Introduction

Arguments against bullfighting. An examination of the corrida (Spanish-style bullfighting, also practised in Southern France, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru and Ecuador):
1. The horses
2. The bull
3. The courage of the bullfighters
4. Bullfighting as an art form
5. Animals: appreciation and abuse
6. Cultural stagnation
7. The case of Orson Welles, the film-maker.

La Route de Sang

Introduction

This discussion of bullfighting gives new information and puts many of its cruelties in a wide context. For example, the sufferings of the horses in the bull-ring have a context: the enormous, never-to-be forgotten indebtedness of humanity to horses in times of war and peace. Instead of this suffering being secondary or of no account whatsoever (the usual attitude of apologists for the bullfight), it becomes a central objection to bullfighting, overwhelmingly important - decisive. For this reason, I've placed it first in arguing the case against the corrida. Bullfighting apologists claim that bullfighting is an art rather than a sport, pointing out that it's reviewed in the arts sections rather than the sports sections of newspapers. I expose the artistic pretensions of bullfighting and show that artistically it's negligible. I take a fresh look at the bullfight as 'tragedy' and the Spanish concept of 'duende,' which has a linkage with bullfighting. I acknowledge the courage of bullfighters but make clear that this courage is limited, far surpassed by the courage shown, for example, by mountaineers and in the war experiences of countless people. In fact, every aspect of bullfighting is shown as limited. Ignore the sick and decadent claims to importance, the romanticized exaggeration, the flagrant myth-making. And by concentrating on the bull to the exclusion of the mysterious and wonderful world of the animal kingdom as a whole, by their general indifference to animal suffering (the suffering of the bull and the animal kingdom as a whole) most bullfighting-apologists are cut off from a deep and inexhaustible aspect of reality.

In campaigning, I think it's essential to distinguish two things: (1) The most effective techniques to win, in this case, to abolish the corrida. This will often demand short, vivid messages and simple slogans - as when the French Alliance Anticorrida organized an amazing air campaign over Nimes in May, 2007, two planes flying and towing banners with a short message against the bullfight over a distance of 600km. It will often demand arguments presented very briefly, and action which is concentrated rather than diffuse, ruthless in spirit rather than genteel, but action which keeps within the law. In a democracy, it may be necessary to break the law if that seems the only way to end a serious abuse, but the most effective actions for opposing bullfighting don't require the law to be broken, I'm sure. (Where the opponent is a totalitarian power, as in the occupied countries of Europe during the Second World War, then the use of violence and force can be justified.)
(2) The reasoning which underlies the action. This should not be simple. It should be comprehensive (covering all relevant aspects of the subject rather than a few), fair-minded (taking every care to avoid distortions of reality, taking note of possible objections), sophisticated in moral argument and, also, factually correct. It's not true, for example, that the bull is killed by a sword thrust to the heart, as is often claimed, for example, in the current 'Rough Guide to France.' Very often, the bull isn't killed by a sword thrust to the aorta either, but, after hitting bone, by brutally prolonged attempts to sever the spinal cord.

However, it's sometimes difficult to separate the two. The ideas which seem vastly more forceful, developed, persuasive than the opposing ideas are amongst the most important contributions to activism. They're a precondition for activism, or should be. One of the most striking demonstrations comes from the history of penal reform, on which the Italian thinker Beccaria has had an incalculable influence. To read more about his achievement, click here. Beccaria's achievement is amongst other things a massive practical achievement - concrete reforms can be traced back to his work - but these were due purely to his ideas. He had none of the attributes of an activist. The introduction to his work 'On Crimes and Punishments' in the Hackett edition describes the work as 'greater than its self-effacing author, a man of almost crippling shyness.'

The philosophical literature to do with animals and animal suffering is now vast. The fact that most aficionados in the bullfighting regions of Europe, from Andalucia to Arles, are not aware that it exists is a serious deficiency. This literature. which reflects a fundamental change of consciousness, is comparable in importance with the literature and the changes which began the secularization of Europe during the Enlightenment. A non-technical statement by Jeremy Bentham is a good starting point. His 'utilitarian' view is now better termed a 'consequentalist' view. It appears in The Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789, Chapter XVII, Section 1d:

'The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?'

1. The horses

Hugh Boustead, a South African officer, of an experience during the Battle of the Somme in the First World War. (Quoted in 'Somme,' by Martin Gilbert):

'Dead and dying horses, split by shellfire with bursting entrails and torn limbs, lay astride the road that led to battle. Their fallen riders stared into the weeping skies.'

Dennis Wheatley, describing an aerial bombing attack on the Western Front in December 1915 in his book 'Officer and Temporary Gentleman.'

'When the bombs had ceased falling we went over to see what damage had been done. I saw my first dead man twisted up beneath a wagon where he had evidently tried to take shelter; but we had not sustained many human casualties. The horses were another matter. There were dead ones lying all over the place and scores of others were floundering and screaming with broken legs, terrible neck wounds or their entrails hanging out. We went back for our pistols and spent the next hour putting the poor, seriously injured brutes out of their misery by shooting them through the head. To do this we had to wade ankle deep through blood and guts. That night we lost over 100 horses.'

Ernest Hemingway, 'Death in the Afternoon:'

'...the death of the horse tends to be comic while that of the bull is tragic.' He relates the time when he saw a horse running in the bull-ring and dragging its entrails behind it, and makes the further remark 'I have seen these, call them disembowellings, that is the worst word, when, due to their timing, they were very funny.'

Without horses, no developed human civilization was possible. Before the modern era, their role in carrying heavy loads (as pack-horses), pulling heavy loads and carrying riders was crucial, all-important. Gratitude, overwhelming gratitude, is the only proper response. The horse: this is a species which has benefitted mankind more than any other, which has earned, many, many times over, the right not to be subjected to disgusting cruelty. These facts alone should have made it unthinkable to subject horses to the cruelty of the bullfight. The link between horses and humanity is ancient and central, far more so than any link between bulls and humanity. Bullfighting in anything like its modern form is only centuries old. In France, the tradition is more recent still.

A fact often overlooked is that, even after the development of mechanical means of carrying loads and transporting people, horses continue to play their ancient role today, as uncomplaining, useful - indispensable - beings. In many parts of the developing world, they continue to be as indispensable as they ever were in Europe. Their treatment is very varied. It may be as good as could possibly be expected in desperately poor societies. It may, on the other hand, be vile, with avoidable sufferings - and not only the vicious use of the whip, which leaves so many horses with open wounds and scars. Often, there is the absence of basic care. From the newsletter of a charity I support:

'Across the developing world, thousands of brick kilns in poor villages and towns are churning out millions of bricks to feed a growing demand for houses, hospitals and schools. These blisteringly hot open-air factories are relentless brick-making machines. Desperately poor workers and their horses, mules and donkeys are merely part of that machine. For the workers, kiln life is tough enough, but for their animals, these can be the worst workplaces on earth.

'Temperatures can hit 50 C, yet often there is little water or shade. Uneducated owners don't understand their animals' needs and work them hard as they can under tremendous pressure to meet production targets. Many animals are denied rest on 12-hour shifts that see weary donkeys and horses hauling bricks by the ton across hilly, pot-holed terrain.

Donkeys, horses and mules working in brick kilns suffer dehydration, exhaustion, hoof, skin and eye problems, and a catalogue of other illnesses. They bear horrific wounds from beatings and from falling down, and struggle with filthy, ill-fitting harnesses and saddlepacks. Sadly, many who fall never get up again. Life expectancy for kiln animals can be dreadfully short.'

The passage ends with an appeal for funds to help 'many more animals, and the poor people who rely on them.'

George Orwell, in the twentieth century, wrote of the ponies in parts of the Far East: 'Sometimes, their necks are encircled by one vast sore, so that they drag all day on raw flesh. It is still possible to make them work, however; it is just a question of thrashing them so hard that the pain behind outweighs the pain in front.' (From 'Down and out in Paris and London.')

Another dimension - and another, even worse, dimension of horror - comes from the role of animals in war. When cavalry was an active instrument of war, a period lasting millennia rather than centuries - even as late as the First World War, cavalry had a real if restricted role - then horses, like men, were injured and killed by arrows, javelins, spears, axes, musket shot, rifle bullets, were blasted by cannon and artillery, the link between horses and humanity again strengthened by common suffering. From the enormous documentation available, here is one source:

From Franz Kafka, The Diaries 1910-23:

'Paul Holzhausen, die Deutschen in Russland 1812. Wretched condition of the horses, their great exertions: their fodder was wet green straw, unripe grain, rotten roof thatchings...their bodies were bloated from the green fodder.

They lay in ditches and holes with dim, glassy eyes and weakly struggled to climb out. But all their efforts were in vain; seldom did one of them get a foot up on the road, and when it did, its condition was only rendered worse. Unfeelingly, service troops and artillery men with their guns drove over it; you heard the leg being crushed, the hollow sound of the animal's scream of pain, and saw it convulsively lift up its head and neck in terror, fall back again with all its weight and immediately bury itself in the thick ooze.

During the First World War, there was approximately one horse for every two combatants, and although horses were not directly targeted, cavalry by now becoming less important, about 400 000 horses were killed. Many of them died, like the soldiers, by distinctively new methods, by phosgene, mustard gas, chlorine gas. At Passchendaele horses, like so many of the soldiers, suffocated in the mud.

There are accounts by soldiers who regretted that horses had been caught up in the conflict. The account of Jim Crow, quoted in 'Passchendaele,' by Nigel Steel and Peter Hart:

'You hear very little about the horses but my God, that used to trouble me more than the men in some respects. We knew what we were there for, them poor devils didn't, did they?'

In one of his last letters before he was killed at Verdun, the German expressionist painter Franz March wrote, "The poor horses!" On a single day at Verdun, 7 000 horses were killed.

The British were much more ready to cast (declare unfit for work and retire) horses than were the French, who tended to work them until they literally dropped. The Intelligence Officer of the British 1st Cavalry Division, Lieutenant Colonel Barrow, was horrified during the move up to the concentration area in 1914 when he entered a farmyard and found a wounded French horse lying on a pile of burning bedding. It was trying, unsuccessfully, to get up, and was literally roasting to death. The yard was full of French troops who took not the slightest notice, and Barrow shot the animal with his pistol.' (Recounted in Gordon Corrigan, 'Mud, blood and poppycock.')

At the end of the conflict, the martyrdom of horses was far from ending. Large numbers of them were sold to work in the Middle East and were worked to death.

Even after the development of mechanized warfare and mechanized transportation, a process which was more or less completed after the First World War, horses have been used, often. I think of a photo I have of 'The Road of Life.' For 900 days, during the Second World War, Leningrad was besieged by the Germans: an epic story of heroism, and starvation, which accounted for most of the deaths during the siege, at least 632 000 and perhaps as many as a million people dying. With the capture of Tikhvin, it became possible to develop an ice road, 'The Road of Life,' across frozen Lake Lagoda to supply the city. The photo shows gaunt horses dragging sledges across this ice road. When horse-drawn sledges fell through the lake at weak points, the Military Council decided that lorries could not take the risk of using the ice road. Eventually, they were able to.

What happens to the horses in those modern centres of European civilization, Arles, Nimes and the other bull-fighting towns and cities? Not, any longer, disembowelling. Hemingway was writing of the time when horses were completely unprotected. A decree of the government of Primo de Rivera in Spain ordered that horses should be given a quilted covering 'to avoid those horrible sights which so disgust foreigners and tourists.' Note that it wasn't bullfighters or bullfight enthusiasts who called for this protection. If they had, it would have been something in the balance to set against their depravity, but no.

However, Hemingway was clear about one thing. 'These protectors avoid these sights and greatly decrease the number of horses killed in the bull ring, but they in no way decrease the pain suffered by the horses.' And, in the entry in the Glossary for the pica, the spear with which the bull is stabbed by the picador, 'The frank admission of the necessity for killing horses to have a bullfight has been replaced by the hypocritical semblance of protection which causes the horses much more suffering.' One of the reasons is that 'picadors, when a bull, disillusioned by the mattress, has refused to charge it heavily more than once, have made a custom of turning the horse as they push the bull away so that the bull may gore the horse in his unprotected hindquarters and tire his neck with that lifting...you will see the same horse brought back again and again, the wound being sewn up and washed off between bulls...'

Whether the picadors take this action or not, the objective in the bullfight is to tire the bull not just by spearing it with the picador's lance (although this is far more than 'tiring.' It's a vicious injury.) The objective is to tire the bull also by exposing the horse to the full force of the bull. So, horses in the bullfight are crushed against the wooden barrier of the bullring, lifted, toppled, trampled and terrorized - treated worse than vermin. It's true that horses are no longer disembowelled in the bullring. What they do suffer are broken ribs, damage to internal organs, goring to the hindquarters.

Since it's necessary, as bullfight apologists admit, to kill and injure horses in order to have a bullfight, why, then - abolish the bullfight, and as soon as possible too.

Hemingway had a less than sure feeling for comedy. He found comedy where there was none at all, in the death of the horses in the bull-ring, and was oblivious to comedy in his own writing. Isn't this comic, or, rather, bizarre? It comes from the Glossary of the book, where, as well as explaining the diseased world of bull-fighting, he includes an entry on, of all things:

'Tacones: heels; tacones de goma are rubber heels: these are sold by ambulatory vendors who will come up to you while you are seated in the cafe, cut the heel off your shoe with a sort of instant-acting leather-cutting pincers they carry, in order to force you to put on a rubber heel. The rubber heels they attach are of a low, worthless grade...If any rubber-heel attacker ever cuts a heel of your shoe without your having first definitively ordered a pair of rubber heels, kick him in the belly or under the jaw [!] and get the heels put on by someone else...There is one sinister-faced Catalan high-pressured heel ripper...I gave him that [whether a kick in the belly or under the jaw isn't specified] but he is more of a dodger by now and you might have difficulty landing on him. The best thing when you see this particular heel-selling bastard (hijo de puta will do) approaching is to take off your shoes and put them inside your shirt. If he then attempts to attach rubber heels to your bare feet [!], send for the American or British Consul.'

The humour of bullfighting enthusiasts, their idea of 'fun', make a deeply depressing study. The animal victims of the Spanish fiestas are presumably regarded as hilarious, light relief from the solemn tragedy of the corrida itself. A page on the impressive Web site of FAACE gives examples (http://www.faace.co.uk/bfiestas.htm). The live goats thrown from the church tower in Manganeses de la Polvorosa, the pigeons and squirrels stoned in Robledo de Chavela, the live chickens hung from a line and hacked to pieces in Tordesillas, the chickens buried up to their necks and beheaded by the blindfolded villagers of Aduna, the bulls attacked with hundreds of darts in Coria.See also the sombre, harrowing, informative, intelligent page on the same Web site, http://www.faace.co.uk/faqs2.htm It includes the information that a cow, calf or bull can undergo 'rape by sticks or metal spikes, live castration, have its horns, tails and ears ripped off, be blinded or burned.' All of these animals come from the breeders of the bulls used in the bullfight. The same page includes comments on the 'hazy and outrageous mythology' of the bullfight industry and the economic momentum which perpetuates the bullfight.

Donkeys are sometimes used in an event approximating to the mainstream Corrida. A donkey is supposed to be funny, like the dwarf dressed as a bullfighter who appears in some places. If the horse is regarded as a comic character, a donkey is even more comic. Presumably, a mule, as a cross between a horse and a donkey, would be more comic than a horse, less comic than a donkey.

To quote just one more account of war, to make it even more clear that all such rankings are disgusting in the light of reality, read this account, from the book by Nigel Steel and Peter Hart, 'Passchendaele:'

'Heaving about in the filthy mud of the road was an unfortunate mule with both its forelegs shot away. The poor brute, suffering God knows what untold agonies and terrors, was trying desperately to get to its feet which weren't there. Writhing and heaving, tossing its head about in its wild attempts, not knowing that it no longer had any front legs. I had my revolver with me, but we couldn't get near the animal, which lashed out at us with its hind legs and tossed its head about unceasingly...we made some desperate attempts to get at the mule so that I could put a bullet behind its ear into the brain, but to no avail. By lingering there, trying to put the suffering creature out of its pain I was risking not only my life but my companion's. The shelling got more intense - perhaps one would hit the poor thing and put it out of its misery.' (Account of Lieutenant R. G. Dixon.)

At least mules aren't killed and injured at bullfights. Their role is simply to drag the dead bull out of the arena.

2. The bull

A short film showing the slow death of a bull in Barcelona (this address can be copied and pasted):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG9PWsCIAsw&NR=1

This bull has already had its back torn open by the lance of the picador and has already had its back lacerated repeatedly by the barbed banderillas. All this is standard. It always happens. The bull staggering, still alive and conscious, vomiting blood, with the whole length of the sword embedded in its body - this is more common than an instantaneous death. Then the repeated stabbing at the spine with a short knife, the bull still alive and conscious - again, common, not rare. The cutting off of the bull's ears before it's dead - this is less common. What humanitarians these people are! They generally wait until the bull is dead before cutting off the ears! Although in this case they were obviously a little impatient for some reason and couldn't wait. To its credit, opposition to bullfighting is common and well-organized in Barcelona and Catalonia as a whole. But meanwhile, this is what is happening in Barcelona.

From my poem 'Lorca,' referring to the poet and dramatist Lorca, who was a lover of the bullfight.

He went and saw it often, Lorca -
from frantic sun to shade,
the bulls' as they stumbled and died
suddenly glazed eyes,
as if no longer able to comprehend
the Spanish arguments for death and torture.

The life and death of the bull are sharply contrasted. The bulls are treated humanely until they arrive at the bull-ring, but their sufferings may begin even before the picador thrusts his spike into them. Sometimes, thick needles are pushed into the bull's testicles before they enter the ring.This practice is said to subdue any bull, and no wonder.

Too much should not be made of trends. Trends can be harmful as well as beneficial, should be actively opposed in many cases rather accepted and treated as inevitable. But one trend which can be welcomed is the trend to eliminate displays of public cruelty in countries which claim to be civilized. This has been achieved to a great extent in the case of cruelty to people. In the case of animals, now that bull-baiting and bear-baiting have been abolished, bull-fighting remains a cause to be won - and it surely will be won. Bull-fight apologists found no objection to it, but the public disembowelling of horses was found to be more and more intolerable. The continued suffering of the horses, the blood flowing from the bull's back, torn in so many places by the lance of the picador and by the banderillas, the sword thrust, stabbing to sever the spinal cord when sword thrusts fails to kill, the bull thrashing in agony, the flow of blood from a bull's mouth as it dies, the long trails of blood and the dark pools of blood in the sand - there will be mounting revulsion against these things, the arguments of bull-fight apologists will sound more and more hollow and bull-fighting will be abolished in country after country. When that happens, it will be a series of victories not for squeamishness and sentimentality but for elementary human decency: a real moral advance.

In brief, human responsibility towards domesticated animals, and standards for keeping domesticated animals should include (1) humane treatment whilst the animal is reared and (2) a humane death. Battery chickens are denied (1). They have the benefit of (2), but not invariably. Chicken processing plants have many dark secrets, although ones well known to the workers and to investigators. The bull has the benefit of (1) but not (2). No matter how well treated it may have been before arriving in the bullring, the death of the bull, more often than not far from instantaneous, far from pain-free, is an act of disgusting cruelty that shames France, Spain - all Europe - and Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador.

3. The courage of the bullfighters

From 'Death in the Afternoon' by Hemingway.

'The matador, from living every day with death, becomes very detached...' But later: 'After you get a great bullfighter, you may lose him most easily from disease: much more easily than by death [obviously, death in the bull-ring is meant here, in this carelessly phrased passage.]

Information from U.S. News and World Report:

'Bulls killed in licensed bullfights per year in Spain: 30 000; bullfighters killed by bulls in the past five years: 2

'Leading causes of death for matadors: car crashes and suicide.'

If we compare bullfighting and high-altitude mountaineering, then high altitude mountaineering is far more risky than bullfighting, as well as incomparably more interesting, more demanding, and, if you like, more 'noble.' Now, with modern equipment and techniques, it's far less risky than it used to be but the fatality rate on high mountains still averages something like 5%. That is, one in twenty of the mountaineers on an expedition will not return. Some mountains have a much higher fatality rate, Annapurna in particular. From 'Annapurna: 50 years of Expeditions in the Death Zone' by the Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner, one of the greatest of mountaineers: 'Up to the autumn of 1999, 101 men and 5 women had stood on the summit of Annapurna, while 48 men and 3 women had lost their lives on the mountain.' This is a ratio of very nearly one death for every two ascents. Reinhold Messner begins his book with the first ascent by the French climbers Herzog and Lachenal, which was also the first ascent of any mountain over 8 000 metres high. Herzog was caught in an avalanche, knocked unconscious, was suffering from frostbite. Along with others in the party, he waded through deep snow back to Advanced Base Camp, in an epic of endurance.

France has every reason to feel pride in these and so many other mountaineers, just as France has every reason to feel shame about its bullfighters.

On high mountains - and sometimes on low mountains - the ferocity of the winds and blizzards often make a rescue from outside impossible until it is too late. Rescue facilities are well organized in the Alps, not at all in the Himalayas and the Andes. Safety and medical help, are far, far away. An injured bullfighter, on the other hand, can be taken from the ring almost immediately to the bull-ring clinic and then to a main hospital. For this reason, injuries in the bull-ring are almost always non-fatal.. And on the other side of the barrera, the low barrier surrounding the bull-ring, lies safety. At all times, safety is so near. Another advantage: a bull-fighter is in the position of danger for such a short time. A mountaineer may be in an area of acute danger for days or weeks. The dangers are not just the ones that result from errors, which are completely understandable, given the enormous demands which the mountains make on the human mind and body. There are also 'objective' dangers, from the stonefalls that occur regularly in the mountains, avalanches, crevasses, other dangers that result from the unpredictability and instability of snow.

When, on the mountain called 'The Ogre,' Doug Scott broke both his legs, safety was far away. The party was caught by a storm and it took six days, five of them without food, to descend. Chris Bonington, also in the party, broke ribs during the descent.

Another, now famous, story of magnificent bravery and endurance in the mountains is that of Joe Simpson, which he recounts in his book 'Touching the Void' (available in French, Spanish and many other languages). In 1985, he and Simon Yates set out to climb the remote west face of the Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. It was 1985 and the men were young, fit, skilled climbers. The ascent was successful, after they had climbed for over three days. But then Simpson fell, and broke his leg badly. There was no hope of rescue for them. They had to descend without any help. Yates was lowering Simpson on the rope but lowered him into a hidden crevasse. He couldn't hold him and was forced to cut the rope. Simpson wasn't killed by the fall, He managed to drag himself out and drag himself down the mountain, dehydrated and injured, until, at last, he reached base camp.

The intensity of the dangers in the high mountains, the fact that these dangers are so protracted, the beauty of this hostile environment - these and other factors have their effect on human consciousness. Anyone who has read enough mountaineering literature and enough bullfighting literature to be able to compare the two will surely be convinced that bullfighting literature is vastly more meagre, that the states of consciousness revealed in mountaineering literature are incomparably richer, deeper and more complex. Justified pride, self-doubt, hope, despair, elation, crushing disappointment - these and other emotions surge through the mountaineering literature.

What are the achievements of bull-fighters compared with the achievements of mountaineers? What bravery has been shown in the bull-rings of Arles, Nimes, Madrid, Seville, Valencia, Granada, Mexico City, all the bull-rings of the world, that could possibly be compared with the bravery shown on Annapurna, Everest, the Matterhorn, the North Face of the Eiger and the other peaks? The summit may be reached or it may not, but mountaineers have every reason for pride. Bullfighters are obviously very proud of those bleeding, still-warm ears that have been cut from the bull as a mark of their 'achievement.' Revulsion is the only proper, civilized response.

Not only is the courage of bullfighters completely eclipsed by the courage of mountaineers, it's completely eclipsed by the courage of ordinary people in time of war, civilians as well as soldiers. In some operations of war, death has been overwhelmingly likely or ever-present. The life expectancy of a British pilot in the First World War was typically 11 days, the life expectancy of many soldiers at the Western Front during periods of intense fighting something like three weeks. What French bullfighter has had to show a fraction of the courage, has faced a fraction of the dangers faced by the countless, ordinary (or extraordinary) French soldiers at the relentless killing machine of Verdun?

The French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had a very adventurous period in aviation and eventually a very dangerous one. He became a fighter pilot for the Free French and was killed in action in 1944. But the mythology of death had no attractions for him. He wrote: 'It is not a question of living dangerously. That formula is too arrogant, too presumptuous. I don't care much for bullfighters. It's not the danger I love...It is life itself.'

Some opponents of the bull-fight refer to the matador as a coward. This is a clear instance of what I refer to as alignment, which involves a {distortion} of reality. It's also an instance of alignment to claim that Picasso cannot have been a great artist because he was so devoted to the bullfight. Picasso's work leaves me cold, including the overrated painting 'Guernica' but I recognize his importance as an innovator, his secure place in the history of artistic modernism. (All the same, when I think of his devotion to the bullfight rather than his artistic importance, then to me he's 'Pablo Prickarsehole.')

The elementary mistake of rejecting achievement because of an objection to the person's personality, or one aspect of the work, is discussed in the case of another Spanish artist, Salvador Dali, by George Orwell ('Benefit of Clergy: some notes on Salvador Dali.') Similarly to decide that Descartes cannot have been a great philosopher because of his notorious view that animals are automata and cannot feel. Descartes' position as one of the great philosophers is beyond dispute. His 'Meditations' is one of the most attractive works in all philosopy, and certainly one of the greatest works of rationalist philosophy.

To return to the bullfighters, their courage surely can't be in doubt. If fatalities in the bullring are rare, gorings and other injuries are not. Nobody who was a coward would choose to occupy the same space as a half-tonne bull with sharp horns, but I think I've established that their courage is strictly limited.

A related issue: the ethics of climbing and the ethics of bullfighting. 'The ethics of bullfighting' here has a very narrow meaning: whether or not the bull is tampered with to make the work of the bullfighters much less dangerous. The shaving of the bull's horns is one notorious practice that makes a bull far less dangerous, but is commonly practised. There are others. Breaches of climbing ethics make the mountain easier to ascend, with less danger. They include resting in the rope rather than using the rope purely to arrest a fall, in climbs where artificial aids are not permitted. Climbing ethics are almost always observed, 'bullfighting ethics' commonly flouted.

The 'courage' of bullfighters in the past was the means - morally obnoxous means - by which a few individuals could escape poverty and deprivation. As the bullfight apologist Michael Kennedy acknowledges in 'Andalucia,' the growth of prosperity makes individuals less and less keen to take risks in the bullring. The amounts that can be earned are enormous - why take the risks? So the bull is tampered with, by horn-shaving, needles through the testicles, and the other methods. The financial rewards of climbing are far fewer, its code of ethics far more stringent, far more widely observed.

4. Bullfighting as an art form

Nietzsche, 'Thus spake Zarathustra,' Part 3: 'For man is the cruellest animal. At tragedies, bullfights and crucifixions, he has hitherto been happiest on earth...'

Hemingway, 'Death in the Afternoon:' 'Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death.' I would emphasize a different aspect. Bullfighting is the only art form where the artist inflicts suffering and death, the only art form which is morally wrong. Bullfighting is the pariah amongst the arts. Suffering and death have enough power. An art should do nothing to increase it. In other arts, suffering and death are confronted, explained, found impossible to explain, raged against, transcended, balanced by consolation and joy - not inflicted.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'The Great Gatsby:' 'The other car, the one going toward New York, came to rest a hundred yards beyond, and its driver hurried back to where Myrtle Wilson, her life violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick dark blood with the dust.'

Although the cause of death is technologically advanced, death by motor vehicle, this fictional account seems, at first sight, to belong to the same world as the world of the bullfight, where the bull, after a sword-thrust, mingles his thick, dark blood with the sand. For that matter, it seems to belong to the much older world of the Iliad, the Homeric hero dying in the dust. The death of Myrtle Wilson is tragic, the death of the Homeric hero is tragic, the death of the bull is tragic.

But these first impressions are deceptive, in fact, utterly wrong. I've already given reasons why it's an act of callousness, gross ignorance of history, contemptible stupidity to think of the death of horses as comic. I focus now on tragedy. Here, bullfight apologists are on no surer ground.

'Tragedy' has a very wide meaning now. Almost all human deaths are 'tragic' apart, that is, from the deaths of very old people.The word has come to mean not much more than 'very sad' and 'very regrettable.' The clam that the death of the bull is tragic goes beyond this. Bullfight apologists don't claim that the death of the bull is 'very sad' or 'very regrettable.' If they did, they would want to avoid the death by abolishing the bullfight. What they are doing is claiming a linkage with literary tragedy. The study of literary tragedy is the essential background to any claim that the bullfight is a tragedy. Certainly, I'd expect bullfight apologists to have done the necessary study, before any mention of the death of the bull as 'tragic.' The important works aren't so very numerous, although they are demanding. I'd include in their number Aristotle's 'Poetics,' the tragic works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the tragedies of Shakespeare and perhaps Racine, Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy' - and a work such as 'The Death of Tragedy' by George Steiner.

I concentrate upon the death of tragedy here: better, tragedy changed out of all recognition. In contemporary conditions, the tragic sense is modified, blunted, often overturned. We are forced to become critical, to become suspicious. Contemporary life gives us so many examples of deaths and sufferings which can be avoided, by the advances of science and technology, as well as deaths and sufferings which are brought about by science and technology. In both cases, human decisions, plans and mistakes are fundamental. Deaths in car crashes, like the death of Myrtle Wilson described above, are so often avoidable, easily avoidable - just take care to use a seat-belt, to observe speed limits, and so on. These risks can be lowered by passing suitable laws. The dangers, sufferings and deaths of the bullfight, we are reminded, aren't eternal, part of the tragic lot of humanity and the animal kingdom, but easily preventable - just ban the bullfight, and they are gone. Although death is inevitable, death at a certain time and place is very often anything but. The only reason why a bull dies in the late afternoon on a certain day at Arles or Nimes is because the bullfight hasn't been abolished. When we read words to the effect that the bull was 'born and bred for this moment' (the moment of death in the bull-ring - not that the death usually takes only a moment) then we have to protest that this wasn't a destiny, it was far from being an example of tragic inevitability, it was the result of a decision.

I've been reading the poetry of Rilke for a very long time, with less and less admiration. Some poets have marvellous powers of language undermined by a simple-mindedness, a stunted consciousness or other flaws. There are many, many ways to fail, ultimately, as an artist. Rilke, it seems to me, fails in 'evaluation.' He accepts almost everything. He brings to all topics a depth, an urge to create profundity. He brings his profundity to bear on events which call for protest, opposition, a struggle against. He creates genuine profundity and deluded profundity, just as the subconscious of the artist for some reason brings to the surface dross as well as artistically important material, which require the conscious mind to sift and distinguish. Rilke failed to sift and distinguish sufficiently. In practice, he ignored and was ignorant.

He obviously knew that the First World War was recalcitrant and discordant and couldn't be brought into his world of mysterious acceptance, so although he lived through the conflict, he ignored it. He did, though, bring the bullfight into his supposedly transfiguring vision, in the symptomatic poem 'Corrida: In memoriam Montez, 1930.' Francisco Montez was a bullfighter who in 1830 developed a new technique for killing the bull. (Not all new techniques, not all innovations have to be welcomed. They have to be evaluated.)

A false note - a note of complete falsification, of complete distortion - appears in the first stanza:

Seit er, klein beinah, aus dem Toril
ausbrach, aufgescheuchten Augs und Ohrs.
und den Eigensinn des Picadors
und die Baenderhakenwie im Spiel

Since, small almost, through the opened door
with upstartled eyes and ears he came
and supposed the baiting picador
and beribboned barbs to be a game,

(Translation of J. B. Leishman.)

A game! After the wounds caused by the picador thrusting his lance into the bull, it's impossible that the 'beribboned barbs' could ever be a game. The poem closes with the insidious sword thrust which ends the bull's life.

As when he wrote about the panther in its cage at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, Rilke writes in this poem as if these things have to be, could not be otherwise. He does not separate, as he should, death, suffering, deprivation which are an inescapable part of the human (and animal) condition, and particular instances which aren't inescapable. He was an apologist for the bullfight and like the other apologists, his attitude was archaic. It has the same roots as the fatalistic attitude which views a child with rickets as inevitable (and, perhaps, worthy of a 'profound' poem which makes ricketts profound rather than a lack of vitamin D.) A contemporary attitude isn't better simply because it's contemporary - the necessary distinctions have to be made, contemporary attitudes have to be made the subject of criticism just as much as past attitudes. But I think that the contemporary appreciation of animal suffering, so much greater than anything in the past, is a real advance. It's certainly an appreciation with very deep foundations: philosophical arguments, scholarship, a thorough and wide-ranging examination which demands respect.

Modern scepticism has to be taken into account. There's a parallel with the scepticism which illusions bring to sensory experience. Not everything that people see or hear has to be acknowledged as real. Under certain conditions, people can see towers, trees or other objects which don't exist. The fact that some people experience hallucinations, like the experience of optical illusions, lead us to treat the senses with scepticism, suspicion, even if we have grounds for thinking that not all sensory experience is untrustworthy. Similarly with the ecstasies, elevated emotions, intense aesthetic experiences and the pleasure and satisfaction which bullfight apologists claim to experience at a bullfight. They have to be approached with complete caution. Not all emotions are checked by scepticism any more than sensory experience - the emotions of mountaineers not at all, except for those emotions with a clear origin in pathology, such as ones brought on by oxygen starvation. But many emotions, sincerely and uncritically felt, don't withstand scrutiny.

To return to the comment of Nietzsche's quoted at the beginning of this section, people are denied the intense emotions of a crucifixion for very good reasons: not due to modern squeamishness or sentimentality, but due to a real modern advance. Moral advances in our attitude to animals make the strong emotions of the bullfight just as wrong.

Michael Jacobs, in his book 'Andalucia' is one of those writers who have described the silence before the bull is killed, a time of intense drama - supposedly. He claims that there isn't only 'butchery' (the word he uses) in the arena. At times, bullfighting becomes 'one of the more moving and mysterious of human activities.'

These intense experiences melt away with just a little attention to the disastrously misguided ethics of the killing. A comparison: Richard J, Evans, in his 'Rituals of Retribution,' which is concerned with the history of capital punishment in Germany (and one of the most important of all works of 'humanitarian history') gives information about executions in Leipzig in the 1680's, at a time when Bach was composing there. The scene has to be imagined. 'There was a precise order laid down for the procession to the scaffold.' There was beautiful music to accompany the procession, performed to a high standard (even if there's no record that Bach himself officiated.) One can imagine the malefactor awaiting the blow from the executioner's sword, the silence before the blow fell, the consummate emotion. These things may have been felt, but they could not be justified. High emotion isn't self-justifying. Of course, the victim may have been guilty of theft rather than murder, may have been innocent of the crime altogether. The silence, the intensity of emotion, were present at the execution of an innocent victim just as at another execution. In modern conditions, the public execution of a guilty murderer is unthinkable, no matter what the emotional loss for the spectators, the denial of their opportunity to feel spiritual intensity as the head of the victim falls with the swoop of the executioner's sword. It's time to deny the modern spectators of the bullfight their unjustified emotion.

Another example: the believer at a Roman Catholic or Anglo-Catholic mass, a mass of a traditional kind. The vestments of the priest are like the suit of lights of the matador. Often the mass, like the bullfight, makes use of music. The acts of the bullfight lead to its climax, the moment of truth, the sacrifice of the bull. The solemn liturgy moves towards its climax, transubstantiation, in Catholic theology an actual sacrifice: the bread and wine are converted, not into symbols of Christ's body and blood but what are actually Christ's body and blood. Silence, and then the sudden ringing of a bell. To a non-believer, the deep feeling which the believer experiences then are based on misconception, to be blunt, upon delusion. What the believer is worshipping is ordinary bread and ordinary wine.

Lorca, the bullfighting apologist, made a comparison between the bullfight and the mass, but the comparison undermines the bullfight. In his essay on 'duende' he writes of 'the liturgies of the bullring, an authentic religious drama, where in the same manner as in the Mass, a God is sacrificed to, and adored.' Although the suspicion of the emotion arises in different ways in the two cases - emotion elicited by a non-existent event in the case of the Mass, emotion made untenable by moral objections in the case of the bullfight - they are alike, to some extent, in the emphasis upon blood. The mythology of blood, the spilling of blood, the supposed cleansing effects of the spilling of blood, is one of those mythologies which is far from being eternal. It isn't at all being literal minded to claim that haematology and secularization have changed utterly this particular obsession.

Intense experience may be due simply to ignorance, lack of knowledge. Someone who knows nothing about wine drinks a sample and is in ecstasy. With further experience, the memory of the ecstasy becomes embarrassing. The wine was one-dimensional, crude. Someone becomes interested in music and is delighted by a performance or a recording - which become hopelessly limited and crude with the growth of understanding. These insights can lead not just to an appreciation of the better and the worse within an activity but to the rejection of the activity itself: to the rejection of bullfighting as an activity, in this case. In 'Death in the Afternoon,' Hemingway discusses appreciation of wine, but does not allow for the growth of consciousness which would lead to the rejection of bullfighting. Although there can be better matadors and worse matadors, bullfighting will be found hopelessly crude in comparison with developed art forms.

George Steiner's book, 'The Death of Tragedy' is concerned with the literary genre of tragedy. He argues that a genre which includes some of the greatest works of literature - including the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the tragedies of Shakespeare - is exhausted, at an end. I don't agree, but his discussion is interesting. George Steiner traces the decline and fall of tragedy in detail, and gives various reasons. For example, 'It is not between Euripides and Shakespeare that the western mind turns away from the ancient tragic sense of life. It is after the late seventeenth century.' The seventeenth century marks the beginning of the scientific revolution. 'It is the triumph of rationalism and secular metaphysics which marks the point of no return. Shakespeare is closer to Sophocles than he is to Pope and Voltaire...The modes of the imagination implicit in Athenian tragedy continued to shape the life of the mind until the age of Descartes and Newton.'

There is also the impact of changes in social conditions. 'In Athens, in Shakespeare's England...the hierachies of worldly power were stable and manifest. The wheel of social life spun around the royal or aristocratic centre.' The tragic heroes of the ages of literary tragedy include King Lear and Oedipus the King. In actual fact, George Steiner does claim that literary works of tragic feeling were created subsequently, but now, tragic death and suffering were democratic. He claims that Buechner's Woyzeck 'is the first real tragedy of low life.' And, 'Buechner was the first who brought to bear on the lowest order of men the solemnity and compassion of tragedy.'

The semi-mythical status accorded to the bull in so many accounts of the bullfighting apologists, the stress upon the bull's power, seem to be an attempt to equate the bull with the tragic hero created before the seventeenth century. In contemporary conditions, this is archaic and cannot work.

It would have been perfectly easy to have made the combat of Roman gladiators into something with claims to artistry just as good as the claims of the modern bullfight, the artistry of both (of a very low level) undermined by their moral depravity.

French arenas dating from Roman times are used for an activity which is in a clear line of descent from the past: for killing. What have the Italians done with the Colosseum? Like the French arenas, it's open for visitors, but the Colosseum has also been used for something which is fresh, imaginative, a stroke of genius, I would say, for something which marks a complete break with its past, something which Italians can feel very proud of. As another page on this site makes clear, I campaign against the death penalty, and the Colosseum's new use as a symbol of opposition to the death penalty pleases me no end. When a country abolishes the death penalty or the death sentence of a prisoner is commuted, the Colosseum is lit up.

A part, probably a large part, of the supposed artistry of the bullfight comes from the work with the cape, the swirling and flowing of the cape. If there were no death and cruelty involved, it might be fine, impressive, like those displays of flag swirling, but by no stretch of the imagination a major art form. Skiers can make beautiful, exhilarating patterns in the snow with their carved turns - and 'extreme' skiers, who can lose their life with one single mistake, are certainly engaged in a far more hazardous activity than bullfighters. The Telemark turn of downhill cross-country skiers '...is so elegant and graceful that onlookers often say it looks like a waltz.' (Steve Barnett, 'Cross-Country Downhill.) But skiers don't generally claim that their turns amount to an art form, or at least a major art form.

If we ignore the cruelties of the bullfight, temporarily, and attend more closely to its claims for artistry we are bound to find the claims of the bullfighting aficionados ludicrously inflated. To mention another aspect, there are no great theatrical masterpieces which last only a quarter of an hour. They need longer than that for their unfolding, to have their impact. Aristotle, in the 'Poetics,' wrote that 'Tragedy is an imitation of an action that ...possesses magnitude.' (Section 4.1) The word he uses for 'magnitude' is 'megethos' and it expresses the need that the dramatic action should be imposing and not limited in extent, not mean. Aristotle's view here isn't binding, but it does express an artistic demand which unlike the so-called 'unities' has a continuing force. The 15 minutes, approximately, which elapse from the entry of the bull until its death are far too little for the demands of a more ambitious art, a deeper art. The complete bullfighting session is simply made up of these 15 minutes repeated six times, with six different victims put to death: this repetition doesn't in the least amount to magnitude, to 'megethos.' And with this, we can return to our fuller view, which takes into account the ethical.

5. Animals: appreciation and abuse

I talked to a goat,
Alone in the field, tied to a post,
Full up with grass, soaked
Through with rain, bleating.

That monotone was brother
To my grief. I answered back: first
For fun, but then because sorrow's
Forever, and is monotonous.
I heard its voice
Sounding in a solitary goat.

From a goat with a semitic face
I heard all ills, all lives,
Lamenting.

(The Italian poet Umberto Saba).

There's a linkage between bullfighting, surely, and a pitifully limited appreciation of animals and care for animals, a linkage between bullfighting and other abuses of animals. Bullfighting apologists do, genuinely, appreciate the power of the bull, the magnificence of the bull (both the power and the magnificence are destroyed by the punishing power of the picador's lance and the banderillas, so that it's a shadow of the magnificent animal, an animal weakened by injury, loss of blood and pain which faces the final act.) Bullfighting apologists are far less likely than other people, surely, to appreciate, to sympathize with, to commune with, to feel pity for, to want to help, all the animals which lack the power and strength of bulls but which have grace, charm, usefulness, or which have no particular appeal to any human preferences but which simply have mysterious 'otherness.' To feel the compassion of Umberto Saba, or of Thomas Hardy. This is from Thomas Hardy's poem, 'Afterwards:'

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, 'He strove that such innocent creatures should ...come to no harm,'

Feelings like these, present in some people in bullfighting countries but surely in stark and jarring contrast with the predominant ethos of a bullfighting country, are infinitely more valuable than the grandiose 'feelings' which are bullfighting's depraved contribution to the world.

As with the world of life-enhancing feelings, so with opposition to organized mass cruelty, it could confidently be predicted that the bullfighting countries would not be in the forefront of opposition to the cruelties of factory farming. When the European Union voted to phase out the battery cage (although the so-called 'enriched cage,' a slightly larger battery cage, was a despicable compromise), the only country which voted against was - Spain.

6. Cultural stagnation

Hemingway, 'Death in the Afternoon:' '...Huron, a bull of the ranch of Don Antonio Lopez Plata, which fought a Bengal tiger on the 24th of July 1904 in the Plaza of San Sebastian. They fought in a steel cage and the bull whipped the tiger, but in one of his charges broke the cage apart and the two animals came out into the ring in the midst of the spectators. The police, attempting to finish the dying tiger and the very live bull, fired several volleys which 'caused grave wounds to many spectators.' From the history of these various encounters between bulls and other animals I should say they were spectacles to stay away from, or at least to view from one of the higher boxes.'

Hemingway's reservations,then, are only to do with the danger to the spectators. He has no revulsion at the effect of the tiger's teeth on the bull and the bull's horns on the tiger. What might a more detailed account of this 'encounter' have revealed? Perhaps an eye of the bull hanging down by a strip of flesh. its face almost ripped away, the tiger pumping out blood from deep wounds, perhaps with an empty eye socket too. It should be apparent to anyone with any moral sense that the Nobel Prize Committee gave its prize to a sadist.

More evidence that Hemingway was disgusting. A 'capea,' as the glossary of 'Death in the Afternoon' informs us, refers to 'informal bullfights or bull baitings in village squares in which amateurs and aspirant bullfighters take part.' Now, Hemingway tells us, 'one bull which was a great favourite in the capeas of the province of Valencia killed sixteen men and boys and badly wounded over sixty in a career of five years.' So, simple enough. The bull was defending itself. The people who were killed and injured knew what risks they were running and there was an easy way to avoid all these risks. After the bull had killed or injured people in its first season, it was allowed to go on for years afterwards.

What happened to this 'great favourite,' also described by Hemingway as 'a very highly valued performer?' The bull's owner sent the bull to the slaughterhouse in Valencia. Two relatives of a someone killed by the bull asked permission to kill the bull, which was granted. The younger of the two 'started in by digging out both the bull's eyes while the bull was in his cage, and spitting carefully into the sockets, then after killing him by severing the spinal marrow between the neck vertebrae with a dagger, he experienced some difficulty in this, he asked permission to cut off the bull's testicles, which being granted, he and his sister built a small fire at the edge of the dusty street outside the slaughter-house and roasted the two glands on sticks and when they were done, ate them. They then turned their backs on the slaughter-house and went along the road and out of town.'

Hemingway did not, obviously, disapprove. In fact, he was in the vicinity when all this was done, although he doesn't reveal the fact in 'Death in the Afternoon.'

As well as the formal, ordered bullfight, with its three 'acts,' we have, then, such informal 'events' as these in which the bull plays a part. Why is it that they are unthinkable today? Not, primarily, because a Siberian tiger is an endangered species and because the method of slaughter at the Valencia slaughterhouse is against regulations. In the past, obviously, most bullfight apologists would accept almost any cruelty to a bull, even if their preference was for the formal, ordered bullfight. There has been a transformation in human attitudes to animals, so powerful that it has even influenced some, but not all, bullfight apologists. Now, there are more bullfight apologists who would go so far as to condemn cruelty to the bull outside the ordered bullfight but who continue to defend the practices of the bullfight, using supposed arguments which rely heavily upon words like 'tragedy,' 'honour,' 'courage.' They will find that the transformation of attitudes which has condemned the informal events has condemned the bullfight as well, and that they too stand condemned.

Arrival in Provence from Northern Europe. Impressions, the experience of countless travellers: the heat of the day, the wonderful warmth of the evenings, the powerful leafy scents, the quality of the light, the blue skies, the cypresses, the unexpected wildness of the landscape, French spoken unexpectedly, with a different accent. Is not the ordered bullfight just another sign of local distinctiveness? To abolish it to make a reduction of contrast?

In other places in this site, I've made clear that reduction of contrast can't be regarded mechanically, as always good. It has to be evaluated. There are many, many colourful customs, distinctive of a region, which have involved harm to men, women or children, as well as animals. Their loss has been a gain.

If we carry out a survey of a region, or a whole country, we find that there is so much to interest us. Provence has so much to interest any traveller that the loss of the bullfight would be insignificant. A survey of the pleasures available would include so much - a very partial list would include the pleasures of eating, of wine, of emotional intensity, sexual intensity, of the landscape, of nature, of the genuine arts, the true arts not fatally compromised by any dependence on the infliction of suffering and death. The bullfight apologist might even discover that the world of animals becomes an absorbing interest.

The attention given to the bullfight in Provence and other places is a sign not of colourful tradition but of stagnation. Any region or country with vitality tries to preserve its strengths and reduce its weaknesses. To be unchanging, to be oblivious to the better intellectual and cultural currents of the age, is a sign of weakness.

Great Britain, but particularly England, has a very high regard for tradition but it has at least recognized that tradition can be a sign of weakness as well as strength. It's remarkable that Britain, with all its serious faults, has transformed itself from a bull-baiting and bear-baiting and fox-hunting country, one with no real tradition of animal welfare, to one with such a care for dogs, cats, and injured wildlife, and one which has achieved a very great deal in the abolition of factory farming, although not nearly enough. Countries, as well as people, are not condemned to repeat the past, to perpetuate traditions that have become unacceptable for good reasons. Practices that seem deeply embedded in a society, too much a part of its tradition to be reformed or abolished, can go. Hanging by the neck is an ancient English tradition that has gone. It might have been expected that Spain's fondness for the death penalty would have been reversed with more difficulty. Not so. Execution by garotte and shooting was ended in Spain in a dramatic way. Not one member of the Spanish parliament voted against abolition, but not all bad practices are ended by legislation. They may wither away, regarded as obsolete, as an embarrassment.

Andalucia, along with Castilia, is the European region most closely associated with the bullfight. It's argued - more often, simply stated - that Andalucia is so receptive to bullfighting because of the attitude to death there. Poor Northern Europeans, and others, are supposed to confess their limitations at this point, to confess, helplessly, that they can't possibly understand death like the Andalucians, being so much more superficial. That's why so many Northern Europeans, and others, are outraged by the bullfight. They lack this sense of life mysteriously interlinked with death. And how does an Andalucian interpret and make sense of, from the depth of Andalucian insight, those vast repositories of death outside Andalucia, such as the Somme, Passchendaele, Verdun, Stalingrad, and Auschwitz and the other extermination camps?

The Andalucian writer Lorca was a lover of the bullfight. The horses used in the bullring were given the cosmetic protection of mattresses before he died (the protection was given from 1928 onwards and he was shot in 1936), but he attended many, many bullfights before then, when horses were publicly disembowelled, when very often three horses were killed during each bullfight and sometimes as many as six.

He gives us his thoughts on 'duende' and death in his essay 'Theory and Function of the Duende.' (The full text of the essay is given in English translation at: http://www.tonykline.co.uk/PITBR/Spanish/LorcaDuende.htm) He writes of duende that 'its most impressive effects appear in the bullring.' Duende, he claims, isn't needed for all phases of the bullfight, but 'in the work with the cape, while the bull is still free of wounds, and at the moment of the kill, the aid of the duende is required to drive home the nail of artistic truth.' And, 'Spain is unique, a country where death is a national spectacle, where death sounds great bugle blasts on the arrival of Spring.' He refers, of course, to the start of the bullfighting season at Easter, but his reference to Spanish uniqueness is obviously wrong, ignoring the bullfighting traditions in Southern France and Latin America.

Duende encompasses the death of people as well as bulls. I give statements from one short paragraph of Lorca's essay, on separate lines, so that their profundity or stupidity stands out more clearly, depending on the views of the reader:

'In every country death has finality.
Not in Spain.
A dead person in Spain is more alive than is the case anywhere else.'

The dead of the Somme, Passchendaele, Verdun, Stalingrad, and Auschwitz and the extermination camps, being almost all non-Spanish and dying far from Spain, are denied, then, the consolation of being 'more alive' enjoyed by, for example, the Spaniards who died in the Spanish civil war, the Spanish women who died in childbirth before the development of modern medicine, the victims of the Spanish Inquisition, as well as their torturers and executioners.

So many of Lorca's claims are superficially deep, reminding us of the 'dark gods' of D H Lawrence at his worst: 'the duende has to be roused from the furthest habitations of the blood,' and 'quoting the Spanish composer Falla: 'all that has dark sounds has duende.'

Lorca sharply distinguishes duende from the Muse, 'which stirs the intellect' and the Angel. The Muse, according to Lorca, 'lifts the poet into the bondage of aristocratic fineness, where he forgets that he might be eaten, suddenly, by ants, or that a huge arsenical lobster might fall on his head - things against which the Muses who inhabit monocles, or the roses of lukewarm lacquer in a tiny salon, have no power.' In a similar style, he refers to 'that other melancholy demon of Descartes, diminutive as a green almond, that, tired of lines and circles, fled along the canals to listen to the singing of drunken sailors.' This from someone who has a towering, and surely an inflated, reputation in European culture.

He goes so far as to give a definition of duende, one of the most useless and empty definitions imaginable: 'a mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.' As is shown by the fact that the definition was originally drawn up by Goethe to describe the violinist and composer Paganini.

How does an Andalucian with the Anadulucian view of death regard those who do everything they can to save life? Grudgingly? I think that the Andalucian attitude, like the acceptance of Rilke, fails.With apologies to the people of Andalucia who aren't so limited as to share these Andalucian obsessions and confusions.

7. The case of Orson Welles, the film-maker

Extracts from the transcript of his comments to Michael Parkinson in 1974 about Hemingway and bullfighting.

'...the fact is, it has become an industry which depends on its existence by the tourist trade. So it's become folkloric, and I hate anything which is folkloric. But I haven't turned against bullfighting because it needs a lot of Japanese in the front row to keep going, and it does. But I've turned against it for very much the same reason that my father, who was a great hunter, suddenly stopped hunting. He said, "I've killed enough animals and I'm ashamed of myself." I was a bad torero for awhile myself, and I've seen too many hundreds of bullfights, thousands of them, I suppose, and wasted a lot of my life...I began to think that I've seen enough of those animals die.'

'...wasn't I living and dying second hand? Wasn't there something finally voyeuristic about it?...By the way, almost all Spanish intellectuals have been against bullfighting for the last 150 years. Lorca is one of the few Spanish intellectuals who ever approved of bullfighting. Was it a waste, waste, waste? you asked me. A waste because I wasn't doing anything...what have I extracted from it that's of any value to anybody?'

La Route de Sang

Recently, I visited France. From Alsace, where I travelled some of La Route de Vin, I travelled much further South than I'd originally intended. A main reason was to visit, for the first time, an area where bullfighting takes place, the setting for what I call 'La Route de Sang.' (it can't be found in any of the travel guides). To visit the area not out of simple curiosity but as an activist, as someone who has already studied the subject of bullfighting in detail, who has found it barbaric and repulsive and who has given a great deal of thought to the most effective campaigning techniques. In the time I had available, I was only able to visit the bullfighting town of Arles. As an individual, I was only able to do a little on this visit. The urge to make a protest was strong. I confined myself to writing messages of protest at six or seven different places on the woodwork inside the arena where bullfighting takes place, and I went to the tourist office and loudly spoke about the barbarity of bullfighting. Since returning to this country, I've phoned tourist offices and arenas and made other protests.

Towns and other places are very concerned with their reputations. They would rather be known as progressive than primitive, as enlightened rather than barbaric, notable as centres of civilization rather than notorious as centres of unjustified killing and bloodthirstiness. It's remarkable that at Arles, the usual crude posters of wounded, charging bulls are to be found in shops but not at the tourist office or even at the arena: evidence, I think, of defensiveness in these places. The campaign to end bullfighting can increase this defensiveness, can even implant the beginnings of shame and self-disgust in the hardened hearts of some aficionados but, most importantly, it has to implant in the minds of the general public an association between bullfighting towns and death and blood, to do damage to the reputation of these places. In this way, it's possible to apply indirect pressure on people who are, realistically, too hardened ever to change, or who have too much to lose to accept change. It's unlikely that a bull-breeder, an employee of an arena or a bullfighter will accept the loss of livelihood.

I don't think that boycotts of bullfighting towns are particularly useful. As a form of economic pressure, they're valueless. Nimes and Arles and other bullfighting towns have far more to lose, economically, if the aficionados stay away than if opponents of the bullfight stay away. I think it's far more useful for activists to descend upon these places and to make their presence - and their opposition - felt. Some people may do this by staging high-profile protests. I've taken part in protests of this kind in other areas of animal welfare - but there are other, less public, ways of making opposition felt, for those who are averse to taking part in public demonstrations.

I would suggest that tourist offices are a suitable focus of opposition. Tourist offices are the places which give information to the public about corridas. If someone wants to know the date and time of the next occasion when terror, injury and death will be presented as a public spectacle then the tourist office is happy to give the information. Let these tourist offices receive more and more phone calls, more and more letters and postcards, more and more visitors making clear their disgust.

To adapt Voltaire's words:

LA CORRIDA. ECRASEZ L' INFAME!