; the lion would lie down with the lamb, and both would oppose genetic modification. Boxing and hunting are crazy, but so are we.

:: :: ::

Personally I don't understand the appeal of boxing but that's a far cry from saying it should be banned. Some people aren't content unless they're telling others what to do, it would seem.