Field sports


Field sports are outdoor sports that take place in the wilderness or sparsely populated rural areas, where there are vast areas of uninhabited greenfields. The term specifically refers to activities that mandate sufficiently large open spaces and/or interaction with natural ecosystems, including hiking/canyoning, equestrianism, hawking, archery and shooting, but can also extend to various surface water sports such as river trekking, angling, rowing/paddling, rafting and boating/yachting.
Field sports are considered nostalgic pastimes, especially among country people. For example, participants of field sports such as riding and fox hunting in the United Kingdom frequently wear traditional attires to imitate landed gentries and aristocrats of the 19th-century English countryside.

Types

Field sports, by definition, involve activities away from typical human settlements, which implies entering into natural areas usually devoid of human presence. Such encroachments can potentially cause ecological disturbances to the wild faunae and florae, including environmental contamination by littered wastes, wildfire risk from campfires and cigarette butts, disruption of groundcovers and topsoil due to trail-making and camping, damages to rocks by anchors used for aid climbing, irresponsible luring and feeding of wild animals, and light and sound pollution that can frequently trigger startle responses and territorial behaviors, leading to animal attacks, nest abandonment, habitat fragmentation and even habitat loss.
Some field sports, especially hunting and fishing, involve the catching and/or killing of wild animals for meat, for removing species in conflict with humans, or simply for personal leisure and trophy. Opponents to such sports consider them controversial, and even immoral, on grounds of animal cruelty, animal welfare and environmental protection, especially those involving commercial incentives such as safari big game hunting.