Introduction
The horses
The bull
The courage of the bullfighters
Bullfighting and comedy
Bullfighting as an art form. Bullfighting and tragedy
Bullfighting and 'duende'
Cultural stagnation
Animals: appreciation and abuse
Orson Welles, the film-maker.
Campaigning techniques
A challenge 1: Stanley Conrad ('El Ratón')
A challenge 2
La Route de Sang
Human welfare and animal welfare
Other forms of bullfighting
Links

aaSee also, on other pages:

A L Kennedy's 'On Bullfighting'
Seamus Heaney and bullfighting
Animal welfare: arrest and activism

Supplementary material is in this font, size and colour.

Introduction

The bullfight is the 'corrida,' the bullfight of Spain and some other countries, but I discuss very briefly other forms of bullfighting.

The emphasis here is different from that of most anti-bullfighting pages. There are no images of the bloody bullfight here, although there are links to outstanding sites with images. I concentrate on exploring the mind of the bullfighter and the bullfight supporter, discussing in detail their conviction that bullfighting is a developed art, that it requires special courage and other deeply misguided views. Undermining morale is essential in winning this difficult campaign, as so many others, and I think that detailed discussion is essential for undermining their morale.This discussion of bullfighting gives new information and puts 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 at all (the usual attitude of apologists for the bullfight such as Hemingway), it becomes a central objection to bullfighting. The suffering of the horses is often a prominent part of the anti-bullfighting case but I give an extended argument. I acknowledge the courage of bullfighters but make clear that this courage is limited, far surpassed by the courage shown, for example, by high-altitude mountaineers and in the war experiences of countless people. (I point out below that 'to climb K2 or Annapurna or another very high mountain just once involves a far, far higher risk of death than a bullfighter faces in an entire bullfighting 'career.')

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 give reasons for regarding its artistry as negligible. I take a fresh look at the bullfight as 'tragedy' and at the Spanish concept of 'duende,' which has a linkage with bullfighting.

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.

Bull-baiting and bear-baiting were abolished in this country in 1835. On other pages of this site, I write about some of the cruelties, abuses and injustices to people which were prevalent at the time and which continued, such as the 'bloody code,' which punished a large number of offences with public hanging (two thirds of the hangings were for property crimes) and the sufferings of adults and children during the industrial revolution, in particular the dangerous and back-breaking work of men, women and children in the mines. But the tearing of a bull's or bear's flesh by powerful dogs for public entertainment - the teeth and claws of the bear pulled out beforehand to make it more helpless - was no minor matter. Bull baiting and bear baiting were indefensible and their abolition was necessary. I believe that bullfighting, which has more artistic pretensions than bull-baiting or bear-baiting, is indefensible in both its Portuguese and Spanish forms, and must be abolished. But action against bullfighting should be with some awareness of context, the context of preventable suffering, animal suffering, such as the suffering of factory-farmed animals, and human suffering.

The horses

A link http://association-chevaux.skyrock.com which shows images (towards the bottom of the page) illustrating some of the subjects I discuss in this section: a picador's horse receiving the full impact of a charging bull, the horse of a rejoneador (mounted bullfighter) being gored and two images of horses which have been gored in the bullring, with protruding organs.

I begin with a section about horses in war and peace, to give context. To omit this section, and go to the discussion of horses used in the bullring, click here.

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, or similar animals, no developed human civilization was possible. Before the modern era, their role in carrying loads (as pack-horses), pulling heavy loads and carrying riders was crucial, all-important.

Horses of substantial size as well as ponies went down the mines and were used well into the twentieth century. They were stabled underground and lived the rest of their lives underground, in complete darkness or almost complete darkness. From a display at the National Coal Mining Museum: 'To the miners, the pony was a workmate. Together they experienced the same conditions [back-breaking work, breathing in coal-dust] and faced the same dangers [of explosions that mutilated or killed, of drowning when the workings were flooded, and the rest]' After nationalization of the mines, they spent 50 weeks of the year below ground but were given two weeks holiday

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. The tradition of bullfighting is not at all ancient. 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.'

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.'

Although I concentrate here for very good reason on the sufferings of horses, I never at any time forget the human suffering. During the French retreat from Moscow, this was extreme - but an extreme often approached or equalled before and after this time. From David A. Bell's very searching book, 'The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Modern Warfare:' 'The men slept in the open, and in the morning, the living would wake amid a field of snow-covered corpses. Lice and vermin gnawed at them. Toes, fingers, noses and penises fell victim to frostbite; eyes, to snow blindness.' The horses' suffering was extreme - but again, an extreme often approached or equalled before and after this time. 'The starving soldiers' were desperate for 'the smallest scraps of food. Some ate raw flesh carved out of the sides of live horses...'

According to the historian David Chandler he lost a total of 370 000 men to death, and 200 000 horses.

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, they were still used on a massive scale to haul guns and waggons. About 400 000 horses were killed in the conflict. Many of them died, like the soldiers, by distinctively new methods, by phosgene, mustard gas, chlorine gas. At Passchendaele horses, like 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 Marc wrote, "The poor horses!" On a single day at Verdun, 7 000 horses were killed.

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.

What happens to the horses in those modern centres of European civilization, Arles, Nîmes and the other bull-fighting towns and cities? Not, any longer, disembowelling, at least for the horses of the picador. (The horses of the rejoneador or mounted bullfighter are sometimes disembowelled.) Hemingway was writing of the time when the horses of the picadors were completely unprotected. A decree of the government of Primo de Rivera in Spain ordered that picadors' 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 force of the bull. So, horses in the bullfight are crushed against the wooden barrier of the bullring, lifted, toppled, trampled and terrorized, suffering broken ribs, damage to internal organs - treated worse than vermin. The mattress may offer some protection against puncture wounds but not against other injuries - and it generally hides from view the injuries which are caused, as in this video. It shows how the bull can still injure or kill a horse despite the protective mattress.

Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre in their biography of the bullfighter 'El Cordobes' describe injuries to horses during his 'career' - this was long after the adoption of the 'protective' mattress. Internal organs protruded from the bodies of the horses. How were the injuries treated? The horse contractors shoved the organs back and crudely sewed up the wounds. The organs still protruded, though, to an extent. The protruding parts were simply cut off. The horses might well last another bullfight or two. The authors - 'aficionados' - relate all this in a matter of fact tone, without the least trace of criticism or condemnation.

From my review of A L Kennedy's book, On Bullfighting, quoting first from the book. She received the help of an aficionado in writing the book, Don Hurley of the 'Club Taurino.' ('This book could not have been written without ... the expertise and advice of Don Hurley.')

'Arguments are cited which state, reasonably enough, that the blindfolded and terrified horse is currently buffeted by massive impacts, suffering great stress and possibly broken bones.' But some aficionados have advocated 'kinder' treatment of the horses. Humane aficionados! What is the reform proposed by these good, kind-hearted people to reduce animal suffering? This: taking away the protective mattress and returning to disembowelling of the horses! As A L Kennedy puts it, 'a return to the 'kinder' option of evisceration.' She perhaps forgets that death by disembowelling - evisceration - was often not instantaneous. As Hemingway admits, a horse might carry on running whilst trailing its intestines behind it. (If only some of the horse's innards were showing, the gap in the horse's body could be filled with sawdust 'by a kindly veterinarian.' 'No sweeter, purer sawdust ever stuffed a horse than that used in the Madrid ring' according to Hemingway.)

She discusses these things in a strangely detached tone, and, in the same strangely detached tone, 'It is believed in some quarters that horse-killing greatly improves the bull's 'spirit' for the remainder of its time in the ring and is the only fit proof of its 'bravery'.

The first film I saw which showed a bullfight included a 'rejoneador,' a mounted bullfighter. (The same film also included horrendous footage of a bull which had obviously hit the wood of the bullring very hard, with a horn hanging off, almost detached, and almost certainly feeling severe pain - even before it faced the lance, the banderillas and the sword.) The horse of the rejoneador isn't protected in any way. The intention is that the horse's speed and agility and the skill of the rider enables it to avoid the horns of the bull. Sometimes, the reality is otherwise.

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

The bull

A page which shows images of the bull during a bullfight

There are many, many images and films available on the internet which show the course of a bullfight. I think it's advisable to see some of these images and watch some of the films. None of these films, none of the films distributed by convinced opponents of the bullfight, show untypical 'atrocities,' incidents which are very rare, except in a few cases. The bull is never wounded and killed under controlled conditions. Whatever the intention, the lance of the picador, the banderillas, the sword and the rest regularly penetrate flesh not at all near the targetted area. The picador's horse may be about to fall as the bull's massive weight charges into it and the lance may sever an artery and blood pulses out. When blood pours out of the mouth and nose of the bull, which is often, the sword has failed to cut the aorta (the heart is out of reach of the sword.)

The number of stab wounds a bull receives at the minimum is astonishing. The animal often receives many more. When the bull is about to be killed, it will already have had its back torn open by the lance of the picador and will already have had its back lacerated repeatedly by the sbarbed banderillas. Hemingway mentions the fact that the bull 'may be ruined by a banderillero nailing the banderillas into a wound made by the picador, driving them in so deep that the shafts stick up straight.' By the time of the sword thrust supposed to kill the bull, the bull will have two or three stab wounds inflicted by the picadors and six stab wounds from the banderillas. The sword often hits bone, or goes deep into the animal but fails to kill. The bull, staggering, still alive and conscious, with the sword embedded in its body - this is far more common than an instantaneous death. The matador pulls the sword from the animal and then thrusts it into the animal again, and again often fails to kill the bull. If so, a short knife is used to repeatedly stab at the spine. 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! On occasion, they are impatient for some reason and can't wait.

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 have been 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 than 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 almost entirely 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, eventually. 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. Opponents of the bullfighting who despair of ever making an impact should note the signs that even some bullfighters are beginning to question some of what they do.

The English bullfighter Frank Evans, who has killed many bulls in his long 'career,' has now written that the long-drawn out process of killing, as it so often is, the repeated stabbing, cannot be condoned in modern conditions. If the bull isn't killed by the first sword thrust, then it should be shot. This proposal has no chance of being accepted by the vast majority of bullfighters and bullfight supporters. It would allow to continue the stab wounds inflicted by the picadors and the stab wounds of the banderillas and the injuries to the horses.

The bullfight entails the transformation of a very powerful animal into a weak animal, by pain and injury. There's no great contrast between the 'illegitimate' tampering with the bull before it goes into the ring, by skewering its testicles with a needle or beating it with sandbags, or any of the other methods used, and the methods which bullfight supporters find indispensable, the stabbings with the pic and the banderillas. All of them have the effect of wearing down the bull. In the third phase, the cape is often used to make the bull turn right and quickly left, right and left, right and left, until it sags to its knees and can barely stand again. Even the bulls which are not weakened to anything like this extent are still nothing like the animal which entered the ring.

The corrida can never be made into a humane spectacle. It simply has to be abolished. Almost certainly, it will be abolished last in Spain. In which bullfighting country will bullfighting be abolished first? We must try to reduce the number of bullfighting countries, we must try to win country by country.

The claim is mad by bullfighting apologists that the bull that dies in the bullring is 'lucky.' The claim is made that these bulls have a far better life and a longer life (although not much longer) than the bulls reared for beef, kept in factory farms and slaughtered at a younger age. The claim is made that when bulls are 'tested' for their fighting qualities - the 'tienta' - the bulls which go to the bull ring are much more fortunate than the ones that fail, who will be slaughtered for beef.

Pigs and chickens, both the chickens reared for meat and laying chickens, are very often kept in factory farms but this isn't true of beef cattle in most cases. I can claim to have an exhaustive knowledge of the subject - I've opposed factory farming for a very long time. Animals other than pigs and chickens have been kept in factory farms to a lesser extent, or attempts are being made to factory farm them. In this country, there are planning applications - which are being strenuously resisted - to adopt the hideous 'zero-grazing' system for dairy cows in massive factory farm complexes.

But generally, beef cattle have just as good a life as fighting bulls, grazing in fields. It's true that their life is generally shorter. Fighting bulls are at least four years old when they enter the bullring for the regular corrida, but the 'novillos,' the bulls fought by the apprentice matadors or 'novilleros' are closer in age to beef cattle. When Frank Evans, the British bullfighter, came out of retirement to fight - and kill - a bull, the bull was just two years old. The picture I have is poignant, not for its image of the bullfighter fighting long after most bullfighters have retired but for the bull, not at all a good-looking bull, much slighter than a four year old bull, of course - to put this animal to the sword needed even more callousness than is usual, I feel.

But the arguments of bullfighting apologists which refer to factory farming and the age of slaughter are surely cynical, opportunistic. There's no evidence at all that most of these people are concerned in the least about factory farming and the slaughter of animals.

'Thought experiments' are often used in ethical discussion. They can be used to support or oppose an ethical argument very graphically. In the case of the 'lucky' fighting bull, these analogies suggest themselves. The death of gladiators in the Roman arenas is widely recognized as a blot on Roman civilization - indefensible. The Romans might have developed a system according to which all the gladiators were made up of men condemned to death, volunteering to fight instead of being executed. They had the chance of living for longer, and perhaps much longer. Even if they were beaten in combat, the crowd might spare their lives. What if a contemporary jurisdiction which often executes, such as Texas, proposed to allow condemned men the same chance of living for longer and by similar means?

It would be unthinkable, of course. There's massive opposition to the infliction of death in public. In the history of the death penalty, the trend has been for executions to be public, then not seen by the public, within the confines of a prison, before being abolished altogether. Similarly, if an animal is being slaughtered, then to make a public exhibition of the slaughter is felt to be degrading.

Human responsibility towards domesticated animals, and standards for keeping domesticated animals should include as a minimum (1) humane treatment whilst the animal is reared and (2) a humane death. These should be regarded as essential, fundamental principles of animal welfare in a modern civilization. Battery chickens are denied (1). They have the benefit of (2) almost always, but not invariably. The bull has the benefit of (1) but not (2). Beef cattle generally have the benefit of (1) and (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, preceded by injuries which are likely to be painful or agonizing, is an act of disgusting cruelty that shames Spain, France, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador.

The courage of the bullfighters

The attempt to claim excellence for bullfighting stumbles upon the fact that two categories essential for these claims, physical courage and artistic achievement, are also categories where humanity's achievements are stratospherically high.

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.] Hemingway acknowledges that death in the bullring is less likely than the diseases that non-bullfighters can just as easily develop.

Information from U.S. News and World Report:

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

'Bulls killed in licensed bullfights per year in Spain: 30 000; [closer to 40 000 now] bullfighters killed by bulls in the past five years: 2.

The courage of bullfighters is completely eclipsed by the courage shown by innumerable ordinary people in time of war, including civilians. 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. The men who flew in Bomber Command during the Second World War were all volunteers. They served for thirty operations before they became instructors or took up other non-combatant roles. In 1943, the chances of them surviving the thirty operations amounted to one in seven. After 15 operations, when they were more experienced, they had a 25 % chance of survival. 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?'

Although bullfighters may be severely injured in the bullring, the severity of the injuries in warfare, particularly warfare since the introduction of explosives, is of a different order of seriousness. Bullfighters who have been gored many times can almost always still walk, they still have the use of their limbs, they can still see. The effect of high explosive, in the current conflict in Afghanistan, in the massive bombardments of the First and Second World War and other wars, can leave the soldier - or the civilian - with a single limb or even none at all, or blinded, or mutilated so much that even advanced plastic surgery can never restore anything like the person's appearance. Similarly in the case of the horrific burns which are common in time of war. Ordinary people in vast numbers have faced these risks, with none of the romanticized myth-making of the bullfighters and their supporters.

During The Second World War, this country was dependent upon the convoys bringing food, fuel and other materials across the Atlantic. The merchant seamen who served on these ships were all civilians and all volunteers. Of the total of 185 000 who volunteered, over 30 000 were killed, the majority after their ship had been attacked by a U-boat. The war experiences of the survivors often involved the explosion of the torpedoes, their ship burning from end to end, burning oil in the water, men drowning in oil. These acute dangers were even worse, of course, for the many who faced the long voyage across the Atlantic on oil tankers. The well-developed propaganda machine of bullfighting has never yet faced such realities.

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.'

If we compare bullfighting and high-altitude mountaineering, then high altitude mountaineering is far more dangerous 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 dangerous 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. K2, the second highest mountain in the world, has claimed more than one death for every four successful ascents. Annapurna is even more deadly. From 'Annapurna: 50 years of Expeditions in the Death Zone' by the Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner, the great mountaineer: '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. To climb K2 or Annapurna or another very high mountain just once involves a far, far higher risk of death than a bullfighter faces in an entire bullfighting 'career.'

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.

Injuries to mountaineers occur not only as a result of falling but from a range of other causes, such as rock fall and avalanches - the snow which makes up the avalanche may resemble the consistency of concrete rather than anything soft and fluffy, capable of causing crushing injuries and multiple fractures.

On high 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. Even in the Alps, bad weather can delay rescue for days. For the mountaineer, safety and medical help are generally 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 Joe 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 books about mountaineering and by mountainers and enough books about bullfighting and by bullfighters to be able to compare the two will surely be convinced that the states of consciousness revealed in mountaineering literature are incomparably richer, deeper and more complex. Justified pride, as well as self-doubt, hope, despair, elation, crushing disappointment - these and other emotions surge through the mountaineering literature.

I mention books 'by mountaineers' and books 'by bullfighters.' There's a vast imbalance here. There are a very large number of books by mountaineers, who often write very well and convey wonderful insights into the relationship between mountaineer and mountain. The literature of the bullfighters and bullfight supporters is so meagre as to be practically non-existent. The thrusting of banderillas, lances and swords into bulls has elicited practically no writing of substance to cast light on the practice. Who would be able to cite anything other than Henry de Montherlant's novel 'The Bullfighters?' De Montherlant was a bullfight supporter rather than a bulfighter. Martin Seymour-Smith writes of him that he 'had some experience' in fighting bulls,' 'unlike Hemingway.' Lorca's friend Ignacio Sánchez Mejías was a 'professional bullfighter' and wrote a play 'Injustice' (Sin razón), but it isn't about bullfighting. For criticism of A L Kennedy's book 'On Bullfighting' please click here.

What are the achievements of bull-fighters to be compared with the achievements of mountaineers? What bravery has been shown in the bull-rings of Arles, Nîmes, Madrid, Seville, Valencia, Granada, Mexico City, all the bull-rings of the bullfighting 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 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.

Of all risky activities, none has anything like the bullfighters' highly developed Mythology of Death. Mountaineers tend to be self-effacing and reticent, at least in talking about the dangers. They are acknowledged and mentioned, but there's none of the decadent boasting indulged in by bullfighters. The English bullfighter Frank Evans writes about the women who are attracted to him because of the supposedly glamorous danger he faces. The biography of the Spanish bullfighter of a previous generation, El Cordobes, was entitled, 'Or I'll dress you in mourning,' referring to his boast that he would make good in bullfighting or die in the attempt. (Like the majority of bullfighters, he didn't die in the attempt.)

A L Kennedy makes a grotesque comparison, in connection with the bullfighter 'El Juli,' who, rumours have it, 'will soon attempt to face seven bulls ... within the course of one day... At this level, the life of the matador must be governed by the same dark mathematics which calculates a soldier's ability to tolerate combat: so many months in a tour of duty, so many missions flown, and mental change, mental trauma, becomes a statistical inevitability. But in the corrida, the matador is not exposed to physical and emotional damage by duty, or conscription - he is a volunteer, a true believer, a lover with his love.' This comes from her book 'On Bullfighting.' I note in my review of the book, ' ... ten years after she wrote about him and his likely demise, El Juli is still with us, still very much alive, despite the dark mathematics.'

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 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. Better to call it 'code.' The word 'ethics' shouldn't be used in connection with bullfighting. 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. Stanley Conrad who runs what has been described as the 'best' (pro-) bullfighting Web site in the world in English, admits this, in a review of A L Kennedy's 'On Bullfighting:' 'the critical issues plaguing the present day corrida - weakened taurine bloodlines, horn shaving and other pre-corrida attacks on the central creatures' integrity...' Opponents of bullfighting are often pessimistic - how to win a victory against forces seemingly so powerful and entrenched? They should remember, though, that they are opposing something which is diseased.

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 aren't permitted. Climbing ethics are almost always observed, the 'bullfighting code' very often flouted. Climbers who would like to climb a particularly dangerous rock face don't bring along explosives to make the rock face less difficult and dangerous, but in bullfighting, the most devious practices are common. And the bullfighters, not the climbers, are the ones who will boast of the dangers, of how, in the case of male bullfighters, the vast majority, the glamour of danger makes them attractive to women ...

The 'courage' of bullfighters in the past was the means - the 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. A bullfighter may earn more than most footballers in Spain.The financial rewards of climbing are far less - for the vast majority of climbers nothing whatsoever.

The idiots who run with the bulls at the San Fermin Festival in Pamplona (and similar events) run a risk of injury but most of the injuries are minor. The most common injury is contusion due to falling. There have been fatalities in the bull-run. They include someone suffocated by a pile-up of people and somone, even more idiotic than the others, who incited a bull to charge him by brandishing his coat. There have been only 15 fatalities in the last 100 years. Given the large numbers of people who take part, this isn't very many.

The runners are misguided idiots but courageous idiots: courageous to a limited extent. They are strange people, very peculiar people, enhancing their own self-image, contributing a very great deal to the economy of Pamplona but contributing nothing at all to the reputation of European civilization. All the bulls which run with the idiots are subjected to the lance, the banderillas and the sword and perhaps finished off by severing the spine in the bull ring at Pamplona later that day.

Bullfighting and comedy

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.'

For Hemingway, 'in the tragedy of the bullfight the horse is the comic character ... Therefore the worse the horses are, provided they are high enough off the ground and solid enough so that the picador can perform his mission with the spiked pole, or vara, the more they are a comic element.' And in connection with the disembowelling of the horses, 'There is certainly nothing comic by our standards in seeing an animal emptied of its visceral content, but if this animal instead of doing something tragic, that is, dignified, gallops in a stiff old-maidish fashion around the ring trailing the opposite of clouds of glory, it is as comic it was the horse which provided the comic touch' then according to Hemingway it is as comic as burlesque farce: 'If one is comic the other is; the humour comes from the same principle ... I have seen these, call them disembowellings, that is the worst word, when, due to their timing, they were very funny.'

See also Seamus Heaney on the actions of the banderillero, (stabbing the bull six times) which he thinks are 'closer to comedy than tragedy.'

The humour of some bullfighting enthusiasts, their idea of 'fun', make a deeply depressing study. The animal victims of the 'informal events' of 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. [This has now been ended.] 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 a 'hilarious' event which mimics the mainstream Corrida. (And sometimes there's another 'hilarious' character - a dwarf dressed as a bullfighter.) The horse is regarded as a comic character in the bullfight (so its sufferings are of no account) and a donkey is even more comic.

However, this page is mainly about the organized bullfight, the bullfight as an 'art form,' supposedly. I turn to this topic next.

Bullfighting as an art form. Bullfighting and tragedy

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.

The 'artistry' of the bullfight has to be compared with the rich, radiant, complex, powerful, sometimes transcendently beautiful art-works which have been created in painting, architecture, music, literature, the theatre, the ballet and other arts.

Hemingway, 'Death in the Afternoon,' of bullfighting: 'If it were permanent it could be one of the major arts, but it is not and so it finishes with whoever makes it.' Hemingway thinks of bullfighting as a minor art form, then, not a major one. His view of the performing arts - and if bullfighting is an art, then it's a 'performing art' - is open to question. Great performances in the true arts are surely something of major, not minor, significance. What I would assert is that amongst the performing arts, bullfighting is at rock bottom.

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, 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.'

Bullfight apologists seem to have an abysmal understanding of tragedy, ridiculously simplified. It focuses attention on the solitary tragic death of the protagonist, identified in bullfighting with the bull. In fact, very many tragedies don't end with the death of the protagonist. If the protagonist does die, the death of the protagonist may be quiet and uneventful, lacking the distinctive characteristics of tragic death. Other characters may die together with the protagonist, so that the effect of a solitary tragic death is blunted.

I've a familiarity with Shakespearean tragedy but particular knowledge of the tragic writing which inaugurated the whole magnificent tragic enterprise, the tragedy of ancient Greece. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance and the influence of Aristotle's 'Poetics,' despite its brevity, as an examination of tragedy, although tragedy is only one of its themes. My comments here are necessarily brief. Very much to be recommended is reading the 'Poetics.' One accessible version is published by Penguin Classics, with an introduction by the translator, Malcolm Heath, with a very illuminating introduction which will be sobering reading for the average bullfighting supporter, naively convinced that bullfighting is a tragic form and the bull a tragic protagonist. In the brief extracts below, though, I use my own translation.

In the analysis of tragedy, plot is the primary element for Aristotle. He devotes chapters 7 - 14 almost entirely to his analysis of plot. He distinguishes simple from complex plots, claiming that complex plots are superior. Examining the many complex tragic plots which were familiar to Aristotle and which date from after the time of Aristotle, we can appreciate and admire, their lack of uniformity, their very great differences, their subtle differences, the richness of this one part of cultural history: the enormous differences between the fully-achieved tragic worlds of Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Oedipus the King, Agamemnon, Medea and the rest.

The plot of the bullfight is simple, primitively simple, and repetitious. Bullfighting supporters love the special terms in Spanish which give them the feeling that they are insiders, they know the meaning of potent special words which is denied to outsiders. So, both Hemingway's 'Death in the Afternoon' and A L Kennedy's 'On Bullfighting' include Glossaries of these Very Important Words. Although an outsider, very much an outsider, I use some of these terms next.

The Plot of the Bullfight (without the interest or complexity of anything more than a very primitive plot) consists of these three 'Acts:'

First Act: Suerte de Varas, 'The Act of Spears' in which the bull is stabbed with the lance of the picador.
Second Act: Suerte de Banderillas, in which the bull is stabbed with six barbed darts.
Third Act: Suerte de Matar, also known as the faena, 'The Act of the Kill,' in which the matador kills the bull with a single sword thrust, more than one sword thrust, or by hacking at the spine once or repeatedly.

People who pay money to see one 'performance' will see the Surte de Varas, the Suerte de Banderillas and the Suerte de Matar repeated six times, since six bulls are killed. Anyone who sees 100 bullfights will see these Acts repeated 600 times.

The overwhelming complexity and richness of the plots of literary tragedy goes with the overwhelming complexity and richness of character - the hesitations, doubts, deviousness, goodness, moral badness, the whole inner life and all the actions of the protagonist and the other characters. Although bulls are varied, 'cowardly' or 'brave,' (with not a fraction of the interesting complexities which can modify cowardice or courage in a work of literary tragedy), predictable or unpredictable, with a degree of individuality, Oedipus, Hamelt and King Lear are infinitely more varied, more richly varied, and the tragedies in which they appear are infinitely more varied, more richly varied, than any bullfights. Again, the bullfight is primitive by comparison with a work of achieved literary tragedy. Bullfighting apologists make a great deal of the 'knowledge of bulls' possessed by the bullfighters and the better-informed elements of the audience. But again, this knowledge is surely pitifully limited in comparison with the knowledge and the insight needed to appreciate adequately the masterpieces of literary tragedy.

In the bullfight, the fate of the protagonist, the bull, is rigid and predictable - the bull always dies, except for those rare occasions when pardoned, and everything in the bullfight leads up to the death of the bull. The death of the tragic protagonist which is central to the bullfight plays a less important role in literary tragedy in some cases.

Aristotle hardly mentions death in tragedy. His examination of tragedy was based upon a much greater number of Greek tragedies than the ones available to us, of course. At the beginning of his discussion, he gives a definition of tragedy, which makes no mention of it: 'Tragedy is an imitation of an admirable action, which has completeness and magnitude, in language which has been made a source of pleasure, each of its species separated in different parts; performed by actors, not through narrative, and giving through pity and fear the purification of these emotions.' This will seem obscure to anyone not familiar with the extended discussion of such terms as katharsis ('purification') and the rest. In section 6.5, which is very brief, Aristotle turns to suffering: 'suffering is an action involving destruction or pain.'

The surviving Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are in accordance with Aristotle's discussion: the death of the protagonist is far from being invariable or if it does occur is not necessarily the distinctive tragic death. A few examples, from each of these tragedians. Aeschylus' 'The Persians' takes place at the court of the Persian king. A messenger arrives to announce the Persian defeat at the hands of the Greeks - this based on historical fact. King Xerxes arrives, a broken man, and the play ends with him a broken man. The first play of Aeschylus' Oresteian trilogy portray the death of Agamemnon, the second the death of his murderer Clytemnestra at the hands of Orestes, but the third play, 'The Eumenides,' portrays the acquittal of Orestes and is without a tragic death. In Sophocles' 'Oedipus the King,' Oedipus survives. When he does die, in 'Oedipus at Colonus,' his death is quiet, not a violent tragic death. Sophocles' 'Philoctetes' has a happy ending. Euripides' 'The Women of Troy' portrays the sufferings of a group of women from a captured city awaiting slavery. The tragedies of the seventeenth century French dramatist Corneille, like 'Philoctetes,' end happily.

The tragedies of Shakespeare do show the death of the protagonist, but although each of these takes place in what is obviously a tragedy, I'd argue that they are not necessarily tragic deaths, deaths with the distinctiveness of tragic deaths. In Hamlet, for instance, the death of Hamlet lacks tragic distinctiveness because it is part of a general blood-letting - Shakespeare to this extent repeating a notorious aspect of Titus Andronicus with vastly greater and more mature artistry. In a short period of time, not only Hamlet dies but Gertrude, Laertes and Claudius. The entire royal family is finished off. The death itself may be strangely muted, at least in comparison with the highly charged and dramatically momentous events which have preceded them, as with the deaths of Othello, Macbeth and King Lear. The death of King Lear resembles the quiet death of Oedipus.

The three 'Acts' which end with the death of a bull, repeated six times in a bullfight, last altogether about a quarter of an hour or a little longer. I write about this time-scale in my page aphorisms:

'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 mean, not limited in extent. Aristotle's view here isn't binding, but it does express an artistic demand which more than 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. The complete bullfighting session is simply made up of these 15 minutes repeated six times, with six victims put to death. This repetition doesn't in the least amount to magnitude, to 'megethos.' The scale of bullfighting doesn't have adequacy. The scale of Greek drama does have adequacy. Shakespearean themes needed a drama with still greater scale for adequacy.

The history of tragedy has been very long and eventful, but we have to reckon too with the death of tragedy, or 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 and 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 Nîmes 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.

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 intense 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.

Nietzsche, 'Thus spake Zarathustra,' Part 3: 'For man is the cruellest animal. At tragedies, bullfights and crucifixions, he has hitherto been happiest on earth...' 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' 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. (Completely relevant too is the fact that whilst the audience is appreciating this 'moving and mysterious' experience, the picador's horse may well be shaking, in agony, after being charged by the bull and hit by the bull with full force.)

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.

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 doesn't allow for the growth of consciousness which would lead to the rejection of bullfighting. Although there can be 'better' matadors and 'worse' matadors, in the opinion of aficionados, 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 Büchner's Woyzeck 'is the first real tragedy of low life.' And, 'Büchner 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 (at the lowest possible level) undermined by their moral depravity. To claim that a practice is 'art' is far from justifying it. If Greek tragedy had developed with the actual death on stage of performers, the emotion of the spectators might have been heightened, but of course at ruinous cost.

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 of Roman origin, it's open for visitors, but the Colosseum has also been used for something which is imaginative, something which marks a complete break with its past, something in which Italians can take great pride. As another page on this site makes clear, I actively oppose 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.

The technique of bullfighting, such as the action of the wrists, is surely not nearly as subtle, intricate and complex as the technique of a developed skill such as violin playing, which makes extraordinary demands on neuro-muscular co-ordination, not just of the fingers and hand but the shoulder, arm, elbow and wrist, requiring intense, arduous and protracted study. Working at just one aspect of technique (and emotional expression) such as the vibrato, requires long and patient study. I play the violin and viola, but not to a high standard (I started to play late and can't justify spending very much time on practice, if any, now.) Both bullfighters and musicians practise, bullfighters, for example, by sticking banderillas into a target on wheels, and by going to a slaughterhouse with a sword and thrusting it into live cattle - illegal but commonplace. (The European Union should take steps to eliminate the practice without delay.) Even amateur musicians are surely practising skills vastly more complex than those of the bullfighters. My own studies with the Hungarian violinist Rudolf Botta have left an indelible impression (such as his teaching of vibrato, and the instructional work of his which I used.)

The appreciation of music generally demands insights and emotions of a vastly greater range, vastly more subtle and complex, than the appreciation of the crowd at a bullfighting. See my page music. The Rough Guide to Spain on aficionados: 'a word that implies more knowledge and appreciation than "fan"' - but, I'm sure, vastly less knowledge and appreciation than a developed art.

Bullfighting and 'duende'

Lorca 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 and Auschwitz and the other 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 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 obsessions and confusions.

This is not, of course, to do justice to Lorca. I'm familiar with only a little of his drama and even less of his poetry, but of course I have no opinions about the drama of his that I haven't seen and the poetry of his that I haven't read. The critic Martin Seymour-Smith gives this short extract from his poetry, with the comment that 'the poetry is lucid with folk-wisdom and directness.' The lines interest me very much.

That night I rode
the best of all roads
on a filly of mother-of-pearl
without bridle or stirrups.

Cultural stagnation

The attention given to the bullfight in Provence, Seville 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 faults, 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 very 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. To their credit, not one member of the Spanish parliament voted against abolition. Before bad practices are ended by legislation, though, they may wither away, regarded as obsolete, as an embarrassment. This will be an essential preliminary to the abolition of bullfighting in the bullfighting countries.

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. 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. This is my poem 'Lorca:'

He went and saw it often, Lorca:

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 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.

Martin Seymour-Smith is a writer I appreciate very much. I quote him in a number of places in this site. Yet he supported the bull-fight (whilst opposing fox-hunting). His biography of Robert Graves has a photograph which shows the two of them attending a bullfight, Robert Graves looking very worried, Martin Seymour-Smith with a look of evident appreciation. He was a man of contradictions, although of course hardly alone in this. Goya was an ardent supporter of the bullfight and drew pictures of bullfighting scenes, but he is one of the painters who mean a great deal to me. As is clear from his unforgettable series of pictures 'The Disasters of War,' and from such masterpieces as 'The Third of May, 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid' and 'Saturn eating his son,' Goya had deep insights into the violence of the world. His failures in regard to bullfighting are, I think, failures in what I refer to as {adjustment}.

I've digressed to make it clear that I see the need to recognize that bullfight supporters are not necessarily to be condemned totally, given no credit for any strengths.Their strengths may be very substantial.

'Stagnation' isn't an adequate word, though, to describe what used to happen in Spain and the practices that continue in Spain.

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 [an elephant on one occasion] 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 was in the vicinity when all this was done, although he doesn't reveal the fact in 'Death in the Afternoon.' There's not the least evidence that he disapproved of the treatment of the bull.

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 for the first time 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 English writer V S Pritchett describes the pleasures of life in Spain in 'The Spanish Temper' and 'Foreign Faces.' In 'Foreign Faces,' he gives a memorable portrait of Seville, the city of Figaro and Don Giovanni. The overwhelming impressions as he enters the city: 'Inside the city white walls are buried in bougainvillea and wistaria and all climbing flowers, geraniums hanging from thousands of white balconies, great lilies in windows,carnations at street corners, and roses climbing up the walls and even the trees so that all the gasps and hyperbole of pleasure are on our lips.' He goes on to describe momentous, thrilling, dramatic aspects of life in Seville. As for the bullfights held there, '...this spectacle has its terrible periods of boredom...There are plenty of people in the crowd coming away from the bull ring complaining of the enormous prices charged, the commercialisation of the show and the decline in its quality.' The 'decline in its quality:' V S Pritchett judged the whole thing purely in terms of human pleasure. He was uncritical, a gifted but limited writer.

Animals: appreciation and abuse

Umberto Saba on the pathos of one animal, the original followed by my translation

La capra

Ho parlato a una capra.
Era sola sul prato, era legata.
Sazia d'erba, bagnata
dalla pioggia, belava.

Quell'uguale belato era fraterno
al mio dolore. Ed io risposi, prima
per celia, poi perché il dolore è eterno,
ha una voce e non varia.
Questa voce sentiva
gemere in una capra solitaria.

In una capra dal viso semita
sentiva querelarsi ogni altro male,
ogni altra vita.

The goat

I talked to a goat.
He was alone in the field, tethered,
full up with grass, soaked
with rain, bleating.

That same bleating was brother
to my sorrow. I answered, first
as a joke, but then because sorrow's for ever,
has a voice and never varies
This voice I sensed
moaning in a solitary goat.

In a goat with a semitic face
I sensed all ills lamenting,
all lives.

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, even if there may be significant exceptions. 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 in bullfighting countries but surely in stark 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 such 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.

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?'

Campaigning techniques

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 Nîmes 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, often quoted, 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?'

A challenge: Stanley Conrad ('El Ratón')

There are detailed arguments on this page, about the supposed artistry of the bullfight, the supposed courage of the bullfighters, and many other things. I set a challenge to bullfighting supporters: give an answer to these arguments, in detail. Provide a detailed discussion which attempts to answer anti-bullfighting arguments one by one.

Let's bring this matter into the open. Bullfighting supporters must now be prepared to defend themselves and their supposed 'art form' publicly. The Web isn't the only place where this public examination can be conducted, but it's the most accessible.

I contacted Stanley Conrad, the American Web master of one very prominent pro-bullfighting site, www.mundo-taurino.org ('Stanley Conrad runs the best site on bullfighting in English' according to 'about.com,' http://spanish.about.com/cs/bullfighting/) He's made critical comments about some anti-bullfighting sites but without the least attempt to defend bullfighting in detail or to answer objections in detail. The time has come for such people to do just that - if they can. Stanley Conrad didn't respond. I contacted him again, and I'm glad to say that he did reply this time, and very promptly. He wrote 'I'll do my best to respond.' He hasn't, and many months have passed now. From now on, I'll refer to him as 'El ratón,' Spanish for 'The Mouse.'

A challenge 2

Bullfighting supporters will generally understand the allusions:

Bullfighting supporter, come out of your querencia! Answer the arguments! Defend yourself! Are you Muy hombre? Not parado - aplomado - already?

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 had already studied the subject of bullfighting in detail, who had found it barbaric and repulsive and who had 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 could only 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. Whilst I was in Provence, I came across a circus with animal acts. There were lions crammed together in a small cage. There are parts of Europe, and other parts of the world, where animal acts are banned or surely will be banned before long, since animal welfare is a matter of widespread concern. Provence isn't one of these areas, although there are certainly highly motivated activists in Provence.

To return to bullfighting, 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. There is some defensiveness in these places, I think, or hope. 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 useful. As a form of economic pressure, they're useless. Nîmes and Arles and other bullfighting towns have a great deal to lose economically if bullfighting supporters stay away. The massive influx of bullfighting supporters into Pamplona brings so much money into the town that attempts to boycott Pamplona are futile. 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.

To adapt Voltaire's words:

LA CORRIDA. ÉCRASEZ L' INFAME!

Human values, human welfare, animal welfare

Any accusation that I care exclusively for animal welfare and not at all for human welfare, or that I care far more about animals than about humans, can easily be refuted by looking at other pages in this site. I give an extract from one page next, together with a few internal links:

'Human rights are a strong interest of mine and have been for a very long time. I was a member of Amnesty International for a very long time. I've helped to raise a considerable amount of money for Amnesty International, including the basic method - standing with a collecting tin in all weathers. I've written a large number of letters about abuses of human rights. I've been the driving force behind motions at the Annual General Meeting, and addressed Annual General Meetings to argue the case for some of these motions, and all of them were passed overwhelmingly - on such varied themes as anti-personnel mines, ways of campaigning more effectively against human rights abuse in China, ways of improving campaigning techniques in general.'

On the death penalty page see in particular 'the risk of executing the damaged.'

See my criticism of Nietzsche's rejection of pity and, on the page on industry, a short discussion of human compassion. The page on smoking: a defence is an unexpected place to find discussion of compassion and other human values.

See the poems about child labour and poems about war and the holocaust.

Bullfighting supporters quite often criticize animal welfare and animal rights supporters (I don't give reasoned arguments here for preferring one form of words or the other) for neglecting human welfare and human rights. More often than not, I would think, the bullfighting supporters haven't been very energetic themselves in furthering human welfare and human rights (they may have been too busy watching and reading about bulls being slowly put to death.) If one person has done little or nothing to reduce human suffering but a great deal to reduce animal suffering, whilst another person has done little or nothing to reduce human suffering or animal suffering, then I think that the moral advantage in this respect, if not necessarily in all respects, lies with the former.

Another common criticism made by bullfighting supporters: you oppose bullfighting but you eat meat! This particular criticism can't be made of me - I've been a vegetarian for over thirty years. I'd wish to defend meat-eating bullfighting opponents, though. The argument used in the previous paragraph is applicable here, in modified form. I doubt if there are many vegetarian bullfighting supporters. I don't have the results of any meticulous surveys but I would think that almost every one eats meat. If one person eats meat and opposes the cruelty of the bullfight and another person eats meat and supports the bullfight, then the moral advantage in this respect lies with the former.

If someone eats meat but takes care to eat meat from animals which have been humanely reared and humanely killed, then at least this is to observe the basic standards of animal husbandry and slaughter. There are abuses and imperfections in slaughterhouses, sometimes substantial, but at least it can be claimed that in a modern, well-regulated system, an honest attempt is made to ensure that slaughter is instantaneous and painless. Slaughter in the bull-ring is in anything but controlled conditions. It's impossible to ensure that the sword is placed so as to ensure instantaneous death. The bullfighter is often terrified of being gored as the sword goes in, so that the 'aim' is far from accurate. For whatever reason, again and again, the sword strikes bone, or is embedded in an animal which is still very much alive. If slaughter in the modern abattoir falls short of the ideal, sometimes very much so, then slaughter in the bull-ring is vastly more objectionable.

Bullfighting apologists in my experience are usually fond of very short, supposedly conclusive but not at all conclusive arguments, such as this objection to meat-eating bullfight opponents. They're not nearly so good at addressing a very wide range of issues in depth, in detail.

Other forms of bullfighting

On this page, I discuss the 'corrida,' the form of bullfighting 'practised' in Spain, the bullfighting countries of Latin America and Southern France. Southern France has other forms of bullfighting as well and Portugal has its own form of bullfight.

A page which gives useful information about the Portuguese bullfight and is well written, although with typographic errors. Quotations below are from this page.

http://www.travelnet.co.il/Portugal/09-bullfight.htm

The page doesn't oppose the Portuguese bullfight, but I certainly do. The Portuguese bullfight is less objectionable than the corrida but is barbaric and activists do well to oppose it.

The Portuguese bullfight is far from being bloodless. As in the corrida, the bull is stabbed with six banderillas and these are heavier than the ones used in the Spanish bullfight. This phase of the bullfight is brutal. The bull isn't killed in the arena, but it is killed later, and it may well wait for slaughter, suffering from its wounds, until the next morning or longer.

Horses in the Portuguese bullfight suffer far, far less than in the corrida.

'The horses themselves, a cross of Arab and English thoroughbred, are animals of great beauty, quite unlike the horses in the Spanish bullfight, who are there primarily to be gored by the bull, and consequently, are beat-up old nags that can barely carry their mounts on a hot afternoon.' [Although horses are often gored in the Spanish bullfight, they aren't there 'primarily to be gored by the bull,' but they are there to be charged by the bull, hit by the bull and lifted by the bull, with all that this implies when the bull moves so fast and weighs not far short of half a tonne.]

Even so, the horses in the Portuguese bullfight are terrorized:

'[a difficulty which] the horseman overcomes is the fear of his horse. Anyone who rides horses will know that courage is not one of the virtues of the animal, which shies even from a pile of rubble at the side of the road. Imagine, then, the control necessary to get this nervous animal to ride toward a charging, half-ton hulk of bull. Naturally, use of the spurs is necessary, and even the best of the horsemen leave unaesthetic patches of blood on the sides of their mounts from repeated spurring.'

Links

This section is very short, for the time being.

The Irish Council against Blood Sports has an outstanding section on bullfighting, as on other abuses. From the opening page, go to Campaigns and then to Ban bullfighting. This page has a video which is is very, very informative, with an excellent commentary. The page also has a useful list of addresses and access to the useful 'Bullfight fallacies.' Other pages have photos, a petition page, a links page. There's also a page giving other videos. The one on bullfighting in France, after the short opening in French, is particularly horrific. There are many people not aware that France is a bullfighting country.

A British organization:

http://www.faace.co.uk

The Spanish organization ADDA campaigns against all the main forms of animal cruelty:

www.addaong.org

The page on bullfighting, in English:

http://www.addaong.org/eng/que_7.html