Bullfighting: Tragedy and Farce in 3 Acts
“Torture is neither art nor culture.”-- Anti-bullfight poster in Spain
“It is man's sympathy with all creatures that first makes him truly a man."-- Albert Schweitzer
In addition to lush flamenco music and beautiful poetry and literature, Spain claims bullfighting – the corrida -- as one of its oldest and most dignified traditions. In an attempt to justify current brutalities, apologists of bullfighting often mythologize its murky origins, linking it to the prehistoric sacrifice of bulls in early Mediterranean cultures and the Greek killing of the Minotaur. Wild bulls lived throughout Mediterranean forests. 35,000 thousand years ago, on cave walls in Spain and France, early human beings depicted them with awe and reverence. Standing six feet high at the shoulders and weighing a ton, the bull was a huge and powerful animal, an appropriate totemic symbol to worship and stimulate the mind – but also an affront and challenge to human dominion. The bull-god Apis was the most important deity in ancient Egypt. Bulls eventually were domesticated and in Crete they were brought to palace arenas where daring athletes attempted to vault over their horns, perhaps the first historical anticipation of the modern bullfight. By the time of the Romans, however, bulls and other animals had lost all reverential status and were hunted and killed with bloodthirsty glee.
In the Middle Ages, bullfighting was the province of the aristocracy who attacked bulls while riding on horseback in order to train knights or to celebrate royal events. In the 18th century, King Felipe V prohibited nobles from practicing bullfighting as he feared it could undermine public morals. In 1724, bullfighting changed dramatically when commoners adopted it and began to fight bulls on foot by dodging them, pole vaulting over them, using rags to sidestep them, and raising small spears. They thereby established the corrida as currently practiced and, over time, the maneuvers, costumes, and weapons were refined.
Bullfighting is common in other Latin countries such as Portugal, Mexico, Columbia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Peru, but it also is popular in southern France. There are over 400 bullrings throughout Spain, seating anywhere from fifteen hundred to twenty thousand spectators. Each week, thousands of Spaniards and tourists flock to the nearest plaza de Toro. It is estimated that over 40,000 bulls are killed each year in Spanish bullfights and fiestas.
In a lucrative business, breeders raise bulls on farms throughout Spain. Only young bulls 3-4 years of age are used because older bulls are too strong. But even the young bulls must be weakened in a host of vicious ways. They are beaten and chased by men on horseback who jab them with sharp lances. Weeks before the fight, bulls are forced to wear heavy weights around their necks. In most cases breeders shave down the bulls’ horns to make them less dangerous – a painful mutilation performed without anesthetic. Shaving not only causes trauma to the bull, it impairs his coordination and ability to navigate. This and other acts of willful injury are illegal, but the law is flagrantly violated.
During transit in cramped vehicles without food, water, or space to move, many bulls die before or upon arrival. Bulls frequently are sick with diseases like bovine tuberculosis, suffer injured limbs, and may be ill from a cocktail of drugs combining tranquilizers for the ride and stimulants for the “fight.” On the day of the great encounter, they are confined in a dark box, isolated from other bulls for the first time. Just before they enter the arena, they are poked, harpooned, and harassed. When the passageway to the arena opens, they encounter blinding sunlight, strange surroundings, the disorienting roar of the crowd, and aggressive human beings charging them with capes and weapons.
Probably few people know how a bullfight proceeds, how violent and unfair a “fight” it is, and how relatively minor a role the matador plays. A bullfight proceeds in three stages, or tercios, designed to weaken, torture, torment, and kill the bull. In the tercio de varas, the matador’s assistants chase the bull with capes in order to provoke and tire him. Once the bull is sufficiently exhausted, two picadores ride in on horseback (the horses too are abused in numerous ways) and plunge lancers into the bull’s upper body. The tercio de banderillas begins when three banderilleros individually chase the bull in order to spear him in the neck with two banderillas (colorfully decorated wooden harpoons). Finally, when six banderillas are lodged in the bull’s neck, blood pouring down his back and spewing out of his nose and mouth, the tercio de muleta commences and the brave matador enters for the “ballet of death.” With his sword and red cape, he makes several stylized passes at the bull before he attempts to deliver the estocada, the death blow designed to plunge the sword through the bull’s neck or into his heart. The matador has ten minutes to kill the bull, but quite often, he fails to make a clean kill and has to stab the bull repeatedly. A team member then severs the bull’s spinal cord as he lies paralyzed and dying.
Throughout the final tercio, the applause, roar, and frenzy of the crowd grows progressively louder. When the bull is down and still conscious, the judge gives a sign as to whether to cut off an ear (good fight), two ears (excellent), or two ears and a tail (bravo!). Once the trophy is excised, the bull is dragged out of the ring and then butchered. The remains of the bull, including its testicles, are sold as “black meat” for human consumption – a practice banned by the Spanish government in 2001 due to concerns over mad cow disease.
This sickening “fight” lasts twenty minutes and is repeated six times with different matadors. When the last bull is removed, the matadors and their assistants enter the arena to receive their honors. If the crowd is particularly pleased with a matador, he will be carried out of the arena on their shoulders.
Rationalizing Evil
“It’s a matter of respecting traditions.”-- Jesus Moyano, picador
“All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals.” --Peter Singer
Unlike the “ignorant foreigners” who see bullfighting merely as a “sport,” Spanish connoisseurs and aficionados view it as profound art, rich allegory, and high metaphysical drama. Spanish poet Garcia Lorca called bullfighting Spain’s “authentic religious drama,” one involving courage and confrontation with death. For matador Curro Segura, bullfighting allegorizes “the struggle between life and death. It’s not about violence.” According to Spanish myth, the bull is fulfilling its destiny, being nothing but savage fury waiting for the fateful encounter with man. Christina Sanchez, a famous (and rare) woman bullfighter in Spain, speaks of bulls in this speciesist and essentializing manner: “They are brave, born to die in the ring and help create an act of art with a person.” Longtime bullfighter Diego O’Bolger mythologizes in terms that root human identity in the “domination” of the wild: “You’re taking the brute force of nature and blending the bull’s charge, your cape, and your body into something that does have artistic value. It’s almost like ballet.” The human need to feel superior to animals is evident in the words of Picador Carmelo Perez Arevalo, who described his act of killing a bull as “a feeling of complete happiness, and I felt very big.”
In novels such as Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway popularized bullfights for a global audience and uncritically embraced fatuous Spanish romanticizations of this vicious blood sport. For Hemingway, bullfighting epitomized athleticism, artistry, and courage. Hemingway saw bullfighting as “the only art in which the artist is in danger of death.” He spoke of “the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet draped on a stick.” When the stick pieces the animal’s body, and the red blood runs into the sand or grass, the aesthetic process deepens; the blood is beauty and the beauty is blood. I might say this is enough to make a fascist proud, but contempt for animals transgresses all political ideologies and party lines to register as a general disorder within the human species.
It is only an apparent contradiction that throughout Spain T-shirts and merchandizing portray the bull as a beautiful and noble animal, for its majestic qualities are precisely what human beings must conquer and subdue. If the bull is so powerful and strong, then how much more superior must the human be if he can vanquish this mighty force? Consumer images display the bull running past the red cape of the gracefully dressed matador but never portray the gore and blood. The sanitized forms evoke great drama, but they are despicable lies and propaganda.
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