Tottenham told to axe ‘cruel’ fighting spurs

ANIMAL rights activists want Premier League giants Tottenham Hotspur to sever their historic link with an outlawed blood sport and update their fighting cockerel emblem.

For more than a century the symbol has been synonymous with the north London football club. It’s on the badge, and a huge bronze statue sits above the stadium.

But despite the sport being banned in Britain since the early 1800s and the symbol being redesigned many times, the team’s cockerel still retains its fighting spurs – or gaffs – once used to inflict horrific injuries on other birds.

The club says it “de-emphasised” the spur in a re-design in 2006.

But the charity People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has called on the club to finally ditch the spur.

Founded in 1882 by a group of schoolboys, the club was named Tottenham Hotspur after

Sir Henry Percy, from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, better known as Sir Harry Hotspur.

In 1909 former player William James Scott commissioned a statue of a bronze fighting bird which was erected over thewest Stand.

The cockerel was used on Spurs’ shirts for the first time in the 1921 FA Cup Final and has been central to the club’s identity ever since.

The Golden Cockerel statue, which stands on a football, was re-located in 2018 after the ground underwent a multi-million pound transformation.

As recently as 2006 the club’s cockerel-andball badge underwent a facelift to bring it into the 21st century with “a sleeker, more modern image”. However the bird’s fighting spurs, in smaller form, remained.

Today cockfighting is only legal in a few countries of Central and South America, Asia and Madagascar.

Now PETA’S director, Elisa Allen, believes it is time the club moved on and rejected its historic links with the blood sport.

She said: “The Tottenham Hotspur FC logo, a fighting spur on a cockerel’s leg, calls to mind the violence of cockfighting, in which razorsharp 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 simply 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 is past time for the logo to be updated and the spurs removed.

“Doing so would reflect society’s rejection of needless violence.”