An article appeared in this weekend’s Sunday Express, you might not have read it, but you may well, like me and many others, caught sight of the unattributed screenshot doing the rounds on social media platforms.
A long stare at search engine results revealed nothing, and nor did PETA have anything on their website about the piece. So this morning I rang PETA, who advised me that Eugene Henderson, had been in touch, on behalf of the Express and asked the organization for comment. PETA kindly emailed me the statement.
Understandably, PETA was never going to condone anything that might be related to ‘sport’ that was as barbaric as it was illegal. Elisa Allen, PETA’s director, condemned the badge, which does hark back to less enlightened times, when spurs were attached to cockerels.
The Tottenham Hotspur FC logo, a fighting spur on a cockerel’s leg, calls to mind the violence of cockfighting – in which razor-sharp spurs are tied to a bird’s feet to make fights bloodier and gorier.
The birds forced to fight sustain broken wings and legs, punctured lungs, severed spinal cords, and gouged-out eyes – they cut each other to death.
The blood sport was banned in England in 1835, almost 50 years before the Spurs team was founded, so it’s past time for the logo to be updated and the spur to be removed. Doing so would reflect society’s rejection of needless violence.
Elisa Allen, Director PETA UK
So why was this story not run online?
I take a view that it was the clearly mischievous intent, and one could equally spark damning reactions, by asking certain organizations for a view on things that had a dark edge to them.
The name of the band, ‘Joy Division’ strikes me as one that would be problematic for some to see in record stores or on t-shirts (Google is your friend), But I won’t be phoning the CST for a quote.
For me, it’s a big leap to associate Tottenham Hotspur Football Club with the subliminal endorsement of something as fundamentally nasty as cock cockfighting. So whilst I appreciate PETA’s stance, the world has more pressing issues than looking for problems where none exist. THFC does football, and Chirpy was built for hugs, not tear-ups.
Along with the Y word business, this is simply more from the same people that want to pull down statues and de-platform folks they don’t like very much.
The Express, part of Reach PLC. Need I say more…
need to try that on the wife..
https://www.knowyourchickens.com/rooster-spurs/
Not a gamekeeper mate, but was involved with farms, zoos, stables etc., at times so no surprise I had ‘incidents’ in such environments, must have been a big cat.
Are you Zouma in disguise
All Halogen …🙏
Ffs I have had a 2 inch metal Spur attached to my cock in honour of the badge ….really don’t fancy the PETA grinder anywhere near that.
That is quite a list of animals Mike! What do you do for a living? Are you a gamekeeper?
I was a postman for a decade during the 1990’s. One day I was posting letters through a front door letterbox. The door had two glass panels in it; top and bottom. The letterbox was in the wooden panel separating the two glass panes. As I posted the mail through I felt pain in my fingers. It felt like barbed wire sticking into me. I attempted to pull my hand away but it wouldn’t come out of the letter box. I could now feel a weight pulling on my hand as well as the cutting sensation. The pain was by now intense and at this point I became aware of a shadowy figure bashing against the lower glass pane every time I attempted to yank my hand away.
I realised it was in fact a cat that had jumped at my hand as I attempted to post the letters, sunk it’s claws into my hand, and was now swinging from my blood soaked hand. I gave an almighty tug when I realised what was happening and finally managed to get my hand out; with the cats claws still stuck in them. I was in a state of shock for about 5 minutes.
There was nobody around, my hand hurt like hell and I was furious. Upon returning to the delivery office I was inevitably asked what had happened to my hand as it was still bleeding quite badly. When I explained my injuries were caused by a cat I was greeted with hysterical laughter. I got no sympathy. Just an almighty pi55 take. I often wished I’d said it was a dog.
I hate cats to this day.
Not yet.
😁
😊👍
Starring Danny Boy as Father of Dracula
Hahaha,imagine they come to my country and tell us to stop shooting buffalo’s, kudus,bucks.
Erm, cockerels have talons… the logo doesn’t show blades attached to the bird..wth?
Spurs were banned from use in horse racing years ago but are still used in other equestrian sports such as show jumping, cross country and dressage, more so for guidance than making them go faster.
Comoli ?, I do mean the feathered kind, it was a Mistle thrush who thought I was getting to close to her nest, but all were in the line of duty, and I lived to tell the tales. Last year I bought a sandwich and a coffee for lunch and was sat on a bench near the beach when a seagull came from nowhere and took the whole sandwich out of my hand, I went mental, and had to go back for another sandwich, true.
“Tottenham are named “Hotspur” after an English knight, Sir Henry Percy (1364-1403), whose Scottish enemies nicknamed him “Haatspore” during the Hundred Years’ War after becoming known for digging his spurs into his horse in order to go faster as he charged into battle.
The Percy family had close connections with the Tottenham area, with the descendents of Sir Henry owning the land around Tottenham Marshes on which Spurs played their early games.”
Nothing to do with cock fighting then, although I suppose someone might make a fuss about the practice of using spurs to encourage horses to run faster. But as with legal cock fighting, that practice has long since ceased.
Sir Henry Percy appears in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, so I guess that play ought to be banned in case it triggers thoughts of violence against animals.
PETA’s name is wrong. They want us to pet animals? How patronising is that? Is that not undermining animals, treating them as pointless 3rd class and non-sentient beings and therefore denigrating and margnalising them to the point that all they can do is wag their tail or poop. Christ
No doubt if you dig deep enough you could find some horrible history in the name Tottenham Hotspur.
Farmers, animal sanctuary owners zoo keepers 😁
And vice versa.
Can you throw some light on this please? 🤔
Arsenal have a Cannon but that is fine hahahahaha
I
m waiting for it cannot be called mens team or women`s team heheI’m in the Illuminati and so is my wife
🤣
Perhaps some busy “journalist” might like to peruse and draw attention to the satanic symbology employed throughout the corporate , media and entertainment worlds.
FFS, whatever next.
Perhaps I need to get out more but I’ve just sent an email with a pic of a naturally spurred cockerel to Peta, fao Elisa Allen, informing her she clearly doesn’t know wtf she’s talking about.
PETA could be an acronym for People Eating and Torturing Animals, which I find offensive, so I think PETA should get a new acronym. And then they should ban the middle ages because they were horrible to animals back then.
I think we should all get together and ask them to kindly remove them so as not to upset these people…
Who on Earth gets attacked by birds, unless it’s seagulls trying to nick your chips on the beach.
This requires some follow up questions.
Do animals attack you regularly and is your name Damien by any chance?
Exactly. That’s why we have so many woke causes. People, especially young people, with so few worries, have to find things to worry about.
never been attacked by a Bengal Tiger then?
I would hazard a guess that if you ran a survey amongst the population, in general, asking what does THFC’s Cockerill symbolise you would probably get the following results: 25% What’s a Cockerill, 25% Is it Nandos, 10% THFC, 10% a football club, 10% I don’t care, 19.9% What used to be a football club and .1% Might be something to do with a sport that was banned 186 years ago when Tottenham was a small village in Middlesex. This whole story is utter bullshit from whichever way you look at it.
Cockerels have spurs.
Honestly, I was actually attacked by a cockerel once and over the years have had various incidents with the usual types of animal that want to attack, like dogs , geese, bulls, cows and birds but never a cockerel and he was the worst.
What is this nonsence? Cockerels/roosters have natural spurs at the back of their legs. It’s a part of their body ffs. The world has gone Karen. 😞
Some people have too much time on their hands and should be worrying about more important stuff than this.
I’m as woke as they come. I’ve little time for moaning about cancel culture. The establishment decide who to venerate and why the majority of us who are not part of the establishment should agree or applaud their choices astonishes me. It how we end up electing jokes instead of looking for an end to the biased system they have created. But that said I do like our logo.
I feel better now 😊
Do we stop calling breeds of dogs Bulldogs & Bull Mastiff’s because they were used for bull baiting?
Do we change the name of Birmingham Bullring because it was where they tied bulls to be baited?
Will airplanes no longer have cockpits?
Will Arsenal stop using the Gunners as a name as gun’s are used to kill people?
What a load of twaddle & a waste of everyone’s time!
Completely absurd, when is all this nonsense going to stop? It feels as if we are living under the tyrannical rule of a woke and cancel culture society. What amazes me is that anybody takes any notice of them, particularly as they are such a small but noisy minority. Most people don’t have the time or inclination to indulge themselves in navel gazing of this self indulgence.