It’s a tradition that dates back hundreds of years, where two stallions fight over a female to ring the Chinese new year. And when it’s the Year of the Horse, the fights are considered to be even more significant. They’re held in small villages across southern China and have been condemned by animal rights groups, including Hong-Kong based Animals Asia. But those who participate in the events defend the fights and insist they take care of the animals.

A car drives past burning trees as a wildfire rages in the northern city of Haifa, Israel November 24, 2016. Hundreds of Israelis fled their homes on the outskirts of the country's third city Haifa with others trapped inside as firefighters struggled to control raging bushfires, officials said. (Photo by Gil Eliyahu/Reuters)

A picture made available on 20 October 2015 shows a foreign tourist posing for a souvenir photograph with a figure of a tiger head at a private zoo on Phuket Island, Thailand, 17 October 2015. Each day hundreds of tourists, including young children, visit the private tiger zoo where visitors are allowed to touch and pose for photographs with unchained tigers inside their enclosures. (Photo by Rungroj Yongrit/EPA)

Chinese artist Kong Ning walks in her costume made of hundreds of orange plastic blowing horns during her art performance raising awareness of the hazardous smog in front of the Drum tower in a historical part of Beijing on a very polluted day December 7, 2015. Kong, whose works include themes related to China's air pollution problem, named her new performance “The Orange Horns Bride Marries the Blue Sky” and presented it dressed in orange, the colour of the second highest pollution alert level issued again in Beijing as hazardous smog blankets the capital. (Photo by Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

People wearing bear furs perform during a festival of New Year ritual dances attended by hundreds in Comanesti, northern Romania, Wednesday, December 30 2015. In pre-Christian rural traditions, dancers wearing colored costumes or animal furs, toured from house to house in villages singing and dancing to ward off evil, in the present the tradition has moved to Romania's cities too, where dancers travel to perform the ritual for money. (Photo by Vadim Ghirda/AP Photo)

Flamingo chicks walk in an enclosure before they are tagged in Fuente de Piedra, Spain, on Jule 19, 2014. Fuente de Piedra lagoon is a natural reserve with more than 170 different species recorded and one of the main breeding grounds for flamingos in the Iberian Peninsule. Hundreds of flamingo chicks are tagged and checked annually to record the evolution of the species. (Photo by Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images)

In a 200-acre-plus dump 5 kilometers north of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, hundreds of men, women and children scavenge day and night through the burning wasteland. They earn $12 to $15 a day – on a good day – for recycling plastics as well as clothing, household items and aluminum (for smelting). Some 5,000 tons of waste is created each day in the Port-au-Prince area. (Photo and caption by Giles Clarke/Getty Images Reportage)

Two styles of cleaned bird's nest, Yan Zhan (L) and Su Zhan (R) await repacking at a processing plant in Kuala Lumpur, February 17, 2015. Prized in China for is alleged health benefits for hundreds of years, nests made from swiftlets' saliva are being mixed into coffee and cereal as the Southeast Asian producers of the delicacy seek to broaden its appeal, and their profit margins. The nests are among the world's most expensive foods, selling for up to $2,500 a kg and the swiftlets that weave them are indigenous to Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. (Photo by Olivia Harris/Reuters)