How can you call it a "Sport"?

The problem here arises in the way that words change their use over time.

The term "Field Sports" to denote Hunting Shooting and Fishing uses the word sport in its old fashioned sense.

The anti-hunt lobby always think that they are being very clever in changing "Field Sports" to "Blood Sports", whilst they don't realise that they are actually arguing about the wrong word.

When people think about the word "sport", they might think of football or rugby or cricket.

That’s fair enough, these days, but in the traditional sense of the word, these are not sports they are games.

Sport refers to the way in which a thing is done. To a sense of fair play and following the rules and general stiff-upper-lippedness. Terribly, terribly British, don’tcha know, old boy. Etc.

This can still be seen in some modern uses of the word today. When we refer to someone as being "a good sport", we don't mean that he or she is "a good player", we mean that they play in a "sportsmanlike" (there it is again) manner.

We mean that they don't cheat and loose (or win) gracefully and generally follow the rules of good "sportsmanship" (and again).

Indeed, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary still contains the following definitions for sport :

"4 colloq. a a fair or generous person. b a person behaving in a specified way, esp. regarding rules, etc."

When we talk about Field Sports, we do so because the term refers to the sportsmanlike way in which the written and unwritten rules that have developed over the years to give the quarry a sporting chance are honoured and adhered to.

A Field Sport is an honoured institution. It is not a Game.