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Some people are dog people. Some people are cat people. I am a bird person. Feel free to make the Rick and Morty jokes, I’ve heard them all. This is the reason why I’m even less willing to have a sense of humour about the concept of goose pulling than most.

Perhaps it’s this affection for our featured friends that makes the idea of this blood sport so appalling to me personally, but even then, I think goose pulling takes the piss. I’d like to think that no matter what animal became the victim of this so-called sport, people would be outraged. This is because if you haven’t heard of it before, then first and foremost, I’m truly sorry to have to darken your life this way. Second of all, the name is disgustingly literal.

You start with a set of posts. Imagine a set of tall goalposts without the net. Then, you prepare the goose. You cover its head with grease, then tie a rope to the no doubt terrified bird’s neck, then hang it from the middle of the posts. After that, you get a set of players on horseback, and one by one, each of them takes turns riding under the posts, trying to get a hold of the bird and get a tight enough grip that you pull the head clean off.

Now I’m just miserable. People have always had stupid ideas like this one. God knows variations of it have probably been “played” with just about every other creature that can reasonably be hanged from a post. So why the hell does this one become not only a “sport” (a term doing some serious heavy lifting there), but a tradition in several European countries to boot?

To understand that, we need to begin with its origin, which takes us to sunny Spain.

How did goose pulling become a tradition?

Right in the middle of the coast of the Basque Country is the fishing village of Lekeitio.

For the past 350 years, Lekeitio has been one of the many villages that have spent the first to the eighth of every September celebrating the San Antolin festival. These are the festivities that brought geese pulling into the world, as part of the festival would be called ‘The Day of the Goose’, where the men of the town would get together and…well, goose pull, as it were.

The original version had a few variations on the finished sport. The tradition took place in the town harbour, and the goose was suspended over the water. Rather than riding on horses, contestants would ride their boats under it, before jumping up and trying to wrestle and pull the bird down. Their boat would continue on without them, and the question became whether they could plunge into the harbour with the bird or without it. If you did, you got to keep the goose. Which is nice, I guess.

Considering this is a tradition that stretches back literal centuries, the reasons for it have understandably been lost to time. There are some who swear that it was to show the village who its most physically capable men were. One wonders whether there was any way they could have demonstrated this without such absurd animal cruelty, but then you remember, it’s Spain. There probably wasn’t.

One can’t get too superior over that fact, though. Goose pulling became a sport practised all over Europe, from Belgium and the Netherlands to France and Europe. So, next time you sit down to play Untitled Goose Game, remember that you’re not playing “a horrible Goose”. Just one with a score to settle.