Emma Griffin's book is a new contribution to what is a limited list of works that deal with hunting. The aim of Blood Sports is to give an account of how hunting, and particularly hunting with dogs, survived over one thousand years of English history, and of how the sport adapted to survive. The book has a narrative rather than a thematic structure. It begins with the Norman Conquest and takes the reader through to the twenty-first century and the effective banning of the sport by the Hunting Act. Griffin makes the work accessible to a wider audience by giving the broader historical background to the different stages in the development of hunting.

The author has two main arguments that she pursues over the thousand years that the work spans. She suggests that social conflict has always underlain hunting. This theme recurs through her account of the forest laws and the game laws, which both, in different ways, sought to restrict hunting as a privilege for the social elite. Social conflict is also to be found in the emergence of the various movements in the twentieth century whose efforts ultimately led to the banning of the sport in the twenty-first. Griffin reflects the changing nature of the conflict, however: the transition from opposition arising because those who wanted to hunt were not permitted to, and the later conflict with those who believed that no one should be allowed to hunt.

The other theme that the work pursues is an ecological one: the way in which the very act of hunting put the chosen prey and its habitat under pressure, and how hunting in turn adapted to changed circumstances. Griffin explains the switch from deer hunting to fox hunting in terms of declining deer population. Economic pressure led to continued reduction in the physical forest. The long-term effect of this, combined with the short-term effect of the civil war in denuding deer populations in both forest and park, led to the ultimate decline in deer hunting. The search was on for a replacement prey. The hare did not afford enough excitement, but the fox fitted the bill. And so an animal previously dismissed as vermin came to be treasured as the quintessential quarry. This in turn caused pressure on the fox population, and Griffin examines the steps that were taken to deal with this, including the provision of fox coverts.

The book has a readable style, and will appeal to a wider audience because of that. But this also leads to one of its weaknesses. There is much that is speculative, particularly in the accounts of early hunting. This aids the narrative flow but at the expense of some necessary discussion. Thus, although developments in the landscape play a crucial part in the account of hunting's adaptation to ecological pressures, there is an uncritical acceptance of some arguments that really would bear closer examination. The book also tends to overlook the key role played by the horse in the evolution of ‘modern’ fox hunting, whereby the majority of the sport's followers were really hunting to ride rather than riding to hunt.