Photographs unearthed by AL.com on Monday show a grizzly sight: men grappling with a fully-grown bear in an Alabama bar while spectators look on.

The images are shocking enough as it is - but even more so when you realize they were taken just twenty years ago, when the 'sport' was legal.

The images show 'Terrible Ted,' a large bear, battling a succession of men in the center of The Ponderosa Club in New Hope, Alabama, in 1996. Ted's owner can be seen in the background of some of the images holding the bear back with a chain.

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Bear-knuckle fighting: 'Terrible Ted' the bear takes on a contender at The Ponderosa Club in New Hope, Alabama, in 1996. Bears would be brought into bars to wrestle anyone who stepped up

Once bitten: Some bears had claws and teeth removed, to minimize the chances of a human being injured. Others would 'wrestle' with muzzles. Animal rights protesters at the time claimed Ted had been operated on

The 'sport' of bear-wrestling - that is, humans wrestling with bears that had usually had their claws and teeth removed, or a muzzle placed over their faces - arrived in the US in the late 1800s, Bleacher Report claims, though it had been in Europe earlier.

And the novelty of seeing a man take on one of nature's mightiest predators continued right into the mid-1900s, sometimes at county fairs, in professional wrestling showcases or as half-time events.

In 1980, for example, Huntsville, Alabama TV celebrity Jamie Cooper 'wrestled' Victor the Bear at the North Alabama State Fair - although the 'fight', which was broadcast on a local channel, mostly involved Cooper flailing around underneath the huge beast.

For Terrible Ted, however, fights were often staged in bars or car parks. Reports mentioning the bear go back to 1988, when The Orlando Sentinel reported that protesters had shut down one competition by using an archaic law designed to keep horses out of bars.

And in 1992, Walker was charged with disorderly conduct and cruelty to animals after taking Ted to a bar in Illinois, where men paid $5 to watch the spectacle, The LA Times wrote.

But in Alabama there were no laws against such events.

In 1989, Northwest Alabama's Times Daily announced that a bar-based competition offering $100 to the person who could best wrestle Ted - described as being six feet, three inches tall - was disrupted by animal rights protesters.

'The bear has no teeth, his claws have been removed and the muscles in his arms have been cut to prevent him gripping,' animal rights groups claimed at the time.

But, the paper confirmed, there was nothing illegal happening according to state law.

Owner: Ted would be taken to bars or parking lots by owner Richard Walker (pictured). There are reports of 'Terrible Ted' being offered for fights in Illinois, Louisiana and Florida stretching back to the 1980s

Grizzly fight: At some bars, people would pay $5 to watch the man-on-bear 'fights.' According to animal rights campaigners, Ted had his claws and teeth removed, and tendons cut in his arms to stop him grappling

And that's how these 1996 photos, showing Terrible Ted and Richard Walker surrounded by spectators, came to be.

In one of the images, a man appears to be pushing Ted's head back by grabbing his neck; the bear's mouth appears to have no teeth inside.

Alabama did not host these events for much longer, though. That year - and following Walker's fights specifically, according to AL.com - the Alabama senate voted 23-0 to ban bear wrestling for profit, as well as making it illegal to surgically alter a bear or train it to wrestle humans.

The bill was sponsored by Representative Joe Ford (D-Gadsden) and Senator Tom Butler (D-Madison).

Ford said at the time: 'I don't mind anybody who wants to fight a bear if they just go out in the woods and fight the bear on his own terms.'

In a curious twist, however, the law was repealed in 2015 along with more than 300 of Alabama's outdated laws.