Introduction
The horses
The bull
The courage of the bullfighters
Bulls, elephants and tigers
Bullfighting as an art form. Bullfighting and tragedy
Bullring ballet
Bullfighting and comedy
Bullfighting and duende
Bullfighting and seduction
Cultural stagnation
Animals: appreciation and abuse
Bullfighting and mono-culture Fadjen, a
fighting bull, and Christophe Thomas
Campaigning techniques
Three Spanish restaurants
La Route de Sang: nouvelle route touristique
Human welfare and animal welfare
Bullfighting and application of ethical theory
Other forms of bullfighting
Freedom of expression
Alexander Fiske-Harrison ('Xander'): 'Into the Arena' Orson Welles
Stanley Conrad
Giles Coren
Daniel Hannan MEPSee also the pages:
A L Kennedy's 'On Bullfighting'
Crap and credulity
Animal welfare: arrest and activism
Veganism: arguments against
Supplementary material is in italics
The bullfight is the 'corrida,' the bullfight of Spain and some other countries, but I discuss very briefly other forms of bullfighting.
I explore 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. This discussion of bullfighting gives new information and puts its cruelties in a wide context.
For example, 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 provide some instructive statistics, which show that the risk of being killed in the bullring is negligible.
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.
The multiple stabbings inflicted on the bull are a matter of common knowledge to opponents of bullfighting. I document and discuss these, of course. An extract from my discussion: 'Alexander Fiske-Harrison saw a bull stabbed three times with the 'killing sword' but still alive, and then stabbed repeatedly with the descabello. According to the 'bullfighting critic' of the newspaper 'El Mundo' who counted the stabbings, the bull was stabbed in the spine seventeen times before it died.' Alexander Fiske-Harrison went on to kill a young bull himself. Like this matador, he stabbed it three times with the 'killing sword.' The bull was still alive, with the sword embedded in its back. It too was stabbed in the spine to kill it. The number of blows isn't recorded. I include an extended review of his book Into the Arena.
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. I quote defenders of bullfighting who have made revealing admissions about the artistic limitations of 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.
Abolition of bullfighting is long overdue. 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 before and in some cases after this time, such as the 'bloody code,' which punished a large number of offences in this country 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.
In countries of modern Europe and the bullfighting countries of Latin America, animals with swords embedded in their backs are made to twist and turn by flapping capes, in the hope that the sword will sever a vital organ and bring about the death of the bull - a procedure which so often fails. Even when the animal is killed by the sword at once, it will previously have been stabbed a minimum of seven times. I believe that bullfighting, which, unlike bull-baiting and bear-baiting, has artistic pretensions, is indefensible in both its Portuguese and Spanish forms and ought to be abolished. But action against bullfighting should be with full awareness of context, the context of preventable suffering, animal suffering, such as the suffering of factory-farmed animals, and human suffering.
I've made every effort to ensure that the information I give concerning bullfighting and the other spheres I discuss is accurate. I'd be grateful if any errors are brought to my attention - and, of course, relevant information not included here, different interpretations of evidence, objections and counter-arguments.
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. A photograph of conditions in an American mine in the early 20th century:
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, horses were used often - in enormous numbers as late as The Second World War. 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.
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.
Acknowledgments: www.arteyfotografia.com.ar
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. The bull is never wounded and killed under controlled conditions. Whatever the intention, the lance of the picador, the banderillas and the sword 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, the lance may sever an artery and blood pulses out. 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.' 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.)
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 barbed banderillas. 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, as with the bull shown above, which has been wounded in the targeted areas - for the bullfighting supporter, this bull has been treated 'correctly.'
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. A report by Tristan Wood in 'La Divisa,' the journal of the 'Club Taurino' of London, on the bullfighter Miguel Abellán: ' ... an excellent faena of serious toreo, only for its impact to be dissipated by four swordthrusts.' The excellence and seriousness found here are surely only an aesthete's response.
In the same set of reports, on the bullfighter Morante de la Puebla: 'the swordwork was very protracted.' Or, alternatively, the bull died a very slow death.
This shocking video http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=FR&hl=fr&v=N9EjWES7aXs shows the bullfighter Antoni Losada stabbing a bull with the 'killing sword' seven times in the bullring at Saint-Gilles, France.
After the 'killing sword' has been used to no effect, a different sword, the descabello, or a short knife, the puntilla, is used to stab the spine, often repeatedly.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison saw a bull stabbed three times with the 'killing sword' but still alive, and then stabbed repeatedly with the descabello. According to the 'bullfighting critic' of the newspaper 'El Mundo' who counted the stabbings, the bull was stabbed in the spine seventeen times before it died. This experience had a lasting effect on his girlfriend, 'her perspective on bullfights changed for ever,' but Alexander Fiske-Harrison went on attending bullfights, went on to kill a bull himself and opposes the abolition of bullfighting.
From my critical review of A L Kennedy's On Bullfighting, quoting from the book. A L Kennedy is watching a bullfight at the most prominent of all bullrings, Las Ventas in Madrid:
' At the kill, the young man's sword hits bone, again and again and again while the silence presses down against him. He tries for the descabello. Five blows later and the animal finally falls.' The descabello, as the Glossary explains, is 'A heavy, straight sword' used to sever the spine.
' 'I have already watched Curro Romero refuse to have almost anything to do with his bull, never mind its horns. (The severely critical response of a member of the audience to a cowardly bull or a cowardly bullfighter.) He has killed his first with a blade placed so poorly that its tip protruded from the bull's flank...As the animal coughed up blood, staring, bemused, ['bemused?'] at each new flux the peones tried a rueda de peones to make the blade move in the bull's body and sever anything, anything at all that might be quickly fatal, but in the end the bull was finally, messily finished after three descabellos.'
'The suffering of the bull 'left, staggering and urinating helplessly, almost too weak to face the muleta' wasn't ended by a painless and instantaneous death: 'Contreras...misses the kill...Contreras tries again, hooking out the first sword with a new one ...Contreras finally gives the descabello.' So, the sword is embedded in the animal, the sword is pulled out and thrust into the animal yet again, but it's still very much alive, the ungrateful creature. The descabello is hard at work in this book. People who have the illusion that the 'moment of truth' amounts to a single sword-thrust and the immediate death of the bull are disabused of the notion here. More often, the moment of truth is hacking at the spine with the descabello.'
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! Not always, though. 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 lance 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. Bullfight 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, can't 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. Even if it were adopted, it would still allow the stab wounds inflicted by the picadors and the stab wounds of the banderillas and the injuries to the horses.
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 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 used to make the bull turn right and quickly left, right and left, right and left, until often it sags to its knees and can barely stand again. Even the bulls which aren't weakened to anything like this extent are still nothing like the animal which entered the ring.
The claim is made 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, that 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 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 bare 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 North Face of the Eiger (Acknowledgments: flickr)
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.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison lets slip in his book 'Into the Arena' the information that between 1992 and the publication of his book in 2002, no bullfighters were killed in the ring in Spain. Paul Richardson, in an article in 'The Observer,' gives the information, which again I can't confirm from other sources, that between the years 1700 and 2010, when his article was published, the number of matadors killed in the bullring is: 52. This is the figure quoted by Mark Rowland in his critical review of 'Into the Arena' in 'The Times Literary Supplement.' In a letter to the TLS, Alexander Fiske-Harrison disputes the figure. He gives 'several hundred' as the number - a very small number in a period of over 300 years. Bullfight statistics and bullfight scholarship require the urgent attention of bullfight apologists. Accurate fatality statistics may not help their cause, but are very likely to help opponents.
The pro-bullfighting Website carrionmundotoreo.com has a page on bullfighting risks written by Michael Cammarata, which includes this: ' ... toreros are not inherently at risk for many health conditions. Their lives may be complicated by injuries, but death by the bull’s horns is rare, they are unbelievably resilient, and healthcare has improved to the point that nearly all consequences or mishaps are manageable.'
'In 1997, the Spanish government issued the first Royal Decree significantly pertaining to "sanitary installations and medico-surgical services in taurine spectacles" (Real Decreto de Oct. 31, 1997).' The regulation outlines the facilities which must be available:
'All infirmaries are expected to have basic amenities,
including sufficient lights, ventilation, generators for back-up energy
supplies, and a communications system. Mobile infirmaries should have a
minimum of two rooms; one for examination and another for surgical
intervention; however, the standards for fixed infirmaries are higher. A
bathroom, recovery room, and sterilization and cleaning room are also
necessary. The regulation continues to outline a list of necessary supplies,
such as central surgical lamps, tables, anesthesia machines, resuscitation
machines with laryngoscopes, intubation tubes, suction, and a cardiac and
defibrillator monitor. The responsibility for such materials lies in the
hands of the chief surgeon of the plaza.
... events with picadors require the following staff: a chief surgeon, an assisting physician with a surgical license, another physician of any type, an anesthesiologist, a nurse, and an auxiliary person. Events without picadors such as novilladas without picadors, sueltas de vacas, and comic taurine events require a chief surgeon, a physician, a nurse, and auxiliary person. Therefore, the difference is in the assistant surgeon and the anesthesiologist. A plaza de toros has ambulances on site for emergency transports from the plaza to the nearest hospital, during which at least a nurse and physician must be on board the vehicle.
Fatalities to bullfighters may be very rare, but fatalities to the horses used in bullrings don't seem to be nearly so rare - but I haven't been able to find any statistics whatsoever. This surprises me not at all. The bullfighting world seems to consider the welfare of horses completely unimportant. When I found bullfightingNews.com, this news piece was on the Home page, headed 'Diego Ventura [a 'rejoneador,' not a picador] triumphs, but loses his horse to goring.' (He 'lost' another horse two years earlier):
'The star horse "Revuelo" was gored in the right hind quarters,
during a performance in Morelia, Mich.
'The goring was deep about 30 centimeters, fracturing the femur. It was
reported in several newsoutlets [sic] that the goring was on the left when
in actuality it was on the right.
'The
veternarian [sic] that was onsite was looking after the horse trying to see
how bad the goring was, with his hand exploring the goring, it was said that
when he took his hand out he brought bone with it.
'The horse was losing too much blood, and even though they
tried to transport him to a clinic, he succumbed to his injuries.
'The horse, called "Revuelo" was 7 years old and a horse
that was used during the placement of the banderillas.
'This is Diego's 2nd loss, his other was in 2009 of the
horse named "Manzanarez".'
Although bullfighters may be severely injured in the bullring, the severity of the injuries in warfare, particularly since the introduction of explosives, is of a different order of seriousness. John Keegan writes well about the subject in 'The Face of Battle.' The injury to the bullfighter Jose Tomas in Mexico was a particularly severe injury, but it was one wound, not the severe multiple wounds common in times of war. Bullfighters who have been gored 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 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.
The courage of bullfighters is completely eclipsed by the courage shown by innumerable ordinary people in time of war, including civilians. 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?' Of the 20 million Russian soldiers who fought in The Second World War against the Nazis, well over 10 million were killed. Over half the population of Warsaw died during The Second World War, 800 000 people in all. The risk to life involved in bullfighting is tiny compared with the risks to civilians as well as combatants in much modern warfare.
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. Compare the number of fatalities for the tiny number of mountaineers attempting to climb just one Himalayan peak, Annapurna 1, which can easily be confirmed (Unlike bullfighting, Himalayan mountaineering has immensely detailed sources of statistics, such as himalayandatabase.com): 58 fatalities between the successful summit attempt in 1950 and 2007, a total of only 153 summit attempts. (And whereas injured bullfighters have speedy access to modern medical care, the case is very different for injured high-altitude mountaineers. The frostbitten fingers and toes of the two climbers who made the first ascent of Annapurna 1 became gangrenous and were amputated on the mountain without anaesthetic.) To climb Annapurna (a deadly mountain, but not the most dangerous peak) or another very high mountain - or many much lower mountains, for that matter - just once involves a far higher risk of death than a bullfighter faces in an entire bullfighting 'career.'
Reinhold Messner describes 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, or rescue may be impossible. 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 Wikipedia entry for the Eiger gives valuable information about the ascents of the infamous North face, shown in the image at the beginning of this section, including solo ascents, the injuries, fatalities, rescues, successful and unsuccessful, stories of courage and endurance which put bullfighting in its place. Since 1935, at least sixty-four climbers have been killed whilst climbing it - compared with the 52 bullfighters who have been killed in the ring in a period of over 300 years since 1700. Taking into account the number of climbers making the attempt, tiny compared with the number of bullfighters fighting in that period, climbing on the North face is far more dangerous.
The Wikipedia information on one summit attempt, made only a few years after Lorca made his fatuous remark about bullfighting being 'the last serious thing in the world.' This attempt on the Eiger, like all the others before and since, was a serious matter by any reckoning. It also underlines the closeness of safety in the bullring, the availability of prompt medical care in the bullring, the lack of these in the mountains, and the fact that it's not only bullfighters who face injury.
'The next year [1936] ten young climbers from Austria and Germany came to Grindelwald and camped at the foot of the mountain. Before their attempts started, one of them was killed during a training climb, and the weather was so bad during that summer that after waiting for a change and seeing none on the way, several members of the party gave up. Of the four that remained, two were Bavarians, Andreas Hinterstoisser and Toni Kurz, the youngest of the party, and two were Austrians, Willy Angerer and Edi Rainer. When the weather improved they made a preliminary exploration of the lowest part of the face. Hinterstoisser fell 37 metres (121 ft) but was not injured. A few days later the four men finally began the ascent of the face. They climbed quickly, but on the next day, after their first bivouac, the weather changed; clouds came down and hid the group to the observers. They did not resume the climb until the following day, when, during a break, the party was seen descending, but the climbers could only be watched intermittently from the ground. The group had no choice but to retreat since Angerer suffered some serious injuries as a result of falling rock. The party became stuck on the face when they could not recross the difficult Hinterstoisser Traverse where they had taken the rope they first used to climb. The weather then deteriorated for two days. They were ultimately swept away by an avalanche, which only Kurz survived, hanging on a rope. Three guides started on an extremely perilous rescue. They failed to reach him but came within shouting distance and learned what had happened. Kurz explained the fate of his companions: one had fallen down the face, another was frozen above him, the third had fractured his skull in falling, and was hanging dead on the rope.'
In the morning the three guides came back, traversing across the face from a hole near the Eigerwand station and risking their lives under incessant avalanches. Toni Kurz was still alive but almost helpless, with one hand and one arm completely frostbitten. Kurz hauled himself off the cliff after cutting loose the rope that bound him to his dead teammate below and climbed back on the face. The guides were not able to pass an unclimbable overhang that separated them from Kurz. They managed to give him a rope long enough to reach them by tying two ropes together. While descending, Kurz could not get the knot to pass through his carabiner. He tried for hours to reach his rescuers who were only a few metres below him. Then he began to lose consciousness. One of the guides, climbing on another's shoulders, was able to touch the tip of Kurz's crampons with his ice-axe but could not reach higher. Kurz was unable to descend farther and, completely exhausted, died slowly.
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 mountaineers 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.
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, and so for other people who take part in risky activities. During the Winter Olympics at Vancouver, 2010, one of the competitors in the luge event, one of the men and women who hurtle down the ice at terrifying speeds, was killed. The competitors showed restraint and dignity and hurtled down the ice in their turn, without histrionics. 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 vast majority of bullfighters, he didn't die in the attempt.) The book - one I haven't, to be fair, read from cover to cover, only in large extracts - is astonishing. I think particularly of the effusive bullring chaplain holding up a religious medal when it seemed that El Cordobes' histrionic heroics were becoming particularly risky.
The English bullfighter Frank Evans has written about the women who are attracted to him because of the supposedly glamorous danger he faces.
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.'
John McCormick gives the same argument in the morass of ignorance and falsification that makes up a significant part of 'Bullfighting: art, technique and Spanish society.' He writes of the bullfighter, 'Just as the suit of lights marks him off in the plaza from the run of men, so in his own mind he is marked off always ... The closest thing to it I knew was fear of combat, but that was different too, because there was always the comforting sense of having been coerced.
The difference in toreo lies in the element of choice. Only the toreo chooses freely to risk wounds or death.'
Not true of the volunteers from this country and others who went to fight in the Spanish civil war, such as George Orwell, who was shot in the throat. The merchant seamen who served on the ships bringing supplies to this country during the Second World War were all volunteers. Many of the particularly dangerous missions undertaken in the Second World War were undertaken by volunteers. All those members of the armed forces from Northern Ireland who fought against the Nazis were volunteers - there was no conscription in the province during the war - and obviously all those from the Irish Republic who joined the British armed forces to fight against Nazism, around 38 000 in number. The soldiers of this country who fought in The First World War in 1914 and 1915 were volunteers. Conscription wasn't introduced until 1915. This is an incomplete list, which could be vastly extended, of evidence from before the publication of the book in 1967. Events since would provide further contrary evidence. For example, the soldiers from this country and others who fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The men and women who work in bomb disposal, amongst other things making it safe for villagers to return to their villages, are all volunteers. And evidence from other activities before and after he wrote, for example, the mountaineers who risk death in the mountains, practitioners of high risk sports in general, are obviously all volunteers. Again, obviously an incomplete list.
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 philosophy, 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...'
Another critical issue plaguing the present day corrida is cited in the routine and otherwise uncritical book 'Bullfight' by Garry Marvin, a social anthropologist, which includes information about one practice which I can't confirm from other sources. If true, it reflects the tawdry dishonesty and corruption of the relationship between bullfighters and journalists in Spain. He writes,
'In whatever novillada or corrida he is performing, it is important for the matador to have preparado la prensa (literally, 'prepared the press', meaning to have paid a certain amount of money to the reporters and photographers who will cover the event), because the reports of a performance can have a considerable influence on the chances of further contracts. If not sufficiently 'prepared', the press can damn a good performance with faint praise or can concentrate on the odd bad moments rather than on the overall performance. If well 'prepared' they can do exactly the reverse and can find good things to say even though the matador might have been booed from the plaza.' The same novillero who had the problem with the festival performed extremely well on two afternoons in a series of novilladas in a town near Valencia. He paid as much as he could to the local newspaper critic, who was also a correspondent for a national magazine dedicated to the corrida. The amount paid was obviously not enough, and he received a few cursory lines in the report. Other novilleros who had not done as well but who had obviously given more money received much more coverage, including several flattering photographs.'
The book is described by the publisher as one which 'explains how and why men risk their lives to perform with and kill wild bulls as part of a public celebration ...' The usual ignorant or shameless overestimation of the dangers to life which I discuss on this page.
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 obnoxious 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 people 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: 15 fatalities in the last 100 years. Given the large numbers of people who take part, this isn't very many. They include someone suffocated by a pile-up of people and someone who incited a bull to charge him by brandishing his coat.
In the bullfighting: Madrid, 1865
Hemingway, 'Death in the Afternoon:' '...Huron, a bull of the ranch of Don Antonio Lopez Plata ... fought a Bengal tiger on the 24th of July 1904 in the Plaza of San Sebastian. They fought in a steel cage and the bull whipped the tiger, but in one of his charges broke the cage apart and the two animals came out into the ring in the midst of the spectators. The police, attempting to finish the dying tiger and the very live bull, fired several volleys which 'caused grave wounds to many spectators.' From the history of these various encounters between bulls and other animals I should say they were spectacles to stay away from, or at least to view from one of the higher boxes.' The 'other animals' which took part in these 'encounters' included elephants, as in the illustration above.
Hemingway's reservations 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. What would a detailed account of the injuries to the bull and the elephant have revealed, when the 'encounter' was at a later stage than the one shown above? It should be apparent to anyone with any moral sense that the Nobel Prize Committee gave its prize to a sadist.
As well as the formal, ordered bullfight, with its three 'acts,' the bull has been pitted against other animals. Why is it that they are unthinkable today? There has been a transformation in human attitudes to animals, so powerful that it has even influenced many, but not all, bullfight apologists. Now, there are more bullfight apologists who would go so far as to condemn the cruelty of a bull fighting other animals but who continue to defend the practices of the bullfight, using supposed arguments which rely heavily upon words like 'art,' 'tragedy,' 'honour,' 'courage.' The fight between an elephant and a bull which seems to have aroused no opposition in the Madrid bullfighting supporters of 1865 would probably be opposed by the majority of bullfighting supporters now. They will find that the transformation of attitudes which has condemned such events as these has condemned the formal, ordered bullfight as well, and has condemned them.
One common justification for the treatment of the bull in the bullring appeals to the longer, privileged life of the bull up until that point. An entrepreneur in Spain could appeal to the same argument in an attempt to reintroduce the combat of elephant against bull. Elephants due to be culled owing to the fact that there's insufficient food for them to be imported into Spain, given five more years of life, in a separate section of bull-rearing ranches, and then made to fight in the arena, speared to make them weaker, any animal which survives for a quarter of an hour to be humanely killed. An arrangement which might appeal to many bullighting supporters fails because it's no longer within the bounds of possibility. The reputation of Spain, the reputation of Europe, is one consideration among many.
It's becoming ever more clear, if not in every part of Europe and the wider world, that bullfighting dimishes the reputation of every country which allows it and that whatever arguments are brought forward against abolition, its cruelty demands abolition.
More evidence that Hemingway could be 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.
The top picture here shows the Roman arena at Nîmes in France, then part of the Roman Empire. (Acknowledgements: mikeandanna's photostream.) The lower picture shows the ancient Greek theatre at Epidauros. (Acknowledgements: cdine's photostream.) These two places represent vastly different aspects of civilization, at vastly different levels of achievement: one the shameful and diseased dead end, the other the growing point.
A sign in English in the arena at Nîmes gives information about events there in Roman times: “All day long, to the roars of the crowd and the sound of trumpets, the arena staged one show after the other: animal fights, hunts, executions and, topping the bill, gladiatorial contests.” French arenas dating from Roman times, such as the one at Nîmes, are used for an activity which is in a clear line of descent from the past: for the spectacle of killing.
The Roman arenas were used for diverse spectacles, all of them brutal and bloody, of course. Gladiators fought each other, very often to the death, gladiators fought and killed wild animals - lions, tigers, bears, bulls, elephants and others - and there were executions, which were sometimes conducted with a degree of depraved 'artistry.' The more thoughtful and artistic spectators could admire the imaginative reconstruction. Katherine E. Welch, 'The Roman amphitheatre from its origins to the Colosseum:'
' ... condemned criminals dressed up as characters from Greek mythology ... were forced to perform and, at the performance's climax, were put to death ... The difference between these mythological executions in the amphitheatre and Greek dramas in the theatre were commented upon by Martial as an improvement.'
Bullfighting is very different from the gladiatorial combats against wild animals (the 'venationes') but is clearly descended from them. Instead of a variety of wild animals, the bull is the only animal to be put to death. The death of the gladiator who fought the wild animals in the amphitheatre was very common, the death of the bullfighter in the bullring very uncommon. The more sensitive members of the Roman audience might justify the barbarity they were witnessing with the thought that they were also witnessing displays of skill and courage. More sensitive members of the bullfighting audience at Nîmes and Arles may justify the barbarity they are witnessing with the thought that they too are witnessing displays of skill and courage - and 'artistry.' I examine the 'artistry' of the bullfight here.
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 in such a way that there was the actual death on stage of performers, the emotion of the spectators might have been heightened, but of course at ruinous cost. The Greeks never took this step. In classical Greek drama, when a killing took place it was shown behind the 'skene,' as it was thought inappropriate to show a killing on stage, giving us our word 'scene.'
Italians decisively abandoned this, the worst part of the Roman heritage, but not for a long time after the Colosseum became a ruin. 'In 1332 Ludwig of Bavaria visited Rome and the authorities staged a bullfight at the Colosseum in his honour. It was the first time in more than eight hundred years that such an event had been witnessed, so naturally the public turned out to watch in great numbers, though no one, not even the organisers, seems to have reaolized that this had been one of the Colosseum's original functions.' Peter Connolly, 'Colosseum: Rome's Arena of Death.'
What have the Italians done with the Colosseum? The Colosseum has 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. The Roman amphitheatre at Verona is often used for staging opera and other musical performances.
The Romans devised brutal spectacles with bullfighting as the only modern descendant. Greek theatre was incomparably richer, incomparably more important, its descendants incomparably richer and more important: no less than the creation of tragic drama and comic drama, and works, by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, of remarkable artistry. The range of the surviving works is astonishing, expressing pathos, harshness, human savagery and cruelty, sympathy for the victims of human savagery and cruelty, grandeur, beauty, wonderment, tenderness, gentleness, chance, unexpectedness, parody, crude humour and sophisticated humour, eroticism, fun and mature vision, excess and restraint, and so much more, of course, and so much more than the cramped and primitive world of bullfighting.
The full range of civilization's achievements should be defended, promoted and of course extended - not just civilization's abolition of past cruelties and efforts to abolish present cruelties but so much else as well, including a vast treasure of subtle insights and nuances. I believe that it will always be to the credit of this country that it continued the fight to end Nazism - and also that it decided not to neglect every aspect of civilization which didn't contribute to the country's physical survival. In desperate circumstances, at the low point of 1940, for instance, cultural and scholarly publication continued. Amongst the works published in that year was the ninth edition of the monumental Greek lexicon of Liddell and Scott, the current edition, which enhanced the study of Homer, Thucydides, Aristotle and the Greek dramatists (my own particular interests) and the rest of ancient Greek achievement in words.
If the legacy of the Roman amphitheatre is bullfighting, the legacy of Greek theatre includes, of course, the tragedies and comedies of Shakespeare and other dramatists, and non-dramatic comedy for that matter. If the literary artistry of Greek theatre is its main claim upon our attention and most deserves our admiration, there were other aspects of Greek theatre which came to have enormous influence too. Greek theatre was a spectacle as well as a form of literature, combining words with music and dance. The ancient Greeks never attempted opera - its invention was an Italian achievement - but by their use of music they paved the way for opera.
What aspects of human life and experience does bullfighting leave out? Almost all. 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. Schiller referred to the stage as 'Die Bretter, die die Welt bedeuten.' 'The boards that signify the world.'
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.
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 resemble the much older world of the Iliad, the Homeric character dying in the dust. When Homer recounts a violent death, he makes frequent mention of dust. One of many examples is Iliad 13: 548.
In her fine introduction to Anthony Verity's fine translation of 'The Iliad,' the classical scholar Barbara Graziosi writes, 'Vivid, painful, and direct, the Iliad is one of the most influential poems of all time ... This poem confronts, with unflinching clarity, many issues that we had rather forget altogether: the failures of leadership, the destructive power of beauty, the brutalizing impact of war, and - above all - our ultimate fate of death.' Its many readers 'have turned to it in order to understand something about their own life, death, and humanity.'
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 a simplified understanding of tragedy, focussing attention on the solitary death of the tragic 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 illuminating introduction by the translator, Malcolm Heath, which will be instructive 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 translations from the 'Poetics.'
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, that they know the meaning of potent special words, one 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 here.
The primitive plot of the bullfight 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 Suerte 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,' predictable or unpredictable, with a degree of individuality, Oedipus, Hamlet 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 in the 'Poetics.' 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. The account, including its important terms, require extended analysis. Below, I give particular attention to 'magnitude,' μέγεθος. (Bekker 1449b.20):
'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.'
ἔστιν οὖν
τραγῳδία μίμησις πράξεως σπουδαίας καὶ
τελείας μέγεθος ἐχούσης, ἡδυσμένῳ λόγῳ χωρὶςἑκάστῳ
τῶν εἰδῶν ἐν τοῖς μορίοις, δρώντων καὶ οὐ δι᾽ ἀπαγγελίας,
δι᾽ ἐλέου καὶ φόβουπεραίνουσα τὴν τῶν τοιούτων
παθημάτων κάθαρσιν.
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. (See my examination of Seamus Heaney's version of the play.) 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 has a linkage with 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 μέγεθος, 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 often 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, in liberal countries, the public beheading 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.
Intense emotion 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.
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.) Both bullfighters and musicians practise, bullfighters, for example, by sticking banderillas into a target on wheels or practising killing with a 'killing carriage' but even amateur musicians are surely practising skills which are vastly more complex than those of the bullfighters. My own studies with the Hungarian violinist Rudolf Botta have left an indelible impression.
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, far less knowledge and appreciation than that needed for a developed art. In my page on Poetry and Music, I give extracts from the writing of Basil Lam as evidence.
To many aficionados, the title of this page and all the references to 'bullfighting' here will seem hopelessly crude. According to this perspective, the corrida is far from being anything so coarse as a 'fight' and the blood and stabbings are incidental, not the essence of the corrida: the corrida requires an appreciation of nimbleness, agility, dexterity, poise, grace, delicacy as well as strength and above all beauty. Some aficionados regard the corrida as having linkages with accomplished ballroom dancing - bullring dancing - more often linkages with ballet - bullring ballet. Daniel Hannan writes, ' 'The Spaniard is watching, not a contest, but a ritualised dance: a relationship so tender and tragic that it might almost be called love.'
I'm completely familiar with this viewpoint. Anyone with any knowledge of the writing of aficionados will be aware of it. But I believe that it's a misleading viewpoint and can't possibly justify the corrida. Treating the violence of the corrida, its spilling of blood as incidental, amounts to active distortion and falsification.
The focus of attention here is on bullfighters on foot, not mounted bullfighters, 'rejoneadores.' In their case, it's the highly-trained horse which makes the agile and graceful movements. Clicking on this link shows the end result. The hideous photograph shows, in the words of the caption, 'Spanish 'rejoneador' or mounted bullfighter Pablo Hermoso de Mendoza celebrates his kill during his bullfight at the Santamaria bullring in Bogota, Colombia ...'
http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/8049423-spanish-rejoneador
The agility and nimbleness of the banderilleros are striking, but unlike ballet-dancers, their choreography is subject to powerful moral objections. Their nimble steps take them up to the bull and allow them to evade the bull, but the act of stabbing the bull with the six banderillas is no incidental matter. Hemingway acknowledges the suffering caused by these stabbings, but writes of the bull, 'I keep my admiration for him always, but felt no more sympathy for him than for a canvas or the marble a sculptor cuts or the dry powder snow your skis cut through.' This is aestheticism without ethics, an evasion, the failure to take into account the crucial and obvious difference between canvas, marble, snow on the one hand and the bull on the other: the bull is a sentient being, with the capacity for pain. Alexander Fiske-Harrison acknowledges the pain caused by the banderillas too, but only in his internet writing, not in his book.
No aficionado makes any claim for artistry in the work of the picador who spears the bull in the first 'Act' of the bullfight, but the injury to the bull, the sentient being, is far from incidental in this case too.
The 'matador,' like the banderillero, does attempt a kind of ballet and of a more ambitious kind. The choreography in both kinds is necessarily improvisational and the circumstances make completely unattainable any developed artistry fit to be compared with ballet. The word 'matador' means 'killer.' Aficionados may prefer to think of the bullring as the stage where the ballet is being performed but the bullring is after all a slaughterhouse. If nimbleness, agility, dexterity, poise, grace, delicacy as well as strength and above all beauty are the essence of the bullfight, then aficionados would find all these qualities in bloodless displays featuring performer and bull. Blood, violence and injury are intrinsic aspects of the corrida, central and not peripheral.
The corrida's linkages with the Roman venationes are obvious. The Romans watched these fights between men (sometimes women) and wild animals in their arenas. If, in Roman times, these fights against wild animals, like the gladiatorial combats in which men and sometimes women were killed, had developed to stress 'artistry,' and Romans had appreciated the choreography of the wild animal killers and the choreography of the gladiators, then the ethical objections to the wounding and killing would be left undiminished.
An aficionado could be described, not just as a person who appreciates the corrida in a 'knowledgeable' way, but as a person who, amongst other things, discounts and evades these intrinsic aspects of the corrida. When aficionados decry, from their superior knowledge, the use of the term 'bullfighting,' they are surely evading a central aspect. Hemingway refers to 'bullfighting' and 'bullfighters' throughout 'Death in the Afternoon,' but some aficionados would be unwilling to grant that Hemingway was an aficionado at all. The back cover of Alexander Fiske-Harrison's 'Into the Arena' mentions 'bullfighting,' 'the bullfight' and 'fighting bulls.' The 'true essence' of the bullfight is described as 'man against bull in a life or death struggle from which only one can emerge alive.' (But this is misleading. The bull is overwhelmingly likely to emerge dead, the bullfighter overwhelmingly likely to emerge alive, despite any impression of comparable risks.) As in the case of Hemingway, Alexander Fiske-Harrison uses throughout his book the terms 'bullfight,' 'bullfighting' and 'bullfighter,' in a way which may well offend refined aficionados who prefer not to associate their art with violence or even with what Daniel Hannan describes as 'contest.'
The account in which Daniel Hannan claims that 'The Spaniard is watching, not a contest, but a ritualised dance: a relationship so tender and tragic that it might almost be called love' also contains this, 'The bull took two pics, the second of which went in repeatedly and way off to one side. After the banderillas, as the bull stood spurting fountains of blood ... ' there was 'a miserable excuse for a sword-thrust into the bull’s flank.'
Any claim by aficionados that the anti-bullfighting activist is bound to have an 'external,' view of bullfighting, or, as they would prefer, the 'corrida,' that the activist can't possibly understand the world of the aficionado or the matador, is very much mistaken. We're not in the least fated to understand only those things we support and appreciate or to fail to understand those things we oppose. Readers have access to many, many worlds at great {distance} from what happens to be their own world, worlds provided by the great novelists and writers of non-fiction and worlds it's possible to understand by our own insights: the worlds of Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Raskolnikov, Malone, of fictional and non-fictional politicians, shopkeepers, financiers, labourers, criminals, detectives and of course so many more worlds - including the worlds of aficionados and matadors.
The aficionado who feels superior to bullfighting supporters who are non-aficionados and very much more superior to opponents of bullfighting relies amongst other things on superior knowledge of the correct terms - 'the corrida,' instead of 'bullfighting,' for example, and may well feel that correcting the misconceptions of others amounts to a confirmation of the importance and legitimacy of the activity - not so. The aficionado has a knowledge of these terms, and many more (the quotation is from 'Into the Arena,' Chapter 17):
'Using the language of the first matador, Pedro Romero, you need parar, templar and mandar. Parar means 'to stop' or 'to stake' - as in poker - and refers to the matador standing his ground. Templar means 'to temper' or 'to tune', adjusting the cape to the bull's charge and / or adjusting the bull's charge with the cape. Mandar means 'to send', with the sense of command, and refers to sending the bull safely away from the body to the place of your choosing.' There follows a discussion of a further term, cargar la suerte, which he translates as 'to load the dice'. (The Club Taurino of London proudly displays these terms on the Home Page of its Website.)
John Gordon's account 'Morante de la Puebla:my Morantismo, his Tauromaquia' (published by the Club Taurino of London in 'La Divisa') is a fairly representative account of intricate and technical aficionado writing, more so than anything in Alexander Fiske-Harrison's book, or Hemingway's, for that matter. An instructive quotation: ' ... not only are his molinetes quite belmontinos, but his kikirikís are reminiscent of Gallito and his naturales de frente are his particular tribute to the post-war toreo of Manolo Vázquez.' He has an aesthete's as well as a technician's viewpoint, assessing the 'technical and aesthetic' performance of the matador Morante, commenting amongst other things on the common passes and the less common passes, including the 'media chicuendina. ' He discusses named individual passes and the linkage ('ligazón') of passes [not an aspect of linkage which appeals to me at all], and the various actions, such as swivelling, pivoting, leaning, the shifting of weight.
Tristan Wood, also writing in 'La Divisa, in a very matter of fact way about another bullfighter:' ' 'At Barcarrota, he [José Luis Moreno] gave his opening Sepúlveda toro some decent verónicas [passes with the cape, the caape held up in front with both hands] before watching it savage the picador’s horse in a huge derribo, [knocking over] the bull rolling the caballo [horse] as it lay on the ground and inflicting a cornada [horn wound] in its right flank.' Tristan Wood is the author of 'How to watch a bullfight.'
As soon as it's realized that watching gladiators fight to the death in the Roman arena would no more be legitimated by technical terms and 'knowledge' than bullfighting (or the 'corrida') then the aficionado's pride and status are suddenly shown to be without any foundation. If the Romans had developed the 'aesthetic' aspect of gladiator-fighting and had developed 'artistic' moves, instead of stressing brute force, skill and courage, then the {separation} of the aeesthetic and the ethical would be clear (I don't of course deny that there are linkages.)
John Gordon notes that 'Morante is very poor with the sword in his hand, and this is surely the most mediocre side of his toreo. It is only necessary to watch the way he lines up for the kill, his right arm seemingly contorted and in the wrong place. What is worse, he goes “out” away from the bull before he has even reached the jurisdiction of the morrillo. [morillo: the large muscle mass in the region of the bull's neck.] Ultimately, there is a lack of conviction when he goes in for the swordthrust, and, when one does not enter believing that the sword will go in, more often than not, the result will be a pinchazo.' A pinchazo is the term for the sword hitting bone. There may be repeated pinchazos and when at last the sword sinks into the bull without hitting bone, the bull may not be killed. John Gordon writes purely as an aesthete, completely indifferent, it seems, to the fact that the bulls Morante attempts to kill so badly will be suffering intensely. He refers to 'the delicate grace that underlines his aesthetic personality.' John Gordon's account, like the account of other aficionados, is subject to extreme {restriction}. It takes no note of the moral dimension. In the same way, the gourmet-aesthete finds some foie-gras 'mediocre,' some, allegedly, 'heavenly,' and can supply some plausible taste-terms, without giving any thought to the moral dimension.
It's often argued that aficionados deplore some common events in the bullring - bulls left weak or almost helpless when they have been lanced by the picador too vigorously, bulls which take a long time to die when the killing sword is used. Their objections have nothing to do with humanitarian ethics at all. They are simply thinking of their own enjoyment, with the limited perspective of the aesthete rather than a moral being. It would be possible to eliminate tampering with the bull before it enters the ring but once it's in the ring, it's impossible to eliminate these absolutely common events, since the picadors, banderilleros and matadors are never able to stab the bull in the 'correct' places, in the conditions of the bullfight, and even if they were, moral objections would remain.
Aficionados' knowledge of the bullfight and its technical terms, the much lesser knowledge of almost all opponents of bullfighting, prove nothing about the moral status of the bullfight. If an opponent, unlike the aficionado, is unaware that the sword thrust is intended to pierce the aorta of the bull not its heart and is unaware that the sword thrust is called an 'estocada,' unless it hits bone, in which case the term is 'pinchazo,' then the act of killing is in no way legitimated by the superior knowledge of the aficionado. In the same way, the traditonal Roman Catholic doctrine of hell isn't legitimated by the superior knowledge of the Roman Catholic theologian and the misconceptions of the atheist, who may be unaware of the distinction, for example, between mortal and venial sins.
The technical terms of bullfighting aren't to be equated with the technical terms of ballet. They're the technical terms for one or another instances of gross cruelty or its accompaniments. The aficionado knows that a mounted bullfighter is called a 'rejoneador' and that the rejoneador uses 'rejones de castigo' ('lances of punishment') before using the banderillas and eventually the 'rejón de muerte' ('lance of death), the 'descabello' being used on the spine after that in many cases. Opponents of bullfighting who know only that the bull is stabbed repeatedly before being killed have enough knowledge to come to an informed view of the morality of the acts - something which the superior knowledge of the aficionado doesn't guarantee in the least.
Bullfighting has linkages with ballet, but ballet is an incomparably more developed art than bullfighting. Aficionados like John Gordon can point to a repertoire of movements in bullfighting, ones which they see performed very well or not nearly so well, but the actions of ballet are incomparably more intricate, skilful and varied. The predominant motion of the bullfight, on which other movements are superimposed, is monotonously elliptical to a considerable extent. The bull is forced to move around the bullfighter in approximate more or less elongated ellipses, more often ragged than smooth, again and again. The actions of ballet are anything but monotonous. (But bullfighting isn't objectionable primarily on aesthetic grounds such as these.)
Aficionados who now feel an urgent need to supplement their 'knowledge' with an understanding of ethical dilemmas and ethical debate in general, have at least and at last begun to appreciate the enormity of their task, but are surely untypical. 'Afición' is generally knowledge of one sphere and shocking ignorance of other spheres of direct relevance to the continued existence of the activity they support.
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. 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. 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.
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.
'From the Website of the French anti-bullfighting organization 'Alliance anti-corrida,' 'Bullfights use the very perverse effects of seduction: colours, costumes full of light, brass bands, sunshine. Everything is set up in order to mask the bloody reality. To this list could be added the haughty or grimly determined look of the bullfighter in his (or sometimes her) colourful costume. Although these are completely familiar, I include an image. It evidently shows a bullfighter superimposed on a separate image of a bullring background but the image of the bullfighter is important here, not the background.
The morality of the bullfight can never be confirmed by any of its outward trappings. The costumes of the matadors, the procession before the bullfight, the language ('the moment of truth'), the music, to some people (but the brass bands may well be found completely unseductive) convert some people to the substitute religion or supplementary religion of the bullfight, they make the bullfight acceptable to many, many people, or far more than 'acceptable,' but that is all they are - trappings, appearances.
If horses and bulls were treated in the bullring in exactly the same way as now but the bullfighters were people in nondescript clothes who made no attempt to pose, if 'the moment of truth' were to be described as 'the attempt at killing,' then the immorality of bullfighting would be even more widely recognized.
Bullfighters and bullfighting supporters aren't 'Nazis' - this is a word that has to be used very carefully - but there are linkages in the use of seduction and propaganda and in their mythologizing. Nazi Germany understood very well how to seduce the senses and mask the reality of its brutal and degraded regime: torchlit processions, the vast displays of might at Nuremberg. Leni Riefenstahl's film 'Triumph of the Will' shows the Nuremberg uses Wagner's 'Götterdämmerung, the beating of drums, the singing of the Horst Wessel-Lied, the shadow of Hitler's plane, the consecration of Nazi Party flags, a giant swastika, silhouetted men, vast numbers of men. Ethical depth so often requires looking beyond the seductive appearance and if most Germans at the time never did so, some Germans were never fooled, and often paid with their lives.
The Roman Catholic Church has brought many into its fold and kept many within it despite any doubts by its very often masterful use of visual spectacle, the visual appeal of priestly vestments, by the musical and architectural riches which are part of its heritage, by the evocative language of the Mass. But again, it's necessary to look beyond any seductive appearances. Roman Catholic theology - including the ban on artificial methods of contraception and abortion in all circumstances, the concept of mortal sin, until not so very long ago the belief that unbaptized babies could never enter heaven, the belief in hell, and the rest - cannot possibly be confirmed by any of these outward trappings.
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 be ended.
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.
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 unnecessary 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.
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 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, is a very poor compromise), the only country which voted against was - Spain.
The 'culture' in 'monoculture' refers to the growing of crops, of course: monoculture is cultivation of one crop to the exclusion of all others, or the overwhelming dominance of a single crop. Monoculture has severe disadvantages. It may entail the loss of genetic diversity, aesthetic loss, loss of interest, the monotony of uniformity, and practical loss, such as the loss of plants which feed beneficial insects and other creatures.
The term 'monoculture' is sometimes used without reference to agriculture. In this case, the reference is almost always to dominance, not to the complete exclusion of alternatives. I use the hyphenated term 'mono-culture' where the 'culture' refers not to cultivation of crops but to aspects of artistry, major or minor, and, to an extent, the wider world of 'ideas, beliefs, values, and knowledge' (Collins English Dictionary).
It seems to me that in the areas of Spain where bullfighting is actively pursued, there's a mono-culture of bullfighting which is unhealthy. Bullfighting doesn't exclude all other forms of 'culture,' obviously, in these areas, but it does have dominance. In Andalucia, for example, cante jondo flourishes, to an extent, but is less prominent than bullfighting and has linkages with it.
The mono-culture of bullfighting is uninteresting as well as unhealthy. Nature writing in English is one of the glories of English literature - the nature writing of American writers such as Thoreau as well as such English writers as Gilbert White, in 'The Natural History of Selborne,' Richard Mabey and of course so many others, and in other countries as well as these, including a host of superb lesser-known writers. I'd include in this number Jennifer Owen, who wrote 'Garden Life.' She writes of swifts, 'In July, swifts wheel and scream in the sky above the garden. Their elegant, black silhouettes, tracing ever-changing patterns against the clear blue of early morning or the opalescent glow if evening, lift the spirits of the most earthbound gardener.'
Many of these writers have revealed the glory of humble creatures, such as moths. They are prominent in 'Garden Life.' Thoreau writes in the closing section of 'Walden' that 'Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years ...'
Spain's natural history is incomparably richer than England's, but the English have made incomparably more of their heritage of natural history than the Spanish, I'd claim. The mono-culture of bulls has surely impoverished Spanish nature writing. Apart from its cruelty, the mono-culture of bullfighting in large areas has impoverished Spanish culture.
If it's conceded that nature writing and appreciation of nature are strengths of English culture but argued that English culture, unlike Spanish culture, largely ignores death, and that this is an obvious weakness of English culture, then I'd argue in turn that this is a gross distortion. I discuss it in the sections Bullfighting and 'duende' and Cultural stagnation. The Spanish preoccupation with death can easily be paralleled in earlier English culture. English parish churches - important to many an intransigent atheist, including myself - are full of reminders of 'memento mori.' English culture has far more of classical balance now: remembrance and grieving rather than preoccupation with death, the public and private remembrance of our war dead, including those who died fighting against fascism, and the countless acts of private remembrance and grieving obviously observed in every country, not only in Spain.
The biography section of a very comprehensive library or a very comprehensive bookshop contains biographies and autobiographies of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, explorers, travellers, poets, novelists, essayists, politicians, generals, soldiers, sailors, airmen, painters, architects, financiers, administrators, nationalists, anarchists, communists, conservatives, comedians, gardeners, ordinary people with ordinary or extraordinary lives - but obviously, the number of categories is immense. It may even include, in the case of very comprehensive libraries, the biographies of a few bullfighters. Are the claims to importance made by bullfighting supporters to be believed in the slightest? Is the adulation in the least healthy? Would the biography section of a very comprehensive library or a very comprehensive bookshop be anything other than pitiful if it contained not much more than biographies of bullfighters or books such as Alexander Fiske-Harrison's 'Into the Arena,' which belongs to the genre of autobiography? Does bullfighting really encompass everything important in the world, or so much that's important?
The Times Literary Supplement blog, 'Tagore in Segovia gives further evidence of the grotesque distortions of the bullfighting world: 'the writer and director Agustín Díaz Yanes declared that bullfighters were the only free men left in the world.'
Fadjen, a fighting bull, and Christophe Thomas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntWd5Pq4Xyo
This is a remarkable film from Pablo Knudsen showing the warm relationship between a bull bred for fighting and Christophe Thomas, the French man who saved him from ever fighting in a bullring, It shows too the gentle relationship between the bull and the goats who play with him and the bull's complete acceptance of a horse. 'Fighting bulls' are subjected to treatment which is artificial and abnormal, treatment calculated to make them aggressive. In the bullring, the bull has nowhere to escape or to hide. The film exposes this treatment and the trickery often used by bullfighters, which fools so many people. The idyll, the possibility of a wonderfully harmonious relationship between human and animal, is far from being a myth. It's no more impossible in the case of human and 'fighting bull' than in the case of human and dog. The film comes from Christophe Thomas's Website, which has other films about Fadjen. The site deserves a prominent role in the anti-bullfighting movement, www.sauvons -un-taureau-de-corrida.com
I don't in the least claim that all bulls are non-aggressive, only that in this respect, as in others, they show variability.
I provide an illustration of the distinction I make here in the next section, Three Spanish restaurants.
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, action which is not at all genteel, but action which keeps within the law. In a democracy, it may be necessary to break the law in exceptional circumestances 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 mention an exception below.) In fact, violence against people and damage to property damage the anti-bullfighting cause. I oppose these tactics in all cases. (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 an damage to property can easily be justified.)
In fact, in almost all cases, anti-bullfighting activists use tactics which can be supported wholeheartedly, for example, the tactics used by these Spanish activists, shown in the film
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OZzvaM2lHs&feature=g-vrec&context=G26ff8ccRVAAAAAAAACQ
It shows them travelling to the scene of their protest outside the bullring, followed by horrific scenes during a bullfight.
I support disruption of bullfights, whether or not they entail a public order offence which is a breach of the law. The rule of law is very important but a perfectionistic approach to observance of the law isn't possible or even desirable in every single case. People handing out leaflets opposing bullfighting (or some other activity) may be 'guilty' of obsruction if they stand still whilst doing so, but any feelings of guilt on that score are unnecessary.
In this film, a bullfight in Barcelona is disrupted:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OibprDli4BM
No bullfights take place here now, of course, as in
the rest of Spanish Catalonia. (The same moral advance hasn't been made in
French Catalonia so far.)
(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.
I would stress the power of ideas. 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?'
This section illustrates the discussion of the previous section on Campaigning techniques. Itgivesgives suggestions for practical action and gives further reasons in support of action.
Abel Lusa is the owner of three Spanish restaurants in London. In an interview on ultravie.co.uk he mentions 'a strong torero influence' in answer to the question, 'Where do you take your inspiration from when creating your menus and the ambience in your restaurants?'
These restaurants are within a short distance of each other on Old Brompton Road: 'Tendido Cero,' (174 Old Brompton Road), 'Capote y Toros' (157 Old Brompton Road) and 'Cambio de Tercio (163 Old Brompton Road.) In an interview
'Tendido Cero.' 'Tendido' refers to 'rows of open seats in a bull ring' (Hemingway, 'Death in the Afternoon.') 'Cero' is zero. The rows of seats are numbered. This restaurant has 'huge, rather camp photographs of matadors.' ('Time Out.')
'Capote y Toros.' 'Capote' is the cape of the bullfighter and 'toros,' of course, means bulls. In this restaurant there are ' ... framed pictures of bullfighters.' ('Time Out.') These can be seen by scrolling down a little way, past the images of some foods on offer, on this page,
http://www.campari-and-soda.com/2011/06/capote-y-toros-bullfighting-is-only-art.html
'Cambio de Tercio.' 'Cambio' means 'change' and the 'tercio' refers to one of the three parts of a bullfight, the 'tercio de varas,' in which the bull is lanced by the picador, the 'cercio de banderillas,' in which the bull is stabbed with the six banderillas, and the 'tercio del muerte,' where 'muerte' means death. This restaurant too makes use of a bullfighting theme, the bullfighter paintings of Luis Canizares, whose work is also prominent on their Website, cambiodetercio.co.uk
Less indirect ways of opposing bullfighting would be preferable but anti-bullfighting activists in this country aren't able to make use of them, since there are no bullrings here, this country being so much in advance of Spain in matters of animal welfare. This being so, I believe there's a case to be made for action against these restaurants, but principally by handing out leaflets to customers. This would be my interpretation of 'direct action,' a form of action which is almost instinctive with me, but a form of action which has to be used with great restraint if it isn't to be counter-productive. (There's no reason, however, why leafletting should be conducted in too genteel a way.) In the past, my interpretation of direct action was far less restrained, but never to the point of advocating or of course taking part in violence and damage to property
I can think of ways in which opposition to bullfighting which used these restaurants as a focus could be very useful. I think it's a mistake for activists to overlook actions which it could be argued are marginal. Small scale actions can make a contribution in this sphere as in others.
This page is about bullfighting, not about other animal welfare issues, but I resolutely oppose the cruelty involved in producing foie gras. Its production is illegal in this country. In my page on Israel I mention the fact that Israel used to be the fourth largest producer of foie gras in the world but, to its very great credit, banned its production in view of the cruelty involved. Importation of foie gras into this country and selling it here aren't illegal. Many restaurateurs never use it, as a product of gross cruelty. It will come as no surprise that Abel Lusa isn't one of them and that his restaurants offer foie gras.
Shops and large stores have sometimes come under intense pressure for this one issue, selling foie gras. Kirk Leech, writing in defence of Foie Gras (huffingtonpost.co.uk
'On Friday 9 December a small group of animal rights activists 'targeted' a list of Yorkshire based restaurants that serve foie gras. Van Zeller, a restaurant in Harrogate was subjected to a short but noisy demonstration. The protestors then made their way to the small village of Ramsgill where they protested outside the Yorke Arms Hotel. From there they moved onto Bolton Abbey, near Skipton where the Devonshire Arms Hotel was 'targeted'. Their activities included leafleting customers as they arrived to eat and making speeches condemning foie gras outside the establishments. Occasionally they book tables and then when seated stand up and denounce foie gras in front of other customers.'
This will seem very unsophisticated behaviour to gourmet-aesthetes of a certain kind, or the usual kind. But the ethics of these gourmet-aesthetes, and the bullfighting-aesthetes, will seem very unsophisticated - primitive - to many people who have given thought to the matter. Matthew Norman gives an appreciation of the cooking at 'Cambio de Tercio' which is very, very effusive (in 'The Daily Telegraph.') A sample: “Ooh, ooh, ooooooohh,” moaned my friend. “Woo, wooo, woooooo,” I whimpered back.' This appreciation of 'a thing of genius' ( ... gazpacho decanted into a bowl hosting a juicy disc of lobster and a scoop of cherry sorbet) was succeeded by appreciation of another thing: 'This was a creamy, eggy, potatoey mush with caramelised onions at the bottom of a cocktail glass, followed by a sheet of foie gras terrine atop smoked eel and apple slices.' Could such a sophisticate be an ethical ignoramus, in matters appertaining to foie gras at least? Quite easily.
Kirk Leech continues,
'Most restaurants and shops don't need the hassle of these protests and cave in to this degree of pressure. Only this week Brook's, in Brighouse Yorkshire, and Six Baltic, based in the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art on the river Tyne, became the latest restaurants to drop foie gras.'
'Were it that all campaigns could be won with such little effort. In the past, animal rights activists have been known to participate in illegal and occasionally violent attacks against their opposition. Now it's phone calls, emails and small protests.
'Low input activism this maybe, but it's clearly effective.'
I couldn't put it better myself. I resolutely oppose illegal and violent action and make phone calls, send emails and take part in small protests (I've travelled great distances to take part in these.) I advocate 'low input activism' as more effective than the alternatives. Kirk Leech does underestimate the difficulty and arduousness of action so often, or almost always.
I think that the evidence available justifies taking action against these three Spanish restaurants, 'Tendido Cero,' 'Capote y Toros' and 'Cambio de Tercio' for selling foie gras and a second issue, bullfighting. Action against these restaurants could well be given a high priority, using the methods of 'low input activism.'
It can be argued that opposition should only take the form of presenting ideas, arguments and evidence, with no attempt to target a specific individual, organization or commercial concern. My priority is very much to present contributions which belong to the realm of ideas, arguments and evidence, but I see the need to supplement these with specific action. I'm completely receptive to criticisms of this approach.
I've given an outline of action which could be undertaken, part 1 in the previous section on Campaigning techniques. Part 2 in the previous section is concerned with the reasoning which underlines the action. Here, I concentrate on foie gras rather than bullfighting. The reasons for opposing bullfighting are given in the rest of this page. I now need to address the matter of foie gras, so that any opposition to these restaurants for their connections with foie gras and bullfighting can be carried out with a comprehensive set of arguments and evidence.
The reasons Kirk Leech gives in his article for defending foie gras production are completely inadequate. In this area, as in so many others, evidence-based argument is in short supply. An evidence-based document which should be studied with care by defenders of foie-gras production, one giving a wealth of biochemical, physiological and other information, and scrupulous in its drawing of attention to areas where adequate information is lacking, is the European Union's Scientific Committee on Animal Health and Animal Welfare on Welfare Aspects of the Production of Foie Gras in Ducks and Geese.
However, the matter can't be decided by citation of biochemical, physiological, ethological and other scientific evidence alone, and this particular document has to be supplemented with other studies and other approaches, such as ones which make an appeal to moral philosophy. There are films available from 'show farms' which attempt to give an idyllic picture of the life of geese and ducks. It can be shown that these are misleading. For a very different perspective, an inquirer could watch this very harrowing film, 'Force-Fed to Death' (the narrator is Roger Moore)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32815SIgq1A&feature=related
and after watching it could well come to the conclusion that action against the three Spanish restaurants, and other restaurants and food outlets which sell foie gras, is fully justifiable. The film comes from the large organization PETA. In general, I don't endorse in the least some of the tactics used by PETA, which are sometimes deranged, or some of the deranged thinking which lies behind the tactics. Some of PETA'S work is genuinely impressive, and the film is an example of PETA at its best, I think.
This is the introduction to the Scientific Committee's document. It sets out the principles which I think should underlie all animal welfare work. Giving the reasons for practical opposition will not always entail the giving of very comprehensive evidence in dispassionate form, but the scrupulousness and comprehensiveness of an adequate ((survey)) should inform the practical action.
'There is widespread belief that people have moral obligations to
the animals with which they interact, such that poor welfare should be
minimised and very poor welfare avoided. It is assumed that animals,
including farm animals, can experience pain, fear and distress and that
welfare is poor when these occur. This has led to animal welfare being on
the political agenda of European countries.
'Legislation varies, but E.U. member states have ratified the
Council of Europe's Convention on the Protection of Animal kept for Farming
Purposes. Article 3 of that Convention states that " Animals shall be housed
and provided with food, water and care in a manner which, having regard to
their species and their degree of development, adaptation and domestication,
is appropriate to their physiological and ethological needs in accordance
with established experience and scientific knowledge” (Council of Europe,
1976).
'In addition to political debate, the amount of information based
on the scientific study of animal welfare has increased. Scientists have
added to knowledge of the physiological and behavioural responses of animals
and philosophers have developed ethical views on animal welfare.
Nevertheless, all agree that decisions about animal welfare should be based
on good scientific evidence (Duncan, 1981, Broom, 1988 b).
'Scientific evidence regarding the welfare of ducks and geese in
relation to foie gras production is gathered together in this report. In
chapter 1, different definitions of animal welfare are presented, the four
main indicators of animal welfare are discussed and the importance of
combining results from several indicators is emphasised. In the second
chapter the extent of production of foie gras is described and in the third,
practical aspects of production are summarised. Chapter four concerns the
behaviour of geese and ducks in relation to force feeding or “gavage”. The
consequences for the birds of force feeding are described in chapter five.
The remaining chapters concern the likely socio-economic consequences of any
changes whose aim is to improve the welfare of the birds, suggestions for
future research and conclusions. Finally, there is a list of references
quoted in the report.
'There is widespread belief that people have moral obligations to
the animals with which they interact, such that poor welfare should be
minimised and very poor welfare avoided. It is assumed that animals,
including farm animals, can experience pain, fear and distress and that
welfare is poor when these occur. This has led to animal welfare being on
the political agenda of European countries.
'Legislation varies, but E.U. member states have ratified the
Council of Europe's Convention on the Protection of Animal kept for Farming
Purposes. Article 3 of that Convention states that " Animals shall be housed
and provided with food, water and care in a manner which, having regard to
their species and their degree of development, adaptation and domestication,
is appropriate to their physiological and ethological needs in accordance
with established experience and scientific knowledge” (Council of Europe,
1976).
'In addition to political debate, the amount of information based
on the scientific study of animal welfare has increased. Scientists have
added to knowledge of the physiological and behavioural responses of animals
and philosophers have developed ethical views on animal welfare.
Nevertheless, all agree that decisions about animal welfare should be based
on good scientific evidence (Duncan, 1981, Broom, 1988 b).
'Scientific evidence regarding the welfare of ducks and geese in
relation to foie gras production is gathered together in this report. In
chapter 1, different definitions of animal welfare are presented, the four
main indicators of animal welfare are discussed and the importance of
combining results from several indicators is emphasised. In the second
chapter the extent of production of foie gras is described and in the third,
practical aspects of production are summarised. Chapter four concerns the
behaviour of geese and ducks in relation to force feeding or “gavage”. The
consequences for the birds of force feeding are described in chapter five.
The remaining chapters concern the likely socio-economic consequences of any
changes whose aim is to improve the welfare of the birds, suggestions for
future research and conclusions. Finally, there is a list of references
quoted in the report.
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. It's claimed that 500 000 bullfighting supporters visit Arles for the Easter festival when the bullfighting season begins. 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!
Bullfighting supporters quite often criticize animal welfare and animal rights supporters (I don't give arguments here for preferring one form of words or the other but I describe myself as involved in 'animal welfare,' not 'animal rights') 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 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.
I provide only a very concise statement of my approach to the application of established ethical theory and application of {thematic} theory. This long page would need to be book-length if I gave a comprehensive discussion with even a little detail.
My approach to established ethical theory is pluralistic rather than monistic, in line with the thinking of W D Ross rather than the two most influential monistic theories, deontology and consequentialism. I see every reason for preferring consequentialism to deontology, but regard even the most developed and sophisticated versions of a hedonistic calculus as generally unhelpful in guiding a decision procedure. Nietzsche's criticism of Kantian philosophy (including, of course, deontology) was unformed - he could airily dismiss Kantian philosophy by describing it as 'Königsbergian' (referring to the place where Kant resided.) My own reaction to Kantianism could be summed up in a word, too, only slightly more adequately, perhaps - but again, this isn't the place to give a full discussion. I'd describe it as a form of scholasticism. Philosophers generally aren't neo-Thomists, and they have found reason to reject the philosophical edifice of St Thomas Aquinas without the production of reasons for opposing particular arguments in the Summa Theologica. Philosophers more often than not aren't neo-Kantian either, and again - although to a lesser extent - not by finding reasons to reject the philosophical edifice of Kant. In the case of Kant's ethical theory, its application can provide good reason for rejecting it - for example, the celebrated case of the armed man and the need to tell the truth regardless of consequences.
Virtue ethics, and particularly Aristotelian virtue ethics, should have a central place in any pluralistic ethical theory, I think. (This 'central place' should be quite congested, not occupied by one grand principle.) Life and death issues, issues to do with suffering and the reduction of suffering are central to the application of ethical theory - but so too should be a host of 'virtues' which go beyond these issues.A complete case can be built against bullfighting which makes no reference to the suffering of the animals - to do with anti-virtues of bullfighters and bullfighting supporters, such as their distortions and illusions. I provide documentation and argument at various places on this page.
One of the reasons why I see the need for a pluralistic rather than monistic view of ethical theory is that I consider that a theory can have a high degree of adequacy in its application to mundane ethical decisions and a much lower degree of adequacy in life and death decsions. I'm influenced strongly here by Roger White's discussion of metaphor in his 'The Structure of Metaphor: The Way the Language of Metaphor Works.' Roger White finds reasons as to why some treatments of metaphor (such as the one presented in the book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 'Metaphors we live by', which I find exceptionally useful and interesting) have inadequate adequacy for complex metaphors to be found in literature, for example in the writing of Donne and Shakespeare. The examples which George Lakoff and Mark Johnson cite include, for example, 'He's head and shoulders above everyone in the industry. (This illustrates 'Significant is big.') My own theory of metaphor and {theme} is intended to have adequacy in explaining simple examples such as this and developed literary metaphor.
It has sometimes been supposed that the ethical concepts and analytical techniques involved in this ethical dilemma have much more extensive appicability: an Oxford don at high table asking himself, 'Shall I or shall I not take another of these delicious creamy desserts?' It will be apparent - or it can easily be shown - that the ethical necessity in this dilemma is much greater: adult sailors in a lifeboat, no food and no hope of rescue in the short term, medium term or perhaps long term, asking themselves, 'Shall we or shall we not kill and eat the cabin-boy to keep ourselves alive?' Unlike the examples from literary metaphor, this makes no greater demands on richness and complexity of mind, only on very different attributes of mind.
The ethical theory I employ most of all on this page - but implicitly rather than explicitly - derives from my own {theme} theory. This is formal and makes use of symbolism. I explain {themes} in my expository page Introduction to {theme} theory.
My own ethical theory, like my theory of metaphor, is intended to have general applicability.Although I refer to ethical necessity above, this is one instance in which I don't subsume ethical necessity, together with logical necessity, in a generalized necessity, in which ethical necessity and logical necessity can achieve {separation} by {resolution}. If some ethical choices seem the outcome of necessity, then this can only so in a fully deterministic ethical world, such as the 'necessitarianism' of Spinoza.
I find the concept of the 'first approximation' valuable but I use instead a linked concept, that of the 'starting point.' Epistemologically, G E Moore's defence of the common-sense view of the world has merit, I think, and should serve as a starting-point, but with no imposition of {restriction}, such that the common-sense view of the world is treated as beyond doubt.
It would be an ethical common-sense view, one which deserves to be a starting point, that if someone is starving, he or she would be morally justified in killing insects or worms to stay alive. I'd defend this choice without the least hesitation. It would be also be a starting point that if a vegan is starving, he or she would be morally justified in killing a chicken. I'd defend this choice without the least hesitation, but many vegans would disagree, and some of them would perhaps disagree too, about the legitimacy of killing insects or worms.
These examples don't illustrate a version of ethical necessity, in view of the potential objections - even if these objections are ridiculous. I use instead the {theme} {ordering}, but with the recognition of the need to supplement it. There's the need for {ordering} with {distance}: in an ethical dilemma, choice A may be preferable to choice B (killing an insect or worm is preferable to the death of a human), it may be given {prior-ordering}, but what's needed is the expression of the very much greater preferability - although this falls short of absolute ethical necessity. I express 'very much greater preferability' in the one word 'outweighing,' and express it symbolically as '>>' (not to be confused with the symbol for {reversal}. So, in the case of the starving person,
killing an insect or worm >> death of the person
killing a chicken >> death of the person
Killing a bull in the bullring obviously lacks this linkage with physical survival but does entail 'outweighing' of a different kind, one which relates to artistry and attributes of the mind which go beyond physical survival:
killing a bull in the bullring >> artistic impoverishment of the person (which, allegedly, would result if bullfighting were to be banned.)
This is the very view which I oppose in various places on this page.
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 about 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.'
I've never at any time attempted to suppress pro-bullfighting views, Anti-bullfighting activists who do try to suppress pro-bullfighting views are very much mistaken - not mistaken about bullfighting, obviously, but very much mistaken in opposing the free flow of ideas.
All attempts to suppress pro-bullfighting books or other printed
materials, to suppress pro-bullfighting films or internet materials, to
suppress pro-bullfighting talks and lectures, are deeply misguided. In 'the
marketplace of ideas,' I regard anti-bullfighting arguments as decisively,
overwhelmingly superior to pro-bullfighting arguments. The anti-bullfighting
case needs no censorship of pro-bullfighting views at all.
The
principle that there should be a free flow of ideas, information and evidence
is a principle under attack. It's essential to defend it. I know of one
organization which called upon a bookseller to remove a pro-bullfighting book
from sale and was successful. This was a bad mistake on the part of the
organization and the bookseller. There are many threats to freedom of
expression, threats which may be veiled or violent. They come from
believers in political correctness, Islamists and others. A bookshop should be under no
pressure to deny shelf-space to books which criticize political correctness, Islam and
bullfighting and books which support political correctness, Islam and bullfighting, and
similarly for other issues. Before I could read Alexander Fiske-Harrison's
Into the Arena it was necessary for me to buy a copy. The idea that I
should be expected to criticize Alexander Fiske-Harrison's defence of
bullfighting on the basis of a few things I'd heard, without having read the
book, is repugnant. My very critical discussion is given below. It
includes information about Alexander Fiske-Harrison's censorship of my
own comments but I include a further example here.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison writes on his blog, 'By the way, I have noticed that various animal rights protesters are complaining that I have blocked their comments on this blog. Well, that’s easy enough to answer: I will post any comment that is civil and unthreatening.' This is simply not true. One comment I sent to him simply gave some of the material in the previous paragraphs about the importance of supporting freedom of expression for writers on bullfighting such as himself. That comment was blocked, perhaps because it included this: 'I regard anti-bullfighting arguments as decisively, overwhelmingly superior to pro-bullfighting arguments. The anti-bullfighting case needs no censorship of pro-bullfighting views at all.' The comment I submitted was completely civil and unthreatening, and all the other comments I submitted have been completely civil and unthreatening, but have been censored by him, except for a much earlier set of comments, very brief, simply stating my intention to discuss 'Into the Arena.'
I showed that his reaction to one comment could easily be explained - he'd simply not read most of what I'd written, by his own admission. He was condemning what he hadn't read. He refused to post this as well. I'd raised one particular issue which he seems determined not to discuss openly - the fact that the bull he killed had blunt horns and had apparently been subjected to the procedure called 'afeitado,' judging by the photographs in 'Into the Arena.' This would have made the bull - which was in any case far from being a full-sized animal - much less risky to fight.
After this mention of suppression of views by Alexander Fiske-Harrison, I
return to suppression of views by some anti-bullfighting activists.
The British
bullfighter Frank Evans planned to give a talk at a bookshop in Manchester. It
was cancelled because of the threat of disruption. Again, this was a bad
mistake. Alexander Fiske-Harrison has been invited to give a talk at
Blackwell's
bookshop in Oxford, death threats have been made, allegedly, and the talk has been
rescheduled, for February 9. (I intend to be there.) It's much easier to issue a threat than to argue a case.
On his Website, Alexander Fiske-Harrison writes, 'I am happy to announce that unlike Salman Rushdie, I will actually be talking at my venue - Blackwell’s of Oxford – regardless of protests.' It would have been better if he hadn't invited readers to compare his situation with that of Salman Rushdie. The danger in which Salman Rushdie found himself was incomparably more serious than the dangers facing Alexander Fiske-Harrison. As in the case of his exploits in the ring, Alexander Fiske-Harrison exaggerates the dangers he faces. The animal rights movement (for the record, I'd describe myself as involved in animal welfare, as one activity among many, not animal rights) includes dangerous as well as deluded people, but their dangerousness (their lethal intent) isn't to be equated with the fanatics who were out to get Salman Rushdie and anyone associated with his book, 'The Satanic Verses.' In that case, lethal intentions were followed by lethal results. Destruction of property in the name of animal rights is quite another matter. It has been far more extensive than media reports would suggest. I discuss briefly the Animal Liberation Front and its misguided and ineffectual tactics in my page Animal welfare: arrest and activism.
From the Wikipedia entry, 'The Satanic Verses Controversy:'
'In
the United States, the FBI was
notified of 78 threats to bookstores in early March 1989, thought to be a
small proportion of the total number. B.
Dalton bookstore chain received 30 threats in less than
three hours. Bombings of book stores included two in Berkeley California. In
New York, the office of the community newspaper The Riverdale Press was all
but destroyed by firebombs in retaliation for an editorial defending the
right to read the novel and criticising the bookstores that pulled it from
their shelves.[20] But
the United Kingdom was the country where violence against bookstores
occurred most often and persisted the longest. Two large bookstores in Charing
Cross Road, London, (Collets and Dillons)
were bombed on 9 April. In May, explosions went off in the town of High
Wycombe and again in London, on Kings
Road. Other bombings include one at a large London department store (Liberty's),
in connection with the Penguin Bookshop inside the store, and at the Penguin
store in York.
Unexploded devices were found at Penguin stores in Guildford, Nottingham,
and Peterborough.
'The bombings meant that hardly a single bookstore sold Rushdie's novel openly in the UK. In the United States, it was unavailable in about one-third of the bookstores. In many others which carried the book, it was kept under the counter.'
...
'Several people have been killed or attacked as a result of the
fatwa:
The Oxford Mail (26 January 2012) quotes Alexander Fiske-Harrison directly: '“I have had between 20 and 30 death threats ...' The article explains that the date and time of his appearance at Blackwell's bookshop were changed as a result of police advice.
On his own Website (27 January 2012): Following the temporary cancellation of my Oxford talk on my book Into The Arena and vastly exaggerated reports of death threats etc. abounding in the Oxford Times and Oxford Mail ... ' If so, why did he make any comparison with Salman Rushdie? In his case, the death threats weren't exaggerated.
Whatever the level of threats to the author, bookshops have been put under pressure not to stock Alexander Fiske-Harrison's 'Into the Arena,' (or such books as Hemingway's 'Death in the Afternoon') then is this to be only a starting-point? I discuss the cruelties of foie gras production in the section Three Spanish Restaurants. Bookshops (and libraries) may have many books on their shelves which 'promote' the use of foie gras, particularly books on French cookery, and not just ones on haute cuisine. Are they to be removed? There are many animal rights campaigners who would agree with or use the slogan 'Meat is murder.' But most of these people would have the sense (I hope) to realize that removing all but vegetarian and vegan cookery books from bookshops and libraries is an impossible (as well as undesirable) objective.
No bookshop can be anything like as comprehensive as a large library, of course. Are large libraries - including the largest of them all in this country, the British Library - not to include on their shelves 'Into the Arena,' Hemingway's 'Death in the Afternoon' and other books defending bullfighting? Published books have to be made available, to scholars, to readers of all kinds - including opponents of the views expressed in some of these books. A good bookshop should give hints of comprehensiveness, at least.
This is very much supplementary information, but the most comprehensive library of all, an imaginary library, is described in a short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Library of Babel.' This contains 'all that it is given to express, in all languages. Everything ...'
Running a bookshop is an intensely demanding activity, now more than ever. It's completely wrong to pressurize a bookshop for any of these reasons. If the owner or manager of a bookshop has scheduled a talk by a pro-bullfighting writer for the near future and is approached by a person or an organization asking for the event to be cancelled, what is the owner or manager to do? Abandon all but the most essential duties and spend an intensive week or two studying as many aspects of the issue as possible as thoroughly as possible before coming to a decision? Not forgetting to read 'Into the Arena.' Or assume that the objector's arguments (which are unlikely to be detailed ones - the objector is very unlikely to have read the book) are correct and cancel the event immediately?
The anti-libertarian, pro-censorship 'principle' of 'no platform for ...' doesn't usually take the form of 'no platform for bullfighting supporters.' It's usually no platform for 'racists,' and a variety of other human rather than animal issues (and we're supposed to take it for granted that the objectors are correct in their understanding of 'racist' and 'racism,' that their intelligence and freedom from bias are beyond dispute. They may describe people who want to set limits to immigration into this country as 'racists.') The rallying cry 'no platform for ...' was applied to Sir Ian Blair, the former Metropolitan Commissioner of Police (by an Indymedia Website) when he came to give a talk at Sussex University.
Similar issues are raised when people who advocate boycotts of Israeli products approach the owner of a shop or the manager of a supermarket which stocks Israeli products. Again, is this owner or manager expected to examine the arguments and evidence in depth before coming to a decision? Or is the owner or manager to assume that the boycotters' case must be correct and clear the shelves of Israeli products at once?
My page on Israel gives detailed information about another attempt to enforce a boycott of Israel. The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra was due to play at the Proms. Pro-Palestinian activists called for the performance to be cancelled. What were the management to do in the week or so after receiving this call? Study the relevant history of the Middle East, and in particular the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, make a comparative study of human rights in Israel and other countries of the Middle East, such as Iran, Syria and the Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, make a further comparative study of war and conflict and of the action which has been taken by democratic countries, totalitarian countries and countries with other forms of government in waging war, including such issues as blockades and protection of non-combatants, study the international legislation concerned with these issues, study the arguments and evidence deployed by supporters of Israel and opponents of Israel, do a little research into moral philosophy and the different approaches to deciding difficult moral issues, such as consequentialism - whilst continuing the intensely demanding task of coordinating the nightly concerts of the Proms season? Or was the management simply to assume that the pro-Palestinian activists must be correct and to cancel the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra's concert without delay - and to add the task of explaining the action to aggrieved concert-goers and defending themselves in the courts for breach of contract to their work-load? In the event, the management stood firm and the concert went ahead, but was disrupted.
Anti-bullfighting censors are far outnumbered by censors of a very different kind, such as radical Islamist censors, They may well be unaware of the context, or indifferent to it: the assaults on freedom of expression from many different directions. Supporting freedom of expression - the general principle - is vital.
The context includes this: 'A talk organised ... by the Queen Mary [University of London] Atheism, Secularism and Humanism Society on ‘Sharia Law and Human Rights’ had to be cancelled after threats of violence.' Information from the excellent site www.studentrights.org which promotes freedom of speech in universities. The site reports the President of the Atheism, Secularism and Humanism Society and the statement issued by The Principal of Queen Mary College in support of free expression.
The President of the Society:
‘Five minutes before the talk was due to start a man burst into
the room holding a camera phone and for some seconds stood filming the faces
of all those in the room. He shouted ‘listen up all of you, I am recording
this, I have your faces on film now, and I know where some of you live’, at
that moment he aggressively pushed the phone in someone’s face and then said
‘and if I hear that anything is said against the holy Prophet Mohammed, I
will hunt you down.’ He then left the room and two members of the audience
applauded.
‘The same man then began
filming the faces of Society members in the foyer and threatening to hunt
them down if anything was said about Mohammed, he added that he knew where
they lived and would murder them and their families. On leaving the
building, he joined a large group of men, seemingly there to support him.'
The Principal of the College:
'Professor Simon Gaskell,
Principal of Queen Mary, University of London said: "We are concerned about
reports of a disturbance at a recent meeting of the Atheism, Secularism
and Humanism Society.
' "The
democratic right to freedom of expression and debate is one Queen Mary
strongly upholds and promotes. Talks, meetings and debates are held
peacefully at Queen Mary on a daily basis and we will continue to
host such events.
' "We are equally
committed to our duty of care to students. A police investigation of Monday
night's incident is currently underway and Queen Mary will conduct its own
review. We will do our utmost to ensure this occurrence is not repeated and
that our students are able to gather and engage in debate freely without
interference of any kind." '
In this page on Israel I write: 'Countries that can be considered free have been surrendering more and more of their freedoms. Complacency and lack of resolve have allowed them to slide towards an Age of Post-enlightenment. Most often, freedoms have been eroded by the growth of informal censorship, self-censorship, strong disapproval, but sometimes by new legislation.' Kenny Hodgart writes well about one such piece of legislation in this country:
'Freedom of speech was hard-won in the West; the freedom only to speak inoffensively is no freedom at all ... Never mind the freedom to speak offensively: people have been invited to believe there is such a thing as the right not to be offended. Never mind that 'incitement to hatred' is a grey, disputable thing, and a different thing to incitement to violence, which was already a criminal offence. Never mind that most ideas are capable of giving offence ... And never mind that in the marketplace of ideas, 'hate speech' can be challenged, debated or ignored. What we now have is moderated free speech at best.'
Nigel Warburton, in his 'Free Speech: a very short introduction,' writes, 'Defenders of free speech almost without exception recognize the need for some limits to the freedom they advocate.' I think this is true, and well put. I'm a libertarian in matters of free speech but not an absolutist libertarian. In the terminology I use, I recognize {restriction}: (free speech). I discuss {restriction} and the {theme} theory of which it forms a part on other pages.
Nigel Warburton writes, again very cogently:
'Holmes, like Mill, was committed to defending freedom of speech in most circumstances, and, explicitly defended the value of a ‘free trade in ideas’ as part of a search for truth: ‘the best test of truth,’ he maintained, ‘is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market’. Holmes wrote passionately about what he called the ‘experiment’ embedded in the US Constitution arguing that we should be ‘eternally vigilant’ against any attempt to silence opinions we despise unless they seriously threaten the country – hence the ‘clear and present danger’ test outlined in the quotation above. Holmes as a judge was specifically concerned with how to interpret the First Amendment; his was an interest in the application of the law. Mill in contrast was not writing about legal rights, but about the moral question of whether it was ever right to curtail free speech whether by law, or by what he described as the tyranny of majority opinion, the way in which those with minority views can be sidelined or even silenced by social disapproval.
'Both Mill and Holmes, then, saw that there had to be limits to free speech and that other considerations could on occasion defeat any presumption of an absolute right (legal or moral) to freedom of speech. Apart from the special considerations arising in times of war, most legal systems ... still restrict free expression where, for example, it is libellous or slanderous, where it would result in state secrets being revealed, where it would jeopardize a fair trial, where is involves a major intrusion into someone’s private life without good reason, where it results in copyright infringement (e.g. using someone else’s words without permission), and also in cases of misleading advertising. Many countries also set strict limits to the kinds of pornography that may be published or used. These are just a selection of the restrictions on speech and other kinds of expression that are common in nations which subscribe to some kind of free speech principle and whose citizens think of themselves as free.'
I'd make the point that 'permitting' is obviously different from 'approving.' 'Permitting whilst loathing' will often be a response in a free society. It expresses my response to Alexander Fiske-Harrison's stance on bullfighting - and his killing of a bull - but I see the need not just to 'permit' the publishing and sale of his book and talks by the author but a passionate upholding of the principle of free expression, if not expression without some {restriction}.
In a wide range of moral and other issues, some of the most fatuous objections often come from people who mechanically point out an alleged inconsistency and ignore the most significant differences. 'You object to bullfighting, but you eat meat!' Alexander Fiske-Harrison, a meat-eater himself, argues along similar lines. (I point this out, as a vegetarian.) 'You object to Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. But Britain has nuclear weapons! (Ignoring the vast differences in political responsibility and restraint.) If German research in atomic physics had been more advanced before the end of the Second World War, then the argument, equally idiotic, might have been, 'You object to Germany acquiring nuclear weapons. But the United States has now acquired nuclear weapons!'
So much for these tidy and unformed minds and their reflex responses.
Some defenders of bullfighting
Alexander Fiske-Harrison ('Xander'): 'Into the Arena'
Not Alexander Fiske-Harrison (no copyright-free image available) but José Tomás: the bullfight as horror film. (Acknowledgments: luispita.com)
Alexander Fiske-Harrison is known as 'Xander' to his friends. To his girlfriend, the ex-model trainee nutritional therapist elder daughter of Lord Brocket, Antalya Nall-Cain, Xander is no ordinary man. ‘He’s terribly handsome, clever — and masculine.’ The words are quoted on his blog (posting, 26.11.11), along with the rest of Richard Kay's piece in 'The Daily Mail,' with the title 'Antalya hits the bull's eye' (29.08.11) The article has some serious deficiencies. One is that it doesn't give a photo of the handsome 'bullfighter-philosopher,' only of his girlfriend AN-C. AF-H corrects the deficiency by providing a photograph of himself directly after the piece, allowing readers to see at once the accuracy of 'terribly handsome.' Another deficiency: according to Richard Kay, Antalya says, 'He's terribly handsome, clever - and macho' not 'He's terribly handsome, clever - and masculine.' Alexander Fiske-Harrison may have misquoted by accident, but this isn't at all likely. He gives the whole of the 'Daily Mail' piece, with identical wording, except for the replacement of 'macho' by 'masculine.' Perhaps he found the associations of 'macho' not too impressive and felt that some rewording of the published quotation was called for. 'Macho:' 'manly' - fine - but 'domineering' 'over-assertive,' 'aggressive' and 'chauvinistic' - no, not at all.
As for 'clever,' he helpfully provides evidence in another posting on his blog (12.01.12, but since removed):
'Alexander Fiske-Harrison. Master of Arts (Oxford), Master of Science (London), Matador de Novillos (Seville)'
'Novillos' are young bulls and matador means, of course, literally 'killer.' (He doesn't make it altogether clear that by 'Seville' he's not referring to the 'Plaza de Toros de la Real Maestranza,' the well-known killing centre in Seville, but a completely different bullring, a small one attached to a ranch outside Seville.)
I don't find Alexander Fiske-Harrison's character in the least likeable. I think he's vain, conceited, often petulant, and unpleasant. I don't, though, use his character as evidence against his claims, arguments and interpretations. Instead, I give detailed arguments and detailed evidence in my discussion below. I don't, I believe, make any use of 'argumentum ad hominem'. The philosopher Mark Rowlands on 'the ad hominem fallacy. This is the fallacy of thinking that one can undermine the status of a claim or argument by undermining the motives or character of the person who makes it.' And, he claims, 'examples of this litter Fiske-Harrison’s writing.' (From his review of 'Into the Arena' in 'The Times Literary Supplement',' 16.09.11.)
Alexander Fiske-Harrison decided that to understand bullfighting and to understand himself, he had to kill a bull. He trained with bullfighters and has now killed a bull, or, to be precise, mortally wounded a bull. What he did was to stab a bull repeatedly. It was finished off by someone else, a bullfighter called Rafaelillo.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison's first sword-thrust struck bone. His second sword-thrust struck bone. His third sword-thrust was 'behind the proper killing spot.' His helper swung his cape on one side of the bull and then he swung his muleta on the other side, the standard technique of making the bull turn this way and that, so that the sword embedded deep in his body would move around and sever some vital organ: a hideous way of trying to ensure death, and very often completely unsuccessful. He was reassured to find that 'the bull was dying. I could see his legs shaking now.' And 'Rafaelillo came over with the descabello sword to sever the nervous link between brain and spinal column.'
This killing was regarded as outstanding. He writes, 'please note that two misses, pinchazos [hitting bone with the sword] followed by a killing strike on your first animal is absolutely unheard of ...' The death of the first animal is usually much more messy and protracted. The death of bulls at the hands of the most experienced bullfighters is often messy and protracted.
In the Prologue of 'Into the Arena' he writes of bullfighting, 'When it was done well, it seemed a good thing; when done badly it was an unmitigated sin.' On his blog, he gives great prominence to this: 'I can't think of many spectacles in the world which are evil when done badly but good when done well.' 'But he knew for certain that his own performance would be without 'artistry,' the people who came to watch him - nearly a hundred of them, including his parents - knew that it would be without artistry. In the Prologue, he writes of bullfighting, By this principle, he has to regard his own fight and killing as an 'unmitigated sin' or 'evil.'
He was about to kill a bull and the spectators were about to witness a killing which couldn't even be justified by the warped reasoning of bullfighting supporters (as I see it), a killing by someone who would never make a 'career' out of his performance, someone who was killing for the sake of his inner compulsions and his book, and death for the bull which was unlikely to be instantaneous and in the event wasn't at all quick, even if quicker than many of the long-drawn out deaths which shame Spain, France and the other countries of the corrida.
The death he planned to inflict had no justifications of necessity - other than the satisfaction of his inner compulsion, and of course the book. Whilst running in Seville he injures his knee, although he can still flex it, but he decides that his fight couldn't be postponed. 'Rescheduling that many people - and by which I mean those intrinsic to the fight - simply could not be done in the near future, certainly not within the projected publication date of the book.'
After the killing, he becomes very thoughtful. A bullfighter asks him, 'What did you feel?'
'I tried to answer, 'Mi corazón esturo con el toro muerto en la plaza. [My heart was with the dead bull in the ring.] I just wanted to go and sit with him in the ring with a bottle of whisky. Only he understood now.'
At this point, if this were a bad, sentimental film, sloppy music would be played to accompany softly spoken words, bad, sentimental, nauseating words: only the dead bull understands the one who killed him.
To imagine that to understand killing it's necessary to kill - this is a strange, a crude, a disastrously misguided notion of understanding. To understand the mind of a different kind of killer, a murderer, one uses reflection, insight and other qualities of the mind, one doesn't kill someone, of course. Dostoevsky's incomparable insights into the mind of the murderer Raskolnikov in 'Crime and Punishment' was achieved by these means.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison is a friend of Giles Coren. His Website shows the two comrades watching a bullfight. If Alexander Fiske-Harrison's defence of bullfighting seems far more sophisticated than that of his fellow enthusiast, appearances are deceptive. He's got ample reserves of simple-mindedness too.
This is one of the milder examples. The quote is from Mark Rowland's review in 'The Times Literary Supplement,' a review which seems to have enraged AF-H:
'After being present at the killing of a bull in practice, Fiske-Harrison gets blood on his hands. He writes: ‘I went straight to Flaherty’s, Seville’s Irish pub … and ordered a large glass of Johnny Walker, sitting staring at it with the blood from the great, dead bull staining my hands pink and my nails black. It took days to wash out.’
'This does seem a little narcissistic ... While having no direct experience of the blood of a recently deceased Spanish bull, I would be very surprised if it were that difficult to remove from one’s hands. And, so I cannot allay the suspicion that Fiske-Harrison is sitting in the bar with blood on his hands because he enjoys it, his little red badge of courage.'
Victor Hugo wrote, 'It is good to wash one's hands, but to prevent blood from being spilled on them would be better.' ('The Last Day of a Condemned Man.') The reference isn't to bullfighting, but the words are apposite.
The photograph at the beginning of this section shows the matador Jose Tomás in action (the blood here is from the bull, not his own). Alexander Fiske-Harrison has things to say about Jose Tomas and blood in the book, seemingly oblivious of his own milder obsession.
He writes of the matador, 'He divided the aficionados ... the reason I had most often heard is that he fights with 'demisiado sangre', 'too much blood', and by blood, they mean his own. Even a cursory glance through the press cuttings of his bullfights shows his face and body drenched in blood like something from a Jacobean tragedy.' Or a horror film.
Haematophilia is a form of fetishism - an intense interest of a sexual kind in blood. Blood fetishism belief within a society or culture that blood in itself (as a material substance) possesses powerful and magical properties.' (Wikipedia.) Writers who support bullfighting sometimes describe the third part of the bullfight in sexual terms. It could be that there is often blood fetishism involved as well, and that the bullfighting areas within bullfighting countries demonstrate a kind of blood fetishism.
One of the quotations which precede the Prologue is this, simple-minded, pompous and inflated rather than deeply impressive, surely:
Ser un torero es como hablar con Dios
[To be a bullfighter is like talking to God]
Eduardo Dávila Miura (matador)
He has some insight into the cruelty of the bullfight, but his lack of insight into 'the sick and decadent claims to importance, the romanticized exaggeration, the flagrant myth-making,' as I put it in the introduction, is obvious.
This is an inbred world, generally oblivious of the achievements - including achievements that require enormous courage - of the world outside, achievements which vastly surpass those of the bullfighters. Alexander Fiske-Harrison settles into this world of extreme {restriction}, despite the moral qualms he advertises occasionally, and long before the end of the book he seems to be at complete ease there. But throughout, as early as the book's Prologue, Alexander Fiske-Harrison can be as uncritical as any bullfighting slob who ever slouched on a bullring cushion.
In his account of the bullring in Seville, of the first bullfight he witnessed, he gives us this: 'The gate was opened ... by Manolo Artero, a stout middle-aged man, who shouted to the rustling crowd the words he had shouted for thirty years: 'Silence! A man risks his life here today.' How impressive the words of Manolo Artero sound to bullfighting supporters, how stupid to other people, ones with a healthy sense of the ridiculous and an appreciation of equally dangerous acts or far more dangerous acts. The last fatality in this ring was in 1992. This was the last fatality in any bullring in Spain.
Later in the book, he writes, of a small bullring, 'It is not a place where one would wish to be gored by a bull. How good, I wonder, is the local doctor and how far is the nearest hospital? it is the length of the journey to the hospital that kills the matador as much as the bull's horns.
For injured mountaineers, on the other hand, the hospital is much further. Above, I write,
'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, or rescue may be impossible. For the mountaineer, safety and medical help are generally far, far away.'
Mountaineers don't have the comforting knowledge that an equivalent of the 'Burladero' is close by. There are a number of these convenient things around the bullring. John McCormick: 'Burladero: a narrow wooden shield ... permitting the torero to slip to safety when necessary but wide enough for the toro not to pursue him.'
Again and again, Alexander Fiske-Harrison stresses the death-defying exploits of bullfighters, completely oblivious, it seems, to something else which he wrote in the book (published in 2011): ' ... no torero has died in the ring in Spain since 1992.' The bullring isn't, it seems, anything like the deathtrap commonly portrayed by bullfighting apologists.
I don't have an exact figure for the number of bullfights which took place in that period of not far short of twenty years (taking account of the time between writing and publication, of course) but it will probably have been in excess of 17 000, with the death of at least 100 000 bulls. And the number of bullfighters killed in that period, by his account: 0.
An appreciative piece by Victoria Aitken on the site www.thewip.net includes this: 'the book is extremely well researched' and 'According to Fiske-Harrison's research, one in four matadors die in the ring.' There's no mention of this particular piece of 'research' in the book. If she had taken the trouble to read the book, all the book, she would have found that there's no mention of it at all, only a mention of the complete lack of fatalities. I haven't been able to find any mention of the 'one in four' statistics anywhere but Victoria Aitken's piece. Alexander Fiske-Harrison needs to present evidence and to explain himself.
Unless he can come up with convincing evidence, which seems very unlikely, the claim seems justified that bullfighters risk serious injury in the bullring but not to any significant extent death: the courage needed to face the risk of serious injury is less than the courage needed to face death. Aristotle writes succinctly about degrees of courage in the Nicomachean Ethics (III, 115a, 25.)
'What, then, are the fearful things which concern the courageous person? The most fearful of all ... now the most fearful of all is death ... '
περὶ ποῖα οὖν τῶν
φοβερῶν
ὁ ἀνδρεῖος; ἢ περὶ τὰ μέγιστα;
...
φοβερώτατον δ᾽ ὁθάνατος:
Alexander Fiske-Harrison refers to bulls which refuse to play the game (not his words) and
fight but a striking omission from the book is any discussion of
tampering with the bull before the fight, a notorious way of reducing the
danger to the bullfighter. One method of tampering or doctoring,
sawing off the tips of the horns, 'afeitado' in Spanish, is referred to in the report of Antonio Lorca in
the newspaper ABC, published in 2008 and referring to bullfighting in
Seville: 'At first sight they looked like bulls, with long hoofs, and
horns looking suspiciously doctored, but in reality they were kittens.'
Bruce Schoenfeld, a bullfighting enthusiast, writes of bullfights in
Seville, 'The trappings remain the same year after year.
Unfortunately, so does the deplorable condition of many of the bulls fought
in Sevilla. Because the so-called sophisticated crowds here want to see
artistic bullfighting, breeders send animals that are smaller, less
dangerous and theoretically easier to work with ... In actuality, bulls in
Sevilla often come out weak and docile, tiring so easily that sometimes they
simply fall down on their own accord, even without a sword thrust.' This
seems a very naive comment for someone who has written so much about
bullfighting. He seems not to acknowledge the distinct possibility, or
likelihood, that the bulls are so weak and docile and tire so easily because
they have been subjected before entering the ring to one or other of the
standard methods of ensuring that the bull is weak, docile and tires easily.
Jérôme Lescure's very disturbing film entitled 'A Two Hour Killing (commentary in French, the images overwhelming) shows sawing of the horns being performed, followed by monstrous cruelties in corridas in five places in the South of France. (You may need to scroll down a little way to locate the arrow button you click on to start the film.) The cruelties include the use of capes to make the bull turn its head from side to side, in the hope of making the sword embedded in the animal cut a vital organ - the same technique used in Alexander Fiske-Harrison's debut as a would-be bull-killer - and the severing of the spine when this fails to work. In the film, the bulls are stabbed with a dagger rather than the descabello, the sword which was used to end the life of Conséjote after Alexander Fiske-Harrison had finished stabbing him.
The man performing the sawing and reshaping in the film says 'Afeitado, c' est interdit, mais tout le monde le fait,' 'Afeitado is forbidden but everyone does it.' (The 'everyone' is obviously hyperbolic.) Another method of tampering with the bull is administration of massive doses of sulphates or salt.
I sent this next paragraph to him, for posting in the comments section of the site he uses for promotion of 'Into the Arena' and discussion of its themes.
‘ 'Afeitado,’ as you know, is the practice of sawing off the horn tips of the bull, the action disguised by further work. (The video ‘A two-hour killing’ shows it being performed on a bull before a French bullfight.) Like other well known practices, not universal but common, such as the dosing of the bull with a substance of one kind or another, afeitado decreases the risk to the bullfighter substantially. Illustration 13 in your book ‘Into the Arena’ shows you fighting the bull which you later killed – or rather the bullfighter Rafaelillo killed, by severing the spine, after you had made repeated attempts to kill the bull with your sword. The photograph shows clearly that the tips of this bull’s horns are missing [I missed this when I first looked at the photograph. It was the anti-bullfighting campaigner 'HillmanMinx' who noticed the missing horn tips, on a Web photograph], not only making it more difficult for the bull to fight but reducing the risk of serious injury to you, blunt horns obviously having much less penetrating power than sharp horns. Do you have a comment? Were the horns of this bull sawn before your fight to make the horns blunt, was this bull chosen for your fight because it had these blunt horns, or is there another explanation? I write as an opponent of bullfighting.'
This material was 'awaiting moderation' for some time but eventually, the information was given that it had been 'deleted.' So he decided not to bring the matter to the attention of his readers and he decided that he had no need to answer the questions, or would rather that he didn't answer the questions. It seems to me that he fought an incapacitated bull. If he claims otherwise, then he needs to present evidence and argue his case - preferably without making the personal smears against me that he did on this occasion, after the information about deletion.
The American aficionado John McCormick writes about afeitado in his book 'Bullfighting: art, technique and Spanish society:
'Horn shaving (and other abuses to the toro) create a parody of the fiesta because it upsets the toro's timing, and therefore allows the torero to take 'risks' that look suicidal but are not so.
' ... the toro is lured into a narrow corral, trussed with ropes to the point where he is immobile, and 2 or 3 inches (called 'the diamond') are sawed off each horn with a hack-saw. The entire horn is then reshaped by filing, including a sharp point, but the toro has been raped of his life-long training in the precise use of his horns ... After filing, the horn may be rubbed with mud and dung to dirty up the dirty work ... Whoever has tried to force pills down a cat's throat is prepared to appreciate the effect upon the toro of being trussed by ropes and violated by the saw and the file; in addition, if the saw cuts too far down, tissue will be torn, and pain and perhaps fever follow, just as though one were to cut deeply into the flesh of one's nails.'
He follows this with a comment about the transportation of bulls to the ring: 'The length of the journey alone, during which the animals take neither food nor water, weakens them.'
This film (with commentary in French) shows the bull 'lured into a narrow corral, trussed with ropes to the point where he is immobile' and then subjected to sawing of the horn tips. The process is shown towards the end of the film - after a succession of shocking images, with diagrams which show exactly what the various stabbing implements (such as the 'rejones de castigo' or 'lances of punishment') do to the bull. A bull is shown with the 'killing sword' sticking out of its flanks. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_LNOpgq9bA&feature=g-vrec&context=G28f87baRVAAAAAAAAAA
Phil Davison writing just before the 1994 bullfighting 'season' began. There's no evidence that afeitado is any less of an issue now. '
El afeitado (horn-shaving) has been an unprecedented scandal this year,' said the then Interior Minister, Jose Luis Corcuera, at the end of last season. Unprecedented, perhaps, but hardly new. Permit me to cite the words of another ageing and near burnt-out scribe written 34 years ago.
' 'To protect the leading matadors, the bulls' horns had been cut off at the points and then shaved and filed down so that they looked like real horns. But they were as tender at the points as a fingernail that has been cut to the quick and if the bull could be made to bang them against the planks of the barrera, they would hurt so that he would be careful about hitting anything else. . .
' 'With the length of the horn shortened, the bull lost his sense of distance, too, and the matador was in much less danger.' Thus wrote Ernest Hemingway in 1960 in The Dangerous Summer, hardly his best book but certainly his last. 'A bull whose horns have been altered is at least 10 times as safe to work and kill as a bull with its horns intact,' the great man calculated.
'Bullfighting critics' descriptions of individual bulls are increasingly headed with the euphemism 'sospechoso de pitones' (suspicion over the horns).'
In Chapter 3, Alexander Fiske-Harrison notes of a cow due to be fought, ' ... I am surprised to see the farm manager cut the tips of its horns off with bolt-cutters. When it gets up, blood pumps out of the horns with little pulses of the heart, like water from a drinking fountain on an alternating current.' [This is rubbish, of course. A pump which uses alternating current shows no difference in its mode of working from one which uses direct current.] I do not ask why they do this, I merely watch.' Were bolt-cutters used on the bull which Alexander Fiske-Harrison took part in killing?
He certainly fought against a bull with blunt horns. No attempt had been made to reshape the horns and make them pointed, but it seems clear that this bull was not nearly so dangerous as he claims, as in the caption which accompanies Illustration 13: 'There are faults here. I am just happy to be alive.'
'British writer risks death in the afternoon' was the title of a depressingly large number of pieces by writers unaware of the real level of the risk of death during his fight - very, very low, with those blunt horns, the horns too of a young and undersized bull. Even if the horns had been sharp, his survival in the ring would have been overwhelmingly likely. Where are the fatality statistics which show that apprentice bullfighters, bullfighters killing their first bull, are at great risk of death? How many of the reviewers read all of the book? If they had, they would have found Alexander Fiske-Harrison's unintentionally revealing fatality statistics which make the title 'British writer risks death in the afternoon' ludicrously dramatic.
Bullfighting apologists can easily remember the lost bullfighters, the mortals but near-immortals whose names resonate with and impress so many outside the faith - there are so few of them. Alexander Fiske-Harrison shamelessly aligns himself with these few. The date was set for his fight to the death, 5 November, and the time. 'Enrique also decided that the fight should occur at five o' clock in the afternoon. This being the time mentioned in the refrain of the García Lorca poem every schoolboy in Spain knows so well.
A las cinco de la tarde.
Eran las cinco en punto de la
tarde.
'At five in the afternoon.
It was at exactly five in the afternoon.'
'Of course, there was something more than a little ominous about that choice of time for, as the first verse ends:
Lo demás era muerte y sólo muerte
a las cinco
de la tarde.
'The rest was death, and death alone
at five in the afternoon.' '
The blunt horns alone, whether cut with bolt-cutters or by some other means, made this very, very unlikely.
Section 1 of this poem is certainly an artistic failure. The repetition 23 times of 'at five in the afternoon' is interminable rather than inexorable. An unsophisticated writer who protested 'at five in the afternoon! We get the point! Now get on with the poem!' would have a point.
Towards the end of the poem, the mono-culture of Andalucia, for such people as Lorca, is made clear in all its exhausted and parochial limitation: the bullfighter as the supreme representative of this society, or one of the supreme representatives, the inability to imagine far greater achievement in a different sphere, perhaps for all time:
'It will be a long time, if ever, before there is
born
an Andalusian so true, so rich in
adventure'
Alexander Fiske-Harrison's fixation on the alleged dangers to life of bullfighting becomes more and more wearisome. This is far from being only his fixation. It pervades the bullfighting world.
He trains with a small calf (an animal less than a year old). Illustration 27 draws attention to 'the grim determination' on his face.
He goes to a bullring where his friend Padilla is due to fight. He describes the way matadors get out of bed on the day of a bullfight. 'His focus at the time is completely on his forthcoming war with Death ...' The bullring is small. He sees Padilla's father, wife and daughter. 'It seems a strangely cosy place to risk your life with your family watching.'
Before a bullfight, the matador Cayetano looks at 'the flag of Spain fluttering above the ring.' Cayetano says, 'That! That is what I hate.' Not, we're quickly informed, the flag but the wind that makes it fly. Bullfighting is more dangerous when there's a wind. Cayetano says, 'The wind, that is what kills you.' This goes unchallenged by the author, of course. But no bullfighter has been killed in Spain since 1992, in all meteorological conditions. If the winds were strong or almost gale force, they made no difference.
In one of the later chapters of the book, the author is with a matador, Alfonso, due to fight the next day. He talks about members of his family. This becomes, 'Tomorrow he struggles with Death, so tonight he struggles with his life.' This would sound much less impressive is, 'Tomorrow, he struggles with the possibility that he may become the first fatality in the bullring since 1992, so tonight he struggles with his life.' If the death of the bulls is meant, this ought to have been made clear.
On the previous page, he reports his father standing up to the men who attempted a coup d' état in 1981. They fired into the air. His father sat with arms folded. 'How did he do that? He was never a soldier. How? Because when you have fought a bull, gunfire just becomes one more thing that can kill you. Just one more among many, and not the most terrifying at that.' Here, as well as the usual overestimation of the dangers of bullfighting, there's obviously an underestimation of gunfire.
A few pages later, on the day of the bullfight, 'In Adolfo's hotel room I join him in the strange silence of a man preparing for war.' The men about to land on the beaches on D-day against machine gun fire were preparing for war too, but with the odds not nearly so favourable.
In Chapter 15, he recounts a visit to an army base on Salisbury Plain. He arrives in the office of a lieutenant-general, where finds the office 'running at unusual speed to deal with the fact that a record number of British servicemen had died earlier that day in Afghanistan.' The main incident had killed five men at once and 'involved a secondary attack with improvised Explosive Devices (IEDS).' On the same page, ' ... what struck me most was the calm manner with which everyone - and I include the rank and file I met - dealt with the death of comrades and the risk of death to themselves. It contrasts a great deal with the way people talk about matadors, and sometimes the way matadors talk about themselves, even though no torero has died in the ring in Spain since 1992.' His book is a dramatic confirmation of this. He indulges in the flagrant exaggeration of danger again and again. The restraint of these soldiers is conspicuously lacking.
In my section The courage of the bullfighters above I compare the fatality rate of bullfighters and fatality rates in some other activities, and point out that bullfighting is much, much less dangerous than these activities. Alexander Fiske-Harrison records injuries to bullfighters, and here, his argument has apparently more substance. Bullfighters would seem to risk injury, sometimes severe injury. I maintain that accusations of 'cowardice' against them can't be sustained. But I also point out that the injuries sustained in modern warfare have been and are much more severe, very often.
There's evidence - not evidence which aficionados share with those outside their circle, for obvious reasons - that most of the injuries in the bullring are due to recklessness or negligence. An 'aficionado,' Andrew Moore, writing for 'La Divisa,' published by the Club Taurino of London, provides a perspective in his piece 'José Tomás in Madrid' which was intended to be read by bullfighting supporters but which has obvious importance for bullfighting opponents. He relates some criticisms made of this bullfighter, including his ' "excessive” daring ... the ragged, unorthodox kills. This is not what toreo is all about, they are saying, reminding us that Pedro Romero killed over 2,000 bulls without ever getting scratched, and that Marcial Lalanda always said that, “good toreros don’t get gored”.' The information is given that José Tomás earned 720 000 euros for his two performances in Madrid.
Avoiding injury isn't completely within the control of the bullfighter, but avoiding recklessness reduces the risk a great deal.
In Chapter 6, the author gives a graphic description of the scars left on the body of Padilla, a bullfighter who has suffered severe injury more than any other in modern times. He has been severely injured since the book was published. This is a reckless bullfighter by any standards, as this account from 'Into the Arena' makes clear:
'At one point, when the bull refuses to charge, he approaches it and leans down asking it why. He leans his head between the points of the two semi-circular horn arcs and asks again. The crowd holds its breath. Then, with a flash, he head-butts the bull between the eyes and steps back to receive the inevitable charge. The applause is loud, but even louder when he does it a second time.' Anyone who shows this degree of recklessness, who head-butts a bull, has only himself to blame if he gets hurt. On this occasion, he isn't.
At the end of the chapter, Padilla is described as a 'showman' and 'a man who fits the old Roman description of what makes a great gladiator ...' Many of the arguments for bullfighting are also arguments for gladiator-fighting. Both activities, despite the differences, are morally beyond the pale, I claim.
In Chapter 13, it becomes even clearer that if bullfighters are injured, it may well be due to their own flaws. Padilla follows the bullfighter Jose Tomás, and is aware that he's regarded as a far less accomplished bullfighter, so he tries to compensate:
'Padilla went into the ring to impress, and doing so, and in contrast to the images of Tomás still replaying in my mind's eye, he came across as reckless and artless. He brought the bull so close to his body that it was constantly buffeting him ... Every audience member seemed to be thinking the same thing simultaneously: 'Padilla, we forgot about Padilla! And he took his revenge on our nerves, forcing us to the edge of our seats with his ludicrously dangerous caping, staring up at the crowd rather than at the bull with accusing eyes, the jilted lover standing at the cliff's edge.'
For such reasons as these, the dangers of bullfighting have to be put into context, a context concealed by the bullfighting apologists who have a vested interest in exaggerating them and making them part of the bullfighting mythology but unwittingly revealed here by the author.
The bullfighting audience tends to make clear its disapproval, of bullfighters and bulls, by throwing cushions into the arena, jeering and whistling. I think that the stupidities of Alexander Fiske-Harrison and other bullfighting apologists, their falsification of reality, deserve a strong and robust counter-response. Towards the end of the book, he claims of the bullring, "And in that ring are all the tragic and brutal truths of the world unadorned.' This is a gross falsification of the tragic and brutal truths of the world. In the Prologue, he quotes the words of the poet García Lorca: 'the bullfight is the last serious thing left in the world today'. These words, written in the thirties, when many millions had been left maimed in mind or body by their experiences in the First World War, when the anything-but-trivial movement of Nazism was beginning, were falsified by the seriousness of reality in these and countless other ways then and have been falsified in countless ways in every decade since then, and falsified in countless ways too by the serious achievement or the striving for serious achievement of countless men and women. Lorca's 'the bullfight is the last serious thing left in the world' has the benefit of sounding impressive, to many, but it belongs only to what I call 'the world sphere.' Anyone who reflects on such matters as serious politics, art, culture, the realities of war and the realities of peace, the struggles of everyday life and struggles for survival, will surely realize the ridiculous and dismal falsity of those words.
The material I give towards the end of this section on the horrific occupation of Poland during the Second World War and its utterly ruthless Governor, Hans Frank, is a reminder of some realities. To say that the extermination camps in Poland at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno and other places, the crushing of the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto (some 6 000 burnt alive or dying of smoke inhalation), the crushing of the resistance Home Army in Warsaw, the daily terrors of the long occupation, during which over 5 million Polish civilians died, to say that these and all the other tragic and brutal truths of the world are in the bullring, unadorned, is monstrous and Alexander Fiske-Harrison's endorsement of the lie is monstrous.
The only strength to have emerged so far at this early stage in the book is a strength, a comparative strength, which has nothing to do with the ethics of bullfighting, the rendering of sights and sounds. These descriptive powers have nothing to do with the ethics of bullfighting. A moral case isn't won if one side has superior skills in writing. As for Alexander Fiske-Harrison's skills, he's obviously a stylist, although not a stylist with any noticeable individuality. 'As Fandi's sun-blinded eyes stared into the darkness he heard the distant protest of heavy steel bolts sliding into their housings, followed by muffled shouting and the hollow sound of unshod hooves skittering on concrete. Then came the dull crash of horns against steel. The sounds repeated closer as further doors were opened, followed by more crashes. Then, from within the darkness, came a rearing, jolting black head, eyes focused, nostrils flaring, ears forward, a foot and a half of horns tapering to fine points above it. And behind it came a half-ton of pulsing muscle propelling it at a steady twenty-five miles an hour.'
The set-piece is over very quickly and gives way to some trite observations, trite observations disguised as penetrating observations and trite observations which are undisguised. He writes, 'A final word about El Fandi. It turns out he was indeed unusually good. The next day the national newspaper ABC said of that fight: 'El Fandi saved the honour of Seville.' Any city of this size which regards its reputation as bound up with one activity to the exclusion of all others must have a fragile self-confidence and very limited horizons - to say nothing of the worse than disreputable activity it embraces. This is a variant of the Lorca error, of course - the deluded belief that bullfighting is uniquely important. After quoting the newspaper, Alexander Fiske-Harrison concludes his Prologue: 'There was a lot I didn't know back then.' Some things never change.
Chapter 1 contains samples of high-flown language, and of the basic, simple-minded language. After the killing of one bull: 'I turn to Tanis [an aficionado] and say, 'Cojones.' He has balls.' 'Cojones' is what I call a 'cliché word' (not all clichés are phrases). After this not so interesting observation, there's bathos. Tanis replies, 'Si, mi amigo, pero no dos, cuatro.' Translation: 'Yes, my friend, but not two, four.' Presumably the bravest bullfighter who ever lived had, or does have, an even larger number of balls - eight. sixteen, thirty-two or whatever.
In some later chapters, Alexander Fiske-Harrison's enthusiasm for bullfighting is tested by events he witnessed in the bullring. His reaction is disturbing. Anyone who thinks that there is any Acceptable Face of Bullfighting should consider his reaction and reconsider. The post of Acceptable Face of Bullfighting is now vacant again, and can't be filled. Alexander Fiske-Harrison reverted to type.
'Not only did this "matador" ... have to go in three times with the killing sword, but then, when the bull was clearly insufficiently wounded for death, his use of the descabello sword to sever the spinal cord was execrable. I lost count of the number of times he stabbed the poor animal - twenty, thirty? [the critic from El Mundo counted seventeen] - by then its neck began to resemble a dish you might serve on a plate ... when it finally died, I asked my girlfriend if she wanted to leave, but now, her perspective on bullfights changed for ever, she felt she had a duty to see it through.'
He makes a comment about the need for matadors to be regulated, for withdrawal of their position as matadors to be possible, but in the meantime, with any such regulation far off, if it ever happens at all, with stabbings at the spine of the bull with a sword embedded in its back commonplace, if not usually so many stabbings, with all the hideous cruelty inflicted by the most prominent bullfighters at the most prominent bullrings and the hideous cruelty inflicted by the amateurish - or amateur - bullfighters at the small arenas, he continued to attend bullfights and he continues to oppose the abolition of bullfighting. He seems oblivious of the fact that any system of regulation would have to prohibit people such as himself from attempting to kill a bull.
He describes the reaction of a woman, Geri, who 'had been a regular attendee at bullfights in her youth.' After an operation, 'she contracted 'the flesh-eating bug' of newspaper horror stories. She survived, but says that to now see the bull with the sword in its back, as the banderilleros flash their capes in front of it to make it turn so that the blade will sever a major blood vessel within and hasten its death, was now almost unbearable for her.' This is a moral advance which Alexander Fiske-Harrison feels unable to follow in this book.
In various places, I draw attention to the linkage between the depraved world of the Roman amphitheatre - the gladiators and the killing of animals - and the depraved world of the bullfight. At one bullfight he attended, the bull gained the approval of the crowd. 'First of all one or two white handkerchiefs came out, then it spread throughout the crowd
...
'They are asking for an indulto, they want the bull to be pardoned.' [The author's photographer.]
At this point Fandi let his muleta drop down by his side and the bull, only two feet away, duly stopped its charginhg, its focus remaining on the limp cloth. Then he looked up at the president in exactly the same manner as thousands of gladiators had looked up to Caesar over the still living form of a defeated opponent, and waited to see if he would be condemned to death or spared.
The mob [the author's name for the bullfighting audience, himself included, but a suitable one] bayed for mercy, the matador indicated he followed their opinion with a small gesture of his hand and an inclination of his head, but the president merely rolled his fingers, giving the universal gesture of 'carry on'. Carry on and we shall see. The bull was eventually spared, but this was no more a demonstration of the humanity of bullfighting than the sparing of some gladiators as a demonstration of the humanity of gladiator-fighting.
The author records the monotony or mediocrity of most bullfighting, the cruelty of bullfighting, but claims that a few, a very few bullfights are transcendental (not his word.) But these are workings of 'the same poem' (the phrase he uses), not the endlessly varied forms of authentic art, and they are examples of cruelty, like all the monotonous and mediocre bullfights.
David McNaughton, in his book concerned with ethics 'Moral Vision' (1988), written from the perspective of particularist moral realism, gives arguments which are surely very cogent, or decisive, against the limitations of classical utilitarianism: pleasure as a nonmoral aspect which is taken to have moral relevance. The example he gives is of a government considering reintroducing public executions. 'If reactions to public hangings in the past are anything to go by, a lot of people may enjoy the spectacle. Does that constitute a reason for reintroduction? Is the fact that people would enjoy it a reason for its being right? It would be perfectly possible to take just the opposite view. The fact that spectators might get a sadistic thrill from the brutal spectacle could be thought to constitute an objection to reintroduction. Whether the fact that an action causes pleasure is a reason for or against doing it is not something that can be settled in isolation from other features of the action. It is only when we know the context in which the pleasure will occur that we are in a position to judge.'
The pleasure which people derive from the brutal spectacle of bullfighting has to be examined in the same way. The pleasure doesn't authenticate, make legitimate, the spectacle. The same argument applies to all the ecstatic reactions to the bullfight which are claimed to go beyond simple pleasure. These reactions too have to be examined in the context of the action, the bullfight. See also the examples I give in the section 'Bullfighting as an art form,' beginning with my discussion of a comment made by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Even if it could be shown that bullfighters faced an enormous risk of death every time they entered the ring, and this isn't the case at all, courage wouldn't authenticate, make legitimate the spectacle. The truth of Christianity isn't established by the courage of the Christian martyrs. Nazism isn't converted from a bad cause to a good cause because enormous numbers of German soldiers and civilians showed enormous courage in promoting and defending Nazism.
An appreciation of Neil White, an academic in the field of computer science who had died recently, included this:
'One perhaps surprising sporting interest of Neil's was his love-affair with bull fighting. Of course, as a Guardian-reading left-wing socialist he was against bull fighting on principle, but as a scientist he knew he should see at least one fight before condemning it out of hand. He went only to have a Damascene conversion. It changed his life. In order to keep up with the latest bull fighting news, not much carried in the sporting pages of the UK national papers, Neil determined to learn Spanish. In one year he passed his GCSE and the following year his A Level in Spanish.'
This will seem very impressive, decisive not just to supporters of bullfighting but evidence in favour of bullfighting to many uncommitted people. In fact, it's not in the least impressive or decisive.
'Damascene conversion' is a reference to the conversion to Christianity of Paul, the future St Paul, on the road to Damascus. St Paul developed a theology of justification to faith as opposed to justification by works. According to a theology of justification by works, good deeds could allow a person to enter heaven. According to St Paul, good deeds (such as a life devoted to relieving suffering) were irrelevant. Only faith in Christ counted. Anyone who has reservations about Christianity or who opposes Christianity, many Christians who reject Pauline theology, including justification by faith, will be unimpressed by this Damascene conversion. Just because Paul had his intense experience, his 'Damascene conversion' we have no obligation to accept his views.
Bullfighting supporters have experienced momentous de-conversions. The Colombian bullfighter El Pilarico turned against bullfighting as decisively as Neil White turned in favour of bullfighting, for example. A conversion and a de-conversion have to be examined very carefully, from a variety of perspectives. I think that multiple perspectives very much favour the anti-bullfighting case. Someone 'converted' to bullfighting is likely to see things from the partial - the selfish - perspective of someone who feels a new form of pleasure and excitement. The perspective of the horses and bulls suffering in the bullring is likely to be overlooked.
In the twentieth century, many people accepted Communism with the passion of converts. The book 'The God that failed' records the disillusionment of ex-Communists, de-converted Communists.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison ignores, at least in this book, all the transcendental experiences outside bullfighting, which involve no cruelty: the thrilling calm of a lake with a strong sun beginning to beat it into gold, the lake beginning to dissolve into darkness at dusk, the violence of the sea battering huge cliffs, a conflict more titanic than anything to be witnessed in the bullring, the sea as calm as a lake, seeming to stretch not to the horizon but to infinity, the sea from sunrise to sunset and at night
Acknowledgments, photograph of the Aegean Sea: vogageAnatlia.tumlr.com's photostream (flickr)
the sea in great and authentic art: Homer's 'wind-dark' sea, Turner's wild seascapes - the power and the fury - the North Sea, the sea of the sea interludes in Britten's 'Peter Grimes,' and as sombre and perplexing as Peter Grimes himself, the Great Bear and Pleiades shining above this sea, the calm sea conveyed with transcendental beauty in 'Soave sia il vento' in Mozart's 'Cosi fan Tutte' as two of the lovers set sail, an opera which is ambiguous, elusive, enigmatic, subtle, rendering an astonishing range of human experience and far more complex than any bullfight, the mastery of orchestral colour in this as in Mozart's other great operas - the muted violins in thirds, the bassoons climbing from their lower register in Soave sia il vento' (David Cairns writes of 'the smooth, mellifluous sonority of clarinets, horns, muted violins, and women's voices entwined in long, lingering phrases full of half-suppressed longing in 'Mozart and his Operas'), the transcendental technique of this and Mozart's other great works and all the other works of developed artistry of other artists, of a completely different order from the technique of any bullfighter, books which may or may not be about the sea but which reflect Kafka's 'a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. '
To quarry stone, transport it, shape it, lift it and produce a work of architectural art such as the fan vaulting of King's College Chapel, Cambridge - and the other stonework of the chapel - and the wood carving of the massive screen, and the stained glass windows - obviously requires technique of a very high order, completely eclipsing any bullfighting technique. Although images of the chapel interior are very familiar, I include one below, as a further reminder of the incomparable richness of the world beyond bullfighting, including the incomparable richness of performing art, such as musical performance, as well as non-performed art. The image shows both.
Acknowledgments: Vocalessence (Flickr)
To attend to one thing so many others must be neglected. People who ignore or loathe the bullfight aren't unfortunates cut off from the possibility of transcendental experience. I mention just two other sources of deep satisfaction, and sometimes of transcendental experience, for me. One is watching the swifts during the summer months, their swooping flight and moving cries, high overhead or dramatically close, shooting by, lower than the rooftops. These are birds which fly all their lives, except when they are nesting and feeding their young, mating on the wing and sleeping on the wing. The other is the experience of growing, which will be clear from two of the pages of the gardening section of this site, Photographs 1 and Photographs 2.
I myself have never had the money to travel extensively and frequently. I've no envy of people taking long-haul flights for pleasure year after year, several times a year. I've travelled far more than Thoreau, who remained close to Concord, Massachusetts, except for one visit to Canada, but his rapt observations of nature and landscape, including the lake he has made famous, Walden, are incomparable. From his essay 'Walking, on what he saw not in the summer months or the time of the brilliant autumn foliage but when the trees were leafless, in the unpromising month of November:'
'We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold, gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon and on the leaves of the shrub oaks on the hillside, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever, an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.'
Authentic art offers more than transcendental experiences, of course, but a range of experiences and a range of insights vastly wider than anything available at a bullfight, evading no aspect of human experience - harshness, ugliness, the everyday, desolate urban life, streets and commerce and factories as well as sunsets lighting up unspoiled countryside or the Aegean. It would obviously be completely impossible to list them, to do the least justice to them. I simply mention the spare and unsparing insights into human life of Samuel Beckett, in such novels as 'Malone Dies,' and provide this image, of Van Gogh's 'Two women in the Moor,' of work, of bent backs. Van Gogh lived at Arles for a time. Arles can be proud that Van Gogh chose to live there, if not in the least proud of its ignominious status as one of the main centres of bullfighting in Southern France. Van Gogh was, of course, an artist of the utmost seriousness, but there have been innumerable serious painters and other serious artists since his time with serious themes - more evidence that Lorca's description of bullfighting as 'the last serious thing in the world' (quoted with approval by Alexander Fiske-Harrison) is a travesty.
Acknowledgments: Creative Commons BY-SA license
These images of nature, architecture and painting, and the examples I give, are no more than reminders, of course - other people can come up with reminders of their own - of the world beyond bullfighting. The wider world can seem distant when one is within its narrow confines, even if only, temporarily, as a reader of bullfighting works. Contact with a narrow religious sect might give rise to similar feelings, the need for similar simple reminders of the wider world beyond the sect. I know that Alexander Fiske-Harrison has wider cultural knowledge (I don't have any evidence of wider cultural interests, which is a different matter) but it's striking that in his book, they seem so distant. Nobody who had an adequate view of the world outside bullfighting could possibly repeat as he does, as if by rote, Lorca's rubbish about bullfighting being the last serious thing in the world, or the rubbish he perpetrates in other places.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison's parents went to see him kill a bull and attended one or more 'professional' bullfights before that. After watching Padrilla kill his bulls in the arena, together with his parents, he describes their reaction: 'We walk back to the hotel and my parents are excited and alive [unlike the bull, of course]; Padrilla's display has invigorated them ...' His parents are wealthy. (His father founded Fiske plc, the stockbrokers.) They could afford the fees for Eton College, the exclusive school which Alexander Fiske-Harrison attended. If they like to travel, they can travel to many interesting and beautiful places, if they like fine wine, they can afford to buy it, if they like fine food, they can afford to eat in fine restaurants. There are so many other pleasures available to them, including ones that cost nothing at all, the riches of the world which are free. With such riches, why the need to see these killings? They should be ashamed.
All over the world, villages, towns and cities have festivals and other events, small and low-key or large and ambitious, which can be a complete delight and which are untarnished by cruelty. Arles is the only bullfighting town I've ever visited, and all its obvious attractions were overshadowed for me by bullfighting. I travelled from there to Northern France and across the border to Belgium, setting up camp at Ieper / Ypres. In the square in front of the cloth hall, there was an event taking place, or rather many small events, all of them unpretentious, not dramatic, but such a pleasure to watch - singing, Flemish street theatre, people in the costume of the area, and a band of pipers in Scottish highland dress - Flemish pipers! With, in the cafes around the square, wonderful Belgian beer.
Another example, the festivities at Hartland in Devon - not much more than farmers and other local people using their imagination to construct floats pulled by tractors and other scenes, but in its good humour and sense of occasion, like the event at Ieper impressive as well as enjoyable.
The Munich Oktoberfest, the Carnival at Cologne and other German cities, opera performances in the Roman arena at Verona, are far bigger and more ambitious, of course, but are further evidence, if evidence is needed at all, that people who do without bullfighting aren't in the least reduced to a an unsatisfactory state of existence. None of us are reduced to an unsatisfactory state of existence because we do without gladiator-fighting.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison's abilities as a stylist are evident throughout the book, sometimes intermittently, sometimes for long stretches - these have to be considered separately from what he's trying to express. It has to be acknowledged that bad causes sometimes have personable advocates, that bad causes may be supported by gifted organizers, notable intellectuals, good or great writers and artists, and other people of note. Bullfighters have to show courage, some, such as Jose Tomás, much greater courage than others (subject to the severe qualifications I make above), bullfighters have to show skill, some, such as Jose Tomás again, show much greater skill than others (but the levels of skill in many human activities are stratospherically high). Gladiator fighting (very different from bullfighting, but with too many linkages with bullfighting for comfort) called for courage and skill of a high order too. The fact that bullfighting demands courage and skill isn't a reason for condoning it, supporting it or failing to ban it.
To return to Jose Tomás, the author agrees with the admirers, not with the detractors, and uses superlatives profusely in a long section on him. What would he answer if asked these questions: how does the best bullfighter, in your view and the view of many others, compare in importance, skill, courage, and other ways, with 'the best' in very different fields? The author's failures of perspective seem overwhelmingly obvious to me.
This film http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18bOa6JVeIg&feature=g-vrec&context=G2d77bf8RVAAAAAAAAAg shows Jose Tomás in the third phase of the bullfight. It shows how long he takes to kill a bull, or rather to attempt to kill a bull: the cruelty of Jose Tomás. When he has killed a bull at once, then the death always follows multiple woundings: the cruelty of Jose Tomás.
After running with the bulls, Alexander Fiske-Harrison attended a bullfight in Pamplona, vowing never to attend another there. It's cause for great regret and cause for moral condemnation of Alexander Fiske-Harrison that he didn't decide never to attend another bullfight anywhere. This is the most heartfelt and most sustained description of the plight of a bull in 'Into the Arena' by far:
'It was a strangely moving experience running side-by-side with a bull, close enough to touch, although I have been warned that that was frowned upon ... he was pure brown in colour and apparently totally ignorant of my existence at his flank, his whole being determined only to keep with his herd and get clear of this mass of humanity. The kinship I felt with him was purely physical, locomotory, experience, but it was still more than superficial.
'Later that evening I watched the one and only bullfight I will ever see in Pamplona. The party atmosphere from the streets was magnified in the ring. Not one, but six bands were in operation, each one from a different fan club celebrating. The fans themselves danced and shouted and swore and drank, half the time with their backs to the sand. The matadors valiantly tried to get their attention by fighting, but the bulls were so distracted by the noise - and being run through the streets that morning - that they were almost impossible to make charge. It was an ugly, barbaric thing. And then the bull I had run beside came in, and although he was fought well, he refused to die, despite the sword being within him. As the crowd cheered and booed, swayed and screamed, he walked over to the planks and began a long slow march around the ring, holding on to life as though with some internal clenched fist, refusing to give up, refusing to die. I had run next to this great animal, had matched myself to him as best I could, and in doing so felt some form of connection to the powers that propelled him. Now I watched them all turned inwards in an attempt to defy the tiny, rigid ribbon of steel within his chest, and having been blinded by no beauty, tricked by no displays of courage or prowess by the matadors, I just saw an animal trying to stay on its feet against the insuperable reality of death. I left the plaza de toros with tears in my eyes after that. And there was nothing good in all that place.'
This is far from being the only instance of confusion in the book, but here the confusion is particularly acute: heartening and not in the least heartening at the same time. The plight of the animal is memorably shown, but at variance with this is the implied criticism of the crowd for disregarding the bullfight, for ignoring the matadors 'valiantly' trying to gain their attention, and the drawing of attention to the 'failure' of the bulls to charge. Worst of all, he overlooks that fact that the plight of Conséjote, the bull he fought, was the same as this bull at Pamplona - he too 'refused to die, despite the sword being within him,' the sword thrust in this case delivered by one Alexander Fiske-Harrison. He doesn't record whether or not the matador at Pamplona struck bone before thrusting the sword in deep, as Alexander Fiske-Harrison did, twice. His parents and the others who watched him can have seen 'no beauty ... or prowess' in this amateur bullfighter's performance, and as for 'displays of courage,' the young age, undersized development and blunt horns of the animal largely excluded any possibility of extraordinary displays of courage or anything very special. There was nothing good in the small arena where Alexander Fiske-Harrison gained the material for Chapter 20 of his book, entitled 'La Estocada,' (the killing sword, and the sword thrust made with it.)
For many or some of the people who attend the running of the bulls at Pamplona and the bullfights, it seems, the events are secondary, having a party primary. It may well be that bulls die in other places so that people can get out of the house, improve their social life, meet new friends, talk with old friends, have a focus in their life. There are many other interests which would serve just as well, without the devastating consequences.
A few lines later, he starts a new chapter, travels from Pamplona to Ronda to watch more bullfighting, the tone quickly brisk and matter of fact, callously matter of fact. From this point on, he records practically no misgivings about bullfighting. Of the first bull of the bullfight in Ronda, ' ... when Manzanares goes in with the sword, I seem to see the bunched muscle of the shoulders actually preventing the blade from going in, catching the steel as though in a clenched fist. However, it does go in the second time and [unlike the majority of the bulls' deaths described in the book] the death is quick.'
'The crowd seem an eager bunch, silent when necessary, but generous with applause for good work. They demand an ear for the performance, but the president is more sober than they and ignores the appeal.' Another bull's death is dedicated 'to the plaza with style, and to roaring applause. The appreciative audience, without the boorishness of the Pamplona audience, gains his approval.
His descriptions are sometimes vivid, including his descriptions of the most harrowing scenes, the dialogue is often well done, but the omissions are glaringly obvious too. In the book, too much of importance is left unexamined. For one thing, he doesn't examine at all deeply this society which has welcomed him. He's sufficiently objective and independent to criticize individual bullfighters, including ones who have become his friends, but he doesn't examine at all deeply this society of Southern Spain. He describes his visits to bull breeding and bull rearing farms but no matter how well he describes his experiences, the perspective is a limited one. His account has to be supplemented, by an examination, for example, of the finances of these places.
The European Union gives the bull breeders and bull rearers something like 185 pounds per bull per year, 37 million pounds per year in total subsidies. The European Union pays for the renovation of bullrings as well.
The book is meant to be about bullfighting and is about bullfighting, but it suffers (but that may not be the best word to use in a book which gives so many instances of suffering) from a lack of context. These bullfighting supporters, or very many of them, are supporting not just the formal bullfight but a host of different informal events, the 'blood fiestas.'
FAACE: 'The vast majority of Blood Fiestas use cattle as their victims. Bulls, cows and calves from the bullfighting herds ...' In Spanish law, 'Blood fiestas with cattle are classified as bullfighting.'
A little information about the fiesta called the 'Toro de la Vega' in Tordesillas, North West of Madrid, will convey the context of cruelty and the context of finance.
The bull is driven by horsemen wielding spears from the town to a meadow. During the run, the horsemen are only allowed to wound the bull. It's only when the badly wounded animal reaches the meadow that it can be killed. The person who finally kills the bull cuts off the bull's testicles, impales them on the point of his spear and parades them through the town, which gives him a gold medal.
In an article in 'The Daily Mail,' an exceptional piece of investigative and humane journalism, Danny Penman describes the treatment of the bull which he witnessed:
'I watched as men on horseback tried to skewer it with their eight-foot long spears. Spear after spear sliced open his back.
'Once his strength began to ebb, the men became increasingly bold and moved in closer. This was the bit they clearly loved most of all - a time when they could begin to play with the bull without serious risk of injury to themselves.
'I watched as one horseman impaled the creature and twisted and turned his spear deeper and deeper into him.
'This seemed to fatally weaken the animal and he fell onto his front knees snorting and bellowing - his distress apparent. Within moments, several more spears had pierced his body.
...
Marcos held aloft the blood-soaked bull's ears and bowed deeply to the crowd. Moments earlier he'd sliced them off the young bull, which now lay on one side, blood pooling beneath him.
'But the poor creature wasn't quite finished yet. In a pitiful act of defiance, he mustered just enough energy to raise his head a few inches off the ground ...
'Marcos responded by unsheathing a vicious-looking knife and stabbing him in the back of the neck a second time. The bull's head flopped back into the dust - he was finished ...'
Alexander Fiske-Harrison, like Giles Coren and others, gives very great prominence to one particular argument: that whatever the bull may suffer in the bullring, it's had a better life than factory farmed animals. The bulls repeatedly stabbed and killed in the bullring are the fortunate ones. He seems not to realize that beef cattle haven't been subjected to factory farming in the same way as pigs or chickens. In the United States, they often spend time in feedlots, but without the close confinement of very intensive farming.
The important point is this. Their argument would justify as well the cruelty of this event at Tordesillas, the argument that the bull has had a good life compared with factory-farmed animals and that this outweighs any cruelties in the killing. Do Giles Coren and Alexander Fiske-Harrison really believe that the bull repeatedly stabbed and killed at Tordesillas is one of the 'fortunate' bulls?
Alexander Fiske-Harrison writes of Conséjote, the bull he stabbed: 'Conséjote lived three years among his brothers, and died within their call, in the country where he belongs.' Just as much could be claimed of the bull speared at Tordesillas, and this bull lived for longer than three years. By Alexander Fiske-Harrison's arguments, this bull was even more fortunate than Conséjote.
Against this, it's essential to stress again and again this point, which I've already made above. Minimum standards for the care of domesticated animals which are eventually slaughtered are these: (1) Conditions as humane as possible during the animal's lifetime. (2) Every effort made to ensure humane slaughter, by comprehensive regulations governing slaughter and efforts to enforce regulations. Bulls killed in the bullring, bulls killed during this and similar 'blood fiestas' have the advantage of (1) but not at all (2). Abolition of the blood fiesta at Tordesillas and the other blood fiestas is necessary and abolition of the bullfight is necessary.
The farm that bred this bull, Platanito, is called Finca Valdeolivas, Danny Penman reveals, and it's owned by the Gil family. 'Judging by the number of expensive cars and pick-up trucks parked in their driveway, they must be one of the richest families in the area.
'Finca Valdeolivas is in the heart of Spain's fighting bull country and it's clear the Gils are taking full advantage of it.'
...
'I tried to talk to Don Miguel Ángel Gil Marín, head of the family that owns the finca, but he declined to answer my questions.
'I was, however, able to examine the EU's accounts and discover that Finca Valdealivas received at least 139 000 pounds in subsidies last year.
...
'The majority of the money flowing into Finca Valdeolivas is from the Common Agricultural Policy's Single Farm Payment scheme. This pays landowners a fee for managing the land, leaving them free to farm it in anyway they choose.'
In Britain, landowners have often used the scheme to abandon intensive farming practices. In Spain, many landowners have used the money in a similar way, but many have used it to rear animals for the bullring and the blood fiestas.
The picture of sturdy independence which Alexander Fiske-Hamilton implicitly conveys in his book is misleading. The reality is much more awkward and much less impressive, involving the receipt of handouts from the Common Agricultural Policy's Single Farm Payment scheme.
John McCormick wrote of the book on bullfighting by Kenneth Tynan, the theatre critic and bullfighting enthusiast, 'Although Kenneth Tynan's instincts are critical and aesthetic, in his book he was busy recording impressions rather than constructing arguments.'
This is certainly true of Alexander Fiske-Harrison. The arguments he does put forward are feeble. He studied philosophy in the course of his higher education and has been described as 'the bullfighter-philosopher' but this description is patent rubbish, on the evidence of this book. He refers to 'the slow construction of the philosophical edifice of how I made peace with the idea of becoming a killer' but his reasoning is perfunctory and has nothing to do with philosophy. Anything less like a philosophical edifice is difficult to imagine.
He read Peter Singer's 'Animal Liberation' and Tom Regan's 'The Case for Animal Rights' and declares that 'the end point of all their arguments is an unavoidable one. If man has a moral duty to minimise the suffering of non-human animals in so far as he is capable, then there is no way in this scheme, in theory, to distinguish between domestic animals and wild ones. So our duty would include, for example, stopping lions from killing antelope in so far as we are capable.' Mark Rowlands disposed of this erroneous argument in his review.
This 'argument' is worse than feeble, practically moronic. Humanity has a general responsibility to domestic animals and a general responsibility not to inflict unnecessary suffering on wild animals, but no general responsibility to prevent the suffering of a wild animal caused by another wild animal. There are no responsibilities in cases where action is impossible, except for token gestures. Making these token gestures would be a ridiculous waste of time, energy and money. Are people with a concern for animal welfare expected to fly to an African country, equip ourselves with tranquillizing equipment and begin 'stopping lions from killing antelope in so far as we are capable,' or send money to people in Africa who can undertake the task on our behalf? All the world's resources would be completely insufficient to do more than make a start on such a grandiose and nonsensical project.
It seems logical to Alexander Fiske-Harrison that opponents of bullfighting should be opposing meat-eating instead, or as a greater priority. He seems to have no conception of concrete realities, of the choices to be made by people with an intense concern for animal welfare but with obvious {restriction}: time, money and energy. Many opponents of bullfighting will also oppose meat-eating, but these people will realize that bullfighting and meat-eating pose vastly different challenges. Two areas of Spain have banned bullfighting, Catalonia and the Canary Islands. No areas of Spain have banned meat-eating, of course. Banning bullfighting in further areas of Spain is a difficult but achievable objective. Modest reductions in meat-eating and even significant reductions in meat-eating are an achievable objective, but not the banning of meat-eating. Opponents of bull-baiting and bear-baiting in this country in the early nineteenth century had an achievable objective, an objective which was won in 1835 with the abolition of bull-baiting and bear-baiting.
The principle that 'ought implies can' is relevant to these two matters, preventing killing by wild animals and preventing the slaughter of farm animals by humans. The principle is often ascribed to Kant. He never formulates it in these words, but it appears in less epigrammatic form in many of his writings, eg in 'The Critique of Pure Reason:' ... since they [principles of the possibility of experience] command that these actions [in conformity with moral precepts which could be encountered in the history of humankind] ought to happen, they must also be able to happen.' (A 807, The Cambridge Edition, Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood.) Lewis White Beck gives a list of occurrences in his 'A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason,' which includes: 'Critique of Practical Reason, 30 (118 - 19); Über den Gemeinspruch, VIII, 287; Vorlesungen über Metaphysik (Kowalewski ed.), p. 600. (Lewis White Beck p. 200 n.)
This is very much 'supplementary material,' obviously. I advocate symbolic representation in my page Introduction to {theme} theory and explain the symbolism which I use. The established symbolic representation of 'ought implies can' in deontic and imperative logic is this (I use / ... / to indicate that the possibility here is established logical possibility, not generalized possibility and that '→' is the established material conditional, / ... / constituting what I call a 'declaration, Dn):
/ O A → ◊ A /
The generalized possibility which I use in {theme} theory includes the logical possibility here and also such instances as physical possibility and psychological possibility.
Banning bullfighting in Spain, although difficult, is certainly achievable. Jason Webster lives in Spain and has defended bullfighting. Some complimentary remarks about 'Into the Arena' are given on the back cover of the book (although this is a minor detail, Alexander Fiske-Harrison gives the mistaken information on the blog that the quotation is given on the front cover.) Even so, Jason Webster writes in an article entitled, 'Bullfighting - a slow death?' on his own blog (http://www.jasonwebsterblog.com):
Alexander Fiske-Harrison doesn't have a high opinion of English aficionados, unlike Spanish ones. In Chapter 8, he mentions that he was contacted by Al Jazeera TV, who wanted him to give a pro-bullfighting perspective, or, as he puts it, 'a balancing voice.' He takes it that the television station couldn't find anyone in England able to give the pro-bullfighting perspective, or balancing voice 'without frothing at the mouth.' He's since modified this harsh view of English aficionados of the bullfight. 'I have since discovered that there are one or two English aficionados who are perfectly reasonable and likeable, such as David Penton, secretary of the Club Taurino of London, or Sam Graham who sits on their committee, whom I will go out of my way to have a drink with.' It's not likely that David Penton and Sam Graham will be too pleased by his comment. The Club Taurino's staff and membership are made up of English aficionados. Presumably all of them or a lot of them, with the exception of these two, are liable to froth at the mouth and are unreasonable and not likeable. He refers to the 'numeric' obsessions of so many 'Anglo aficionados,' their interest in compiling statistics. Reliable statistics would be welcome in one aspect of bullfighting above all, fatalities in the bullring. If these 'anoraks,' as he calls them, have compiled these useful statistics, they are well hidden, as I note in the Introduction. The Club Taurino of London, which contains, it has to be presumed, large numbers of these 'anoraks,' frothing at the mouth and dislikeable anoraks too, according to Alexander Fiske-Harrison.
He makes another very candid comment in Chapter 17:
'I've already heard all the arguments in favour of the bullfight and they're usually bad, so I'd rather not hear people I like come up with them.' (It's surprising that his editor didn't save him from himself here, as in some other places. This quote can certainly be used by opponents of bullfighting.)
This doesn't stop him from adding more bad arguments himself. One of these dire arguments concerns the 'dehesas.' 'Dehesas,' according to a document he quotes, 'a European Commission environmental study on Mediterranean ecosystems' are 'typical ecosystems in western and south western parts of the Iberian Peninsula. They result from ancient methods of exploiting the landscape, which are well adapted to Mediterranean ecological conditions.'
The quoted extract which includes these words makes no mention of bulls, but he immediately claims,
'The harsh economic reality is that if the bullfight is banned, the breeders will have no choice but to convert their land to normal agricultural use or sell it to those who will.'
I haven't been able to find the document quoted here. None of the academic or other studies I've consulted mention bulls.
This is a document which originates with a Spanish animal welfare organization which has relevance to the issue.
It mentions the lack of reference to bulls and bull rearing in studies of the dehesas ecosystem and has great relevance to his claim. Anyone interested in this issue will obviously want to take account of a wide range of documentary evidence. I don't think that anyone who does take the time to study the matter in a fair-minded way is at all likely to conclude that bull breeding and bull rearing is vital to the continued existence of the dehesas. Even if it were otherwise, there would be advantages as well as disadvantages in allowing the change to something nearer to climax vegetation in this area. But these ecological arguments can only be decisive for people who lack an interest in the other dimensions of the issue, above all the ethical dimension.
In his review of 'Into the Arena' in 'The Sunday Times,' Brian Schofield writes that bullfighting 'still has giant ethical questions to answer. Fiske-Harrison’s responses to those questions never convince. His claim that banning the fight would mean the stunning dehesa (meadow) landscape of the breeding ranches “would be turned into farms for beef cattle” is just supposition (75% of Spain’s dehesa is already being conserved without bulls), and his stance that taunting a bull to death is indistinguishable from eating a hamburger smacks of desperation.'
He argues in Chapter 8 that if bullfighting were abolished, the breeding ranches would be turned into farms for beef cattle and that 'bullfighting is actually better in terms of welfare' than rearing beef cattle, that replacing the bull-rearing farms with beef cattle rearing farms would lead to 'massively diminished animal welfare.'
It's obvious that if x million people in Spain are eating y kilograms of beef per year, supplied by beef cattle, then the abolition of bullfighting will do nothing to increase the amount of beef consumed. The beef cattle on the converted bull-rearing farms wouldn't be factory farmed. He gives the misleading and erroneous impression that factory farming is routinely used for the rearing of beef cattle.
There's not the least evidence that the vast majority of bullfighting supporters have any concern at all about the welfare of beef cattle. Bulls are killed in the bullring at an older age than beef cattle, but bullfighting supporters have no objection to the killing of bulls at a young age, either. Whilst bullfighters are training, before they ever kill these older bulls, they kill younger ones. The bull killed by the author was a year younger. Calves are killed in large numbers at the bullfighting schools. In Mexico, children are allowed to kill younger bulls not just in training but in the bullring. By the time Michelito Lagravère was 11, he had already killed 70 calves and young bulls.
The bullfighting areas of Europe and other countries aren't leaders in the field of farm animal welfare or any other aspects of animal welfare, of course, but areas where indifference to animal suffering is rampant - but the exceptions, the individuals and organizations anything but indifferent, are very heartening. He claims that animal welfare in the bullfighting areas would be severely compromised if bullfighting were banned. This is laughably wide of the mark. Without this public spectacle of animal abuse, it's far more likely that concern for animal welfare would increase in these areas.
Only a very few barbaric aspects of the blood fiestas and the formal bullfight have been abolished or moderated, all of them as a result of pressure from people outside the bullfighting world. Until a few years ago, blowpipes were used to attack a bull at Coria until the bull was covered with darts. The mayor of Coria has now banned the use of darts, after the protests of animal welfare campaigners - not, of course, the protests of aficionados with some humanitarian impulses. The protective mattress which has reduced, but not entirely eliminated, disembowelling of picadors' horses, owed nothing to the protests aficionados with humanitarian impulses either. Above, I discuss injuries to horses which the protective mattress doesn't stop and which it conceals.
What regulations govern the killing of bulls in the bullring? Alexander Fiske-Harrison mentions only the Spanish law, under which the bull must be killed within 15 minutes of the matador going out to kill the bull in the third 'act' of the bullfight. Injuring the bull with repeated stab wounds, multiple blows with the sword, hacking at the spine 17 times, hacking at the spine 20 or 30 times, for that matter, isn't forbidden by the regulations.
Compare the mass of regulations governing the slaughter of animals in the European community, and the real effort made to enforce the regulations. There are cases where the regulations haven't been enforced effectively, of course, but bullfighting supporters can't possibly claim to be taking the moral high ground here.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison refers to Jonathan Safran Foer's 'Eating Animals,' which gives instances of cruelty in slaughterhouses. These are American slaughterhouses, where conditions are generally worse than those in slaughterhouses of the European Union. but intensive efforts have been made to improve conditions in American slaughterhouses and to bring poorer slaughterhouses up to the standard of the best ones. There have been steady - or even dramatic - improvements.
Temple Grandin is one of the most important figures in America working to improve the standards of slaughterhouses. Jonathan Safran Foer remarks in his book that 'she has designed more than half the cattle slaughter facilities in the nation.' These are designed to minimize stress before slaughter and to make slaughter instantaneous. In her book 'Making Animals Happy,' she writes about taking visitors to the slaughterhouses which use equipment and the methods she has designed. 'They all expect the cattle to act crazy when they come off the trucks and they are amazed when the cattle stay calm ... '
Her site www.grandin.com contains a great deal of information on ways of avoiding stress to cattle and other animals and on humane slaughter, including this:
She gives data which show the extent of the improvements over the years. In 1996, the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) survey baseline before welfare audits started showed that only 89.5% of cattle on average were rendered insensible with a single shot of the stunning equipment. These would require a second shot, very soon after. In 1999, at the start of the audits, the figure was 96.2 % By 2003, after the slaughterhouses had been audited for some time, the figure had risen to 98.6%.
The improvement has continued:
'Thirty-two federally inspected beef plants and 25 pork plants were audited by third party auditing firms by two major restaurant companies. In 2010, all the plants rendered 100% of the animals insensible and passed the stunning audit. No willful acts of abuse were observed. Compared to 2009, this is a definite improvement.'
The challenge now is to bring other slaughterhouses up to the standard of these. The commitment being shown to making these improvements is immeasurably greater than the commitment being shown to make the bullring-slaughterhouses more humane. To be mathematically precise, the commitment to making them more humane is zero. Alexander Fiske-Harrison has shown no commitment whatsoever to making bullring-slaughterhouses more humane. Quite the opposite, by letting himself loose with a killing sword on a bull, an amateur in a field where killing by 'professionals' is routinely not in the least instantaneous. It's impossible to make them humane, of course, given that the killing takes place in uncontrolled conditions, and given the structure of the bullfight.
In the European Union, existing regulation will be improved in 2013. This document describes the improvements to existing regulations. Anyone convinced by the perfunctory treatment of the issue in 'Into the Arena' would do well to study the new regulations carefully:
http://ec.europa.eu/food/animal/welfare/slaughter/regulation_1099_2009_en.pdf
The Postscript of 'Into the Arena' is assured in tone, with the conviction not just that bullfighting is good but that nobody should dispute that bullfighting is good, that nobody could dispute that bullfighting is good. If they do, he gives them a gentle reminder of their fallibility, as he sees it. So, he gently admonishes the former bullfighter El Pilarico, who killed 150 bulls in Colombia and Spain, until he broke his spine and turned decisively against bullfighting: 'And he became an animal rights protester for the same reason he became a bullfighter, because other people told him to.' A single isolated quotation is produced to make this clear beyond any doubt.
His own doubts about bullfighting may have caused a few ripples on the calm waters of his assurance in the past, but the surface is undisturbed now, it seems.
In the final paragraph, he writes, with quiet but unearned and spurious authority, 'I have given you everything you need in order to decide whether or not you want to see a bullfight, and hopefully something to help you understand a little better the glittering confusion of emotion and danger and gold that will unfold before you if you do.' The turbulent possibility of other responses, such as disgust or outrage, is not so much denied as never permitted to rise to the surface. He continues, as if with infinite, false wisdom, 'And if you do, and your heart goes out to the bull, as it should, let it also go out to the matador. For it is he who is your brother [as he has decided in his delusion] while the bull is not. Not unless you are in the ring itself' where, it seems, the bull and the bullfighter are brothers.
Carlos, a bullfighter quoted by John McCormick in his 'Bullfighting: art, technique and Spanish society' thinks of the bullfighter and the bull as 'friends' rather than 'brothers:'
'The torero and the toro are two friends, not 'enemies' as the critics always write in the newspapers, one of whom must leave the plaza dead' [concealing here the vast imbalance in the probabilities].
'The noble toro has bravura, enthusiasm for life, and his appearance in the ring is an explosion of happiness, of willingness to fight and to live.' But ... 'his instinct for his own death becomes increasingly apparent' until ' ... the magic moment when he says, in effect, to the matador, 'Mátame' - kill me.'
These musings of Alexander Fiske-Harrison and John McCormick are semi-sentimental or completely sentimental. They obviously liked the sound of the words. John McCormick's 'insights' into the inner life of a bull certainly go well beyond the findings of animal ethology concerning animal instincts and are obviously pure supposition.
If Alexander Fiske-Harrison wrote many more books about the subject, I wonder how many of the people who praised 'Into the Arena' would lose interest before he was far into the series, would quickly feel that this is a limited world, far from inexhaustible in its interest, far too monotonous and predictable, the variety of passes, for example, such as the Veronica (holding the cape up in front of the body with both hands) and the pase natural (moving the cape across the bullfighter's leading eye in a noseward direction) not varied enough, would feel that the curtain rising on a darkened stage to watch drama, opera or ballet gives the promise of greater enjoyment or more complex experience, comedy as well as tragedy, perhaps, or would feel that mountains, gardens, books, music, art and architecture, flowers and living creatures, the endlessly varied animals of the world, not just the bull, offer beauty, magnificence, an immeasurably greater variety of emotions and experiences than the bullfight, would realize that by concentrating attention on the bullfights, Alexander Fiske-Harrison has neglected almost everything that Spain has to offer. There's absolutely no reason to follow him in his obsession.
In Chapter 10, in another of his unwitting gifts to the anti-bullfighting cause, he writes, ' ... bullfights can actually be monotonous. Yes, there is the terrible poetry of death, but it's the same poem.'
Alexander Fiske-Harrison disapproves if the bullfight is regarded as incidental, but the people who have a riotous party at Pamplona and turn their backs on the bullfighter are on the right lines. If only Pamplona could transform itself during its festival into a place of drinking, high spirits, song, debauchery and general excess until the early hours or day and night, with abolition of the bullfights. Running of the bulls could still take place and there could be bloodless bullfights in the arena, like the ones in Southern France. Many animal welfarists would object, but I wouldn't. Better by far than any corrida. Animal welfare, like politics, is the art of the possible. Animal welfare, like politics, is an area where perfectionism is likely to delay effective reform rather than advance it. Reformers, like mountaineers, can attempt near-impossible objectives or objectives that seem impossible but which aren't so. But working for a world in which all living things are without stress, all living things are happy, is to attempt the impossible.
'HillmanMinx,' a very committed opponent of bullfighting, included this in one of his comments on a Website: 'I've been to the Pamplona bullrun myself - Spain is fascinating, and bulls will always be part of their culture, but it takes little imagination to see that that could continue to be so without the savage cruelty inflicted on the animals.'
Bad causes (of course there are degrees of badness, of an extreme kind) often have at least one more sympathetic character. Regimes which torture and execute their own people and others they can lay their hands on may have as their public face urbane and sophisticated types who disarm criticism fluently, even charmingly. Saddam Hussein had Tariq Aziz as the 'acceptable' face of mass massacre and other crimes. Colonel Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam played a much lesser role, becoming prominent only in the closing stages of the Colonel's hold on power, but played a similar role. At least, he showed no obvious traces of derangement in front of the cameras. Even the Nazis had their less repulsive Nazis, in the view of some, such as Hans Frank, despite the fact that he was at the head of the most extreme government of all the occupied countries.
William L. Shirer on Hans Frank in 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:'
'Nimble-minded, energetic, well read not only in the law but in general literature, devoted to the arts and especially to music ... his intelligence and cultivation partly offset his primitive fanaticism and up to this time made him one of the least repulsive of the men around Hitler. But behind the civilized veneer of the man lay the cold killer. The forty-two-volume journal he kept of his life and works, which showed up at Nuremberg, was one of the most terrifying documents to come out of the dark Nazi world, portraying the author as an icy, efficient, ruthless, blood-thirsty man ... When once he heard that Neurath, the 'Protector' of Bohemia, had put up posters announcing the execution of seven Czech university students, Frank announced to a Nazi journalist, 'If I wished to order that one should hang up posters about every seven Poles shoct, there would not be enough forests in Poland with which to make the paper for these posters.'
'Himmler and Heydrich were assigned by Hitler to liquidate the Jews. Frank's job, besides squeezing food and supplies and forced labour out of Poland, was to liquidate the intelligentsia ... Frank did not neglect the Jews ... His journal is full of his thoughts and accomplishments on the subject. On October 7, 1940, it records a speech he made that day to a Nazi assembly in Poland summing up his first year of effort.
'My dear Comrades! ... I could not eliminate all lice and Jews in only one year. ['Public amused,' he notes down at this point.] But in the course of time, and if you help me, this end will be attained.'
Alexander Fiske-Harrison took objection to my mention of Nazism. His objections are made clear in this response which I submitted for posting on his blog, together with my reply to his objections:
'Alexander Fiske-Harrison’s comment of 5 December 2011 amounts to gross misrepresentation and falsification but is easily explained – he read only a very little of my discussion of ‘Into the Arena,’ and what he did read was read with insufficient care. The material in question no longer appears at the beginning of my discussion of ‘Into the Arena’ but at the end, since I felt that there were more effective ways of opening the discussion.
'Alexander Fiske-Harrison writes [I quote his comments in full below], ‘You actually open your discussion of my book by talking about me as the acceptable face of Nazism.’ This, you feel, makes it unnecessary for you take anything I write subsequently with any seriousness. Your statement is completely unfounded. It is Hans Frank, who governed occupied Poland, not you at all, whom I name as one of the less repulsive Nazis ‘in the view of some,’ such as the historian William L. Shirer (not the view of myself.) This is what I write:
‘Bad causes (of course there are degrees of badness, of an extreme kind) often have at least one more sympathetic character … Even the Nazis had their less repulsive Nazis, in the view of some, such as Hans Frank, despite the fact that he was at the head of the most extreme government of all the occupied countries.
'William L. Shirer on Hans Frank in ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:
‘Nimble-minded, energetic, well read not only in the law but in general
literature, devoted to the arts and especially to music … his intelligence
and cultivation partly offset his primitive fanaticism and up to this time
made him one of the least repulsive of the men around Hitler. But behind the
civilized veneer of the man lay the cold killer.
‘Alexander
Fiske-Harrison serves as the ‘acceptable face’ of the vastly different bad
cause of bullfighting (‘there are degrees of badness, of an extreme kind’)
to some people who are easily pleased. This is someone who concedes that
there’s a case against bullfighting.’
'Whenever possible in my discussion of ‘Into the Arena’ and the extensive page on bullfighting of which it forms a part, I attempt to provide context, which includes reminders that there are other issues besides bullfighting, some of which represent a far, far worse evil than bullfighting, such as Nazism. In the introduction, I write, ‘ … 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.’
'There are very good reasons why writers on ethical issues should often cite Nazism. It represents, in the view of many, including myself, the worst evil of all. It’s also one which is far more familiar to most readers than such evils as Stalinism. When I’ve argued against pacifism or against the demonization of Israel, and in other contexts, it has been natural to give evidence and arguments which concern the Nazi regime.
‘Godwin’s Law,’ as you will surely recognize yourself, from your advanced study of scientific method, is no law at all. It’s a fatuous and arbitrary rule, a product of what I call ‘the mechanical mind.’ It substitutes for free inquiry and responsible debate the mechanical detection of a word and a mechanical response: mechanically declaring an argument lost or declaring that an argument is at an end.
'I argue that Roman Catholicism, Nazism and bullfighting have linkages in one respect: they are very successful in their use of appearances to hide the reality of the bad cause, as I see it: attractive vestments, solemn ritual, often performed in surroundings of great beauty, hiding for many people the bleaker or more grotesque aspects of Roman Catholic dogma. Smart uniforms, massive, choreographed parades and all the other Nazi paraphernalia hiding for many people the disastrous and despicable ideology. The very striking costumes of the matadors, the parade before the bullfight, the spectacle of the bullfight hiding for many people its cruel reality. This isn’t in the least to claim that Roman Catholics are Nazis or bullfighting supporters are Nazis. It’s simply giving instances of the contrast between appearance and a reality, as I see it. In other respects, the contrasts are extreme.
'You condescendingly call for ‘a little more maturity’ in myself, to benefit my thinking. Mark Rowlands, in his critical review of ‘Into the Arena’ in ‘The Times Literary Supplement,’ mentioned your use of ad hominem argument. You’re using ad hominem argument yet again here.
'If this reply is deleted, like my questions to you concerning the blunt horns of the bull you fought and killed (I argued that blunt horns would make the fight far less dangerous to you), then at least I have the option of publishing this reply on my own Website.'
It was deleted. Alexander Fiske-Harrison decided not to publish these objections to what he'd written or to defend what he'd written.
Within a short time, the page on his site which gave his misinterpretations was no longer available and an error message appeared: 'The page you are looking for no longer exists.' I was able to find a cached copy of the page and to preserve his comments, evidence of his slovenly and evasive approach to honest debate when it suits him. He wrote,
'Further to my previous remarks, I have actually read the part of
your blog dedicated to me. [Not all personal Websites are 'blogs.' This site
isn't a blog.]
'You seem to be completely unaware of Godwin’s
Law (the so-called reductio ad Hitlerum) which states
that the longer an internet discussion goes on, the more likely someone is
to draw an empty and unnecessary analogy with Nazism. It is generally
accepted that at this point the debate has become null and void.
You actually open your discussion of my
book by talking about me as the acceptable face of Nazism. As such I don’t
feel the need to take anything you write subsequent to that seriously. [He
feels no need to answer any difficult questions about the horns of the bull
he fought, for example.] A little more maturity and sense of proportion
would benefit your thinking greatly. AFH'
Orson Welles, the film-maker, is one defender of bullfighting (and amateur bullfighter) who changed his mind.
Extracts from the transcript of his comments to Michael Parkinson in 1974 about 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?'
Stanley Conrad is the American Web master of one 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/) Evidence of his tastelessness amounting to stupidity: for Christmas 2011, the picture on the home page was the usual, bullfighter against bull, but with a seasonal touch. It showed the stable where Jesus was born, an irritated bull in the stable and outside the stable the infant Jesus with a sword in one hand and a muleta in the other (a muleta being the small red cape used in the third stage of the bullfight when the bull is killed.) Mary his mother looks on. There's also a donkey, adorned with three little flags. In a bullring, the mules which drag out the bull after it has been killed are often adorned with these flags.
Stanley Conrad offers instructive instances of cross-linkage, my term for linkages which cut across marked contrasts. As an example, I'm an atheist but I have cross-linkages with the Christians who oppose the death penalty, such as the Roman Catholics of the Community of San' Egidio in Rome. I've a cross-linkage with Stanley Conrad in that we're both atheists. His site includes links to the 'Freedom from Religion Foundation' and 'To state the obvious, there's no linkage but instead marked contrast in a different matter, views on bullfighting.
Many people who share my loathing for bullfighting will have a cross-linkage with Stanley Conrad's political views, including his pacifism. He gives a link to the War Resisters' League' which claims to give 'on the ground tools to end the current war and all wars' and is 'determined not to support any kind of war ...' I consider their views naive and deluded. This isn't the place to discuss my reasons. I do that in many places on this site, but I'll quote an aphorism of mine, 'The evil of aggressive, militaristic states has been overcome often by aggressive military action. When by pacifism?' Until the War Resisters' League has transformed human nature and removed the causes of war, a process which may take many centuries, the League, and Stanley Conrad, has to make clear what guidance it would have given to states attacked by the Nazis, for example. Were the Belgians at fault when their army resisted heroically after the Nazi invasion of Belgium in 1940? Was the Belgian King Leopold III to be praised for surrendering, against the unanimous advice of his government? Were the Jews who took up arms against the Nazis in Warsaw, or those Poles who fought during the Warsaw uprising - pacifists would be well advised to find out as much as they can about these events - to be criticized? Were they war-mongers? Should they have simply waited until the causes of war had been ended? Stanley Conrad would approve of states such as Sweden and the Irish Republic, neutral during the Second World War, but they did nothing to end the nightmare of deportations to the death camps, executions, the crushing of all opposition. I discuss the neutrality of the Irish Republic, and the fact that Ireland only avoided invasion because Britain and other countries did the fighting for the Irish of the 'Free State,' on my page Ireland and Northern Ireland: distortions and illusions.
Giles Coren is a British journalist, one of the prominent defenders of bullfighting in this country, a feeble-minded, a very confused writer, sometimes, when it comes to ethical reasoning (He has a stronger grasp of reality in his speciality, as a restaurant critic.) Any impression of robustness and vigour in his writing on the topic is purely a matter of style: style in its superficial sense, not the style of a writer of substance. To anyone with any thoughtfulness, his writing on bullfighting has nothing to offer.
This is Giles Coren on the experience of attending bullfights, which, according to him, offer 'that proximity to the bloody and barbaric birth of our visual culture, to the hell of the Roman Coliseum, that I would otherwise never know.'
This statement is confused, ridiculous, stupid, disturbing, disgusting: a short statement, but enough evidence that Giles Coren shouldn't be taken seriously when he writes about bullfighting. He could use very similar arguments for introducing public executions, which would offer 'that proximity to the bloody and barbaric birth of our former Christian culture, to the hell of the Roman crucifixions, that I would otherwise never know.'
I write about the Roman arenas where gladiators fought to the death in the section Bullfighting as an art form.
Art critics and art historians, anybody with the least knowledge of the subject, would never in any circumstances endorse the view that the Roman Colosseum marks the birth of our visual culture. Visual culture was already ancient when in the 5th century B.C. the Parthenon and its wonderful sculpture were created in Athens. This is Giles Coren the ignoramus in art history.
He's right to use the words 'bloody,' 'barbaric' and 'hell' of the Roman Colosseum, completely wrong to think that present-day civilization has any need to repeat and emulate these bloody, barbaric and hellish events.
In other writings, and here as well, it's obvious that he thinks that attending bullfights, approving of bullfights amounts to an urgent necessity. Otherwise, we're in danger of becoming sentimental, squeamish. The idea that human history and human experience present so many antidotes to sentimentality and squeamishness seems not to have quite registered with him. The idea that to appreciate the cruelties and evils which can occur in civilization we have to repeat and witness those cruelties and evils, in modified form, has a strange appeal for this dim-witted individual. If the Roman Colosseum was bloody, barbaric and hellish (and it was), why the need to imitate the carnage, why the need to witness the imitation of the carnage?
His thoughts - if you can call them thoughts - on 'the bloody and barbaric birth of our visual culture' are followed immediately by this, which gives the impression of a clinching argument (to Giles Coren). From his piece for 'The Times,' 'Enough sentimental bull about bullfighting.'
'Have you ever seen a terrified bull killed by a tattooed tractor boy with a fag in his mouth in a stinking East Anglian abattoir? I have.'
One elementary first-step in moral argument is to surmount the limitations of personal experience and to do everything possible to carry out a proper ((survey)). I give other examples of the pitfalls of personal experience in my page on Israel. There are non-moral examples as well, obviously. Supposing that Giles Coren, the restaurant critic who has often written enthusiastically about French cuisine, received this communication from someone trying to argue against Giles Coren's liking for French cooking: 'Have you ever been served a disgusting, inedible meal by a tattooed ex-tractor boy with a fag in his mouth in a stinking East Provence bistro? I have.'
I can well believe that the East Anglian 'tractor-boy' was inadequate, but at least he was equipped with a stunner which would cause immediate loss of consciousness and was easily used. The stunner was straightforward to use compared with the the sword of the matador, aimed precariously at a small area of the bull's back, in an attempt to sever the aorta. To be able to use the stunner, the 'tractor-boy' didn't have to reduce the animal to a state of helplessness or near-helplessness, by having other slaughterhouse employees lance it in the neck, like picadors, and wound it six more times, like the banderilleros.
Below, in my review of Alexander Fiske-Harrison's 'Into the Arena,' I give information about afeitado, the practice of sawing off the tips of the bull's horns before entry into the ring, a practice which significantly reduces any danger to the bullfighter, with a link to Jérôme Lescure's film 'A Two-hour Killing,' which shows a terrified bull undergoing afeitado - and scenes from bullfights in the south of France which show the slaughter of bulls. I very much doubt that anything that the 'tractor boy' did to his bull can be compared with this treatment.
He ends his piece with a bizarre defence of bullfighting which could be used to defend so many other 'foreign' practices of the past and present which the ignorant and insular English haven't been able to appreciate - for example, the blinding of ortolans, small birds, in some parts of France so that the birds would concentrate all the more on their feed and become more tasty morsels for gourmets. The idea that appreciating Beethoven, Bach, Brahms and other German composers (in his language, 'snooty classical music composed by krauts') has anything to do with appreciating bullfighting, the idea that appreciating Verdi or Puccini (in his language, 'poncey Italian opera') makes it necessary to appreciate bullfighting - this is the thinking of a sub-East Anglian tractor boy, not the thinking of an Oxford-educated writer for 'The Times.' He writes of bullfighting,
' ... too much blood and sand, too much foreignness, too much difference. I dare say he doesn’t like paella either, or frog’s legs, bratwurst, haiku, poncy foreign novels, French poetry or snooty classical music composed by krauts, funny-looking Portuguese people, poncey Italian opera, sushi . . .'
Giles Giles Coren's level of argument has its approximate equivalent in the restaurant world he writes about. It wouldn't be cooking of any subtlety at all but perhaps something resembling the cooking of Harvester: The Dutch House, as Jonathan Meades reports it in his 'Incest and Morris Dancing:'
' ... Vegetable rolls served in a Chinese steamer for a touch of class were awful but not so awful as a disturbingly pale burger which deserved laboratory analysis rather than ingestion ... Chicken dippers were charred, dessicated [sic] satay with a disgusting peanut sauce like grout with sugar. As I say, you feel contaminated. One mouthful is enough. It's actually too much.
'What do Harvester fry in? Obviously the medium is very cheap, and it's not really sump oil - it just tastes that way. If you have ever shopped in a boarded-up, budget price min-supermarket on a sink estate you will be acquainted with the quality of the ingredients.'
On the front cover of Alexander Fiske-Harrison's 'Into the Arena,' there's an ignorant quote from Giles Coren: 'A hero from another age, a fearless Englishman touched by madness. This endeavour owes as much to Captain Oates as to Ernest Hemingway ...'
Anyone who knows anything about the history of Antarctic exploration in the age before radio, modern transportation, other modern equipment, the possibility of rescue by aircraft (still impossible in most circumstances, though), will know that what Captain Oates endured and risked is on a different plane from anything experienced by Alexander Fiske-Harrison.
Evidence that Giles Coren is a far better writer than his bog-standard writing on bullfighting suggests is available in quantity too. I have James Dyson's book 'Against the Odds: an autobiography,' a notably successful book. It was written by Giles Coren. There's a note, ''The right of Giles Coren to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.' James Dyson is a very gifted individual whose many strengths don't happen to include gifts as a writer, so he turned to Giles Coren for assistance. Richard Booth's autobiography 'My Kingdom of Books' offers a similar, just as legitimate, example. The founder of the remarkable book town has as co-author Lucia Stuart, his stepdaughter, who played a role very similar to Giles Coren's.
Acknowledgments: The Freedom
Association's photostream, flickr
Daniel Hannan is MEP for South East England ('MEP:' 'Member of the European Parliament') and a prominent English aficionado. He criticizes the appalling lack of moral fibre of some bulls, as he sees it: they just don't want to make an effort, the layabouts. In ''Three Days in Málaga,' published by the Club Taurino of London, he writes about the bullfights he saw. He writes in a superior tone about bulls he obviously regards as not nearly as fearless as himself, bulls unwilling to fling themselves on the lance of the picador, the six spiked banderillas or the matador's sword (not forgetting the weapons used to hack at the spine - more of the descabello later):
'These bulls, by San Miguel, were among the worst I’ve watched: cowardly, weak, lazy and petulant. Their lack of breeding was evident from the moment they sauntered out of the toril, [the holding area where bulls wait before they are made to enter the arena] trembling, fidgeting, lowering.'
Of a later bullfight:
'The first [bull] set the tone for the entire string, being manso [cowardly] and sulky.'
None of the bulls are spared the standard stabbings, a minimum of eight (he doesn't record whether or not they received many more.)
Alexander Fiske-Harrison writes about a bull which was stabbed in the spine at least seventeen times with the descabello (total stabbings: a minimum of 25) after it had been stabbed with the killing sword. The 'killing sword' really should be renamed, given the fact that it doesn't kill the bull at all in so many cases, even when the bull has been made to twist its body this way and that, in the hope that the sword will cut a vital internal organ, even when it's been pulled out and driven into the bull's back all over again. The rejón de muerte or 'lance of death' of the bullfighter on horseback, the rejoneador, likewise. Time after time, the lance is left sticking out of the back of the bull, the injured bull continuing to run.
Daniel Hannan records this, of the matador Talavante
'who gave up trying to kill his first bull after much dreich [Scots word meaning 'miserable,' most usually in connection with weather] hewing with the descabello: I lost count after his twelfth attempt.' (Total stabbings: a minimum of 20, and probably many more.)
In another article, 'France is the New Spain,' he writes of one French bullfight,
'Stéphane Meca was less than impressive, but the French crowd did not care. His first bull was enormous (700 kg), and Meca was taking few risks. The bull took two pics, the second of which went in repeatedly and way off to one side. After the banderillas, as the bull stood spurting fountains of blood ... ' there was 'a miserable excuse for a sword-thrust into the bull’s flank.' And after that, the sword failing to kill it, attention turned as usual to the spine. It was treated to not just one of the specialist tools for severing the spine but both, the sword and the dagger, the descabello and puntilla.
And like Alexander Fiske-Harrison and so many others, Daniel Hannan isn't in the least tempted to give up watching and supporting an activity which causes such suffering. Do they really believe that this is one of the finer or one of the finest achievements of European civilization, not in the least a cause for shame?
Daniel Hannan writes, 'The Spaniard is watching, not a contest, but a ritualised dance: a relationship so tender and tragic that it might almost be called love.' ('Bullfighting in Brussels.') My comments on A L Kennedy's similar claims in her book 'On Bullfighting.')
'... there is something sexual about the faena' (From the Glossary: 'The faena is 'The final act of the corrida - the Act of the Kill.') Of another bull: 'Rather than tricking the bull, Ponce gives the impression that he knows what it wants before it does, that he is here to help. This is the body knowledge of a lover...'
'But she's often denied the fulfilment she craves and the death of the bull is like bad sex, very bad sex. Before the bull can die, though, there's a kind of perverted foreplay, in which the spears of the picadors and the banderillas play their part. She writes,
'...the picadors spear as much danger as they can out of the bull.'
' 'After the picadors have lanced it '...another bull is left, staggering and urinating helplessly, almost too weak to face the muleta.' She comments, prosaically, 'I do appear to be observing considerable distress.' The muleta, as she has explained in a footnote, is 'The small red cape, stiffened with a rod, which is used by the matador during the final passes which lead to the kill.' But before the bull could face the muleta, he still had to endure six more stabbings from the six barbed banderillas. These would bring him to an even more helpless state.'
'She writes that ' ... 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. And there are no limits to love, it is quite merciless.' This attempt at high-flown language is an abject failure, a chicken's attempt to soar. At least 'merciless' is accurate, given that in this case the lover may plunge the sword into his love repeatedly, hitting bone, or thrust the sword in and take it out with another sword, or the lover may hack away at the spine of his love with a heavier sword.'
Bullfighting has surely nothing to do with love, except in the sense that bullfighters 'love' fighting bulls and bullfighting supporters 'love' going to bullfights. Bullfighting surely has linkages, deep within the disturbed and diseased psyche of the bullfighter or bullfighting supporter with pathological forms of the erotic, with sadomasochistic eroticism - with the emphasis upon the sadistic: the moment of truth as the moment of sadistic orgasm. Can appearances be so deceptive, can harmless looking people really be seeking to improve their existence by such disreputable means? Yes, quite easily. I don't claim that all bullfighters and bullfighters respond to the bullfight in this way by any means - but the other ways of responding are disreputable or worse than disreputable in themselves.
Criticism of bullfighting has to be multi-faceted, including such matters as illusion and delusion, fabrications, falsification, exaggeration, misleading use of evidence, complacency and evasion. It's not commonly recognized - outside anti-bullfighting circles - to what extent these faults are rife in the bullfighting world.
Above, I give many examples of one of the gross delusions of the bullfighting world, its belief that bullfighting requires courage of an altogether special - or even unique - kind.
The bullfighting supporters in the bullfight audience have an unhealthy attitude to matters of 'cowardice' as well as courage. Here, I concentrate on their attitude to the 'cowardice' of many bulls, not their criticism of bullfighters who show cowardice in the ring. When bullfighting supporters, almost in unison, whistle to show their disapproval and contempt as a 'cowardly' bull is dragged out of the arena, then surely this amounts to hypocrisy, lack of self-awareness, lack of self-criticism, a whole range of glaring, undesirable, diseased faults.
There may well be members of the bullfighting audience who have conclusively shown a degree of physical courage, but this isn't enough to establish the moral standing of any individual. Goering, the corrupt Nazi, was described by one witness when he was tried at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity as 'a bastard, but a brave bastard.' Physical courage of a high order has been displayed time and again in the service of bad causes.
An adequate ((survey)) of courage has to go beyond physical courage, to include moral and intellectual courage, the kind which an aficionado needs to offer evidence and arguments. An aficionado completely unwilling to do that is an 'aficionado manso.' 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.
On to other aspects of Daniel Hannan's 'afición.'
'The Death of French Culture' by Donald Morrison and Antoine Compagnon argues that French culture is no longer a force to be reckoned with, that it has lost its international importance. French writers, film-makers and other luminaries have become tedious. Daniel Hannan, on the other hand, writes to writes to a correspondent, 'Esteban,' 'I think the fiesta is enjoying its second golden age, and nowhere more than in France.' Alexander Fiske-Harrison writes that 'bullfighting is already contained in the very facts of life itself.'
If the novel, poetry, painting, opera and other genres have become mediocre - or a little better than mediocre or a great deal worse - in France then bullfighting can't possibly be an adequate substitute. If Donald Morrison and Antoine Compagnon are correct in their analysis, then the French have every reason to be concerned. The supposed glories of the fiesta in France - in actual fact manifestations of an 'art form' which is minuscule rather than minor and actively harmful - can't compensate for any decline in serious achievement in substantial forms of culture.
To aficionados everywhere:
Not 'afición' but abolición!
