Bullfighting: arguments against and action against

Introduction
The matador José Tomás drenched in blood, not his own blood
but the blood of the bull, during the ritualized cruelty of the bullfight:
the bullfight as horror film:
Lord Nelson, the victor at the Battle of
Trafalgar, amongst other battles, was wounded several times in
combat, losing the sight in one eye and most of one arm before being killed
at Trafalgar. This is Lord Nelson, who was obviously very well
acquainted with death and violence and was no sentimentalist
(his harshness could be severe, and inexcusable), on
the experience of attending a bullfight:
'We felt for the bulls and the horses ... How women can even sit out, much less
applaud, such sights is astonishing. It even turned us sick, and
we could hardly go through it: the dead, mangled horses with
their entrails torn out, and the bulls covered with blood, were
too much. We have seen one bull feast, and agree that nothing
shall ever tempt us to see another.'
One of these women is the fictional Carmen, in Bizet's opera. Taking
seriously the cruelties of the bullfight must lead to a revision of
attitudes to Carmen the woman and to Carmen the opera.
The peto - a protective mattress - was made a legal requirement for the horses of the picadors in
1928. Before the use of the peto - in the bullfight witnessed by Lord Nelson
and his men and the bullfights which took place in the setting of Bizet's
Carmen, 19th century Seville - the horses were unprotected. In each of these
bullfights, far more horses than bulls were killed, sometimes as many as
forty. Again and again, the horses died in horrific ways - after
disembowelling, trailing their intestines behind them.
The opera 'Carmen' is based on the novella written by Prosper Mérimée
and published in 1845.
Prosper Mérimée had already written
'Letters from Spain.' Extracts from 'First Letter: The Bullfights,'
which show that his reaction to the cruelties of the bullring was very
different from the reaction of Lord Nelson and his men:
'During my stay in Spain I have no missed a single fight, and blushingly
admit that I prefer a fight to the death to one in which the bulls,
their horns padded, are merely tormented.'
On the horses killed in the bullring: Though the horse 'may be losing
streams of blood, though its entrails drag on the ground and twine about
its legs, it must face the bull as long as it can stand. When it is down
to stay, the picador leaves the ring and returns immediately on a fresh
mount.'
'When the bull is cowardly and will not take four thrusts of the lance,
the accepted number, the spectators, sovereign judges, condemn him by
acclamation to a sort of torture—at the same time a punishment and means
of reviving his fury. From all sides goes up a cry of “Feugo! Fuego!”
Then, instead of their ordinary arms, the chulos are given banderillas
with firecrackers along the shaft ... As soon as it enters the skin, the
amadou lights the fuse : the explosives go off toward the bull, burning
him to the quick, and, greatly to the satisfaction of the public, he
leaps and plunges. It is, in fact, an admirable sight : this enormous
animal, foaming with rage, shaking the flaming sticks, and tossing amid
fire and smoke.'
Since its introduction, the peto has protected the horse against disembowelling
and other puncture wounds but doesn't spare them the trauma of being hit by a massive animal. The blindfold only spares them the sight of
the bull, not in the least the terror of the experience whenever they are
forced into the bullring. What can happen to a horse 'protected' by the peto in the bullring:
There's a different kind of bullfighting, practised by a bullfighter
riding a horse, a 'rejoneador.' Their horses are unprotected. A film which
shows, not injury to the horse but the repeated stabbing of a bull (in the
last four or five minutes of the film) by a female rejoneador, Noelia Mota:
the degrading cruelty of contemporary bullfighting, as of bullfighting in
the past:
Noelia Mota was practising her 'artistry' in a sparsely attended, minor
bullring. A short film showing the first two stabbings only in a much more
prestigious place, the Seville bullring which is featured in 'Carmen:'
These two stabbings are with the
rejones de castigo ('lances of punishment'). The bull
is then stabbed six times with the banderillas, as in the
standard bullfight. Finally, the rejón de muerte ('lance
of death') is used to kill the bull. Again, and again, the bull is
uncooperative, the attempt ends in failure and the bull is stabbed with the
descabello, often repeatedly, as in the standard bullfight.
The
bullfight I discuss on this page 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
section after this, The Golden Age of Bullfighting,
is about horses in the bullring too. It gives information about the
astonishing number of horses killed during bullfights before 1929 but I try
to show that this is of far more than historical importance. In this
section, I give reasons as to why bullfighting may well have reached its final phase.
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, with hideous cruelty. 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.
I don't confine my attention to animal suffering. I argue
that the adulation given to bullfighters by bullfighting supporters
distorts. The
matador Padilla, for example, has been portrayed as a heroic figure.
He was injured in the
bullring and lost an eye. This is a bullfighter whose recklessness has been extreme. Padilla is still alive - not so Marie Colvin, the
journalist who was hit by shrapnel during the conflict in Sri Lanka
and lost an eye and who has now been killed by shellfire from Syrian forces.
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.
This page gives an introduction to the subject. I give
much more space to the arguments against bullfighting, the reasons why there
should be action to end bullfighting, than to the forms that action takes
and, I argue, should take, although I do comment on some campaigning
techniques.
So much writing in support of bullfighting is suffocating
in its exclusion of the world beyond bullfighting. I see no reason why my
anti-bullfighting page should follow this example. The supplementary
material I include goes far beyond the limited world of bullfighting.
For example, I give reminders of human courage and artistic achievement which owe nothing
to bullfighting and discuss or mention natural beauty, wildlife, wildlife conservation and other
topics. The starting point in every case is a bullfighting topic.
'Taking the offensive'
There are now many organizations which recognize that bullfighting is being challenged as never
before and which intend to defend it. One of them is 'Asotauro,' which gives
this momentous declaration at the top of its home page
www.asotauro.com:
'For lovers of bullfighting
[literally, 'lovers of bulls'] the time has come to take the offensive,
leaving no lie unanswered, no fallacy unrefuted.'
Aficionados
refer to a bull which is unaggressive as a 'toro manso' or 'cowardly bull.'
I sympathize completely with the 'toro manso' and its unwillingness to fling
itself on the lance of the picador, the banderillas of the banderillero and
the sword of the matador to provide aficionados with the experiences they
think they're entitled to. But what of the aficionado manso, afraid -
unable, it seems - to answer arguments? For these people I've no sympathy
whatsoever, of course.
'I've drawn the attention of many
individual bullfighting supporters and bullfighting organizations to this
material and received replies - the most common responses amount to 'I'll
see what I can do,' - but silence has followed. Not one defence of
bullfighting against these arguments. If these people and organizations
consider that there are lies on this page, then go ahead and answer them, if
they consider that there are fallacies on this page, then go ahead and
refute them. Any bullfighting defender who does respond to the arguments on
this page will have to follow much higher standards of critical reading and
critical debate than Alexander Fiske-Harrison, who did claim to find a lie,
a fallacy on this page. His claim that I'd referred to him as 'the
acceptable face of Nazism' was nonsensical, and I explain why this is so in
the section 'Into the Arena' which begins with comments on
bad causes. By his own admission, he'd only read a
little of what I'd written about him.'
Asotauro's Website shows not the least
sign of engaging with difficult anti-bullfighting arguments. Their
declaration belongs to what I call the 'word-sphere,' whiich I describe as
'the world of ringing declarations, facile claims to importance, hollow
confidence-building assertions, projections for future success.'
The
horses: terror and trauma
Petos ('protective mattresses') of picadors' 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.'
He
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.' This took place in 1929. 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.
Before that time, it was common - in fact, usual - for far
more horses than bulls to be killed in a bullfight - as I explain in
The Golden Age of Bullfighting, as many as 40. Disembowelling
is uncommon now, for the horses of the picador and the rejoneador or mounted bullfighter.
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 hides 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.')
A L Kennedy '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.' She might have mentioned
the internal injuries which horses also suffer.
Even if a horse is lucky and suffers no broken bones or internal injuries, it can
be imagined what terror it will feel when blindfolded and led out to take
part in the parade before the bullfight,what terror it will feel when forced
to enter the arena to face the bull, what terror it will feel when it hears
and smells the bull, and the terror it feels when the bull, in its frantic
effort to escape, hits it very hard.
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.
Jeff Pledge, on the methods used by Alain Bonijol, the French
supplier of picadors' horses: 'He has built, on a pair of wheels from some
piece of farm machinery, a kind of heavy-duty carretón, which has a pole
with a flat plate on the end sticking out the front. Several hefty blokes
shove it into the horse, who is wearing his peto, and try to push him over
or back ...' ('La Divisa,' the journal of the Club Taurino of London.) This
gives information not just about training methods but about the hideous
mentality of these people.
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, and not only
for the sake of the horses. Catalonia has shown the way.
Horses in human service have suffered horrifically, and continue to do so.
This is some necessary context for the horrific suffering of horses in the
bullring:
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.'
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 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.
Horse disembowelling and 'bullfighting's 'Golden Age'
In each twentieth
century Spanish corrida (bullfight) before 1929, six bulls were killed, as
is the case now. In each of these bullfights, how many picadors' horses do
you think were killed? One horse per bullfight on average, not as many as
one, more than one, much more than one? The answer is shocking: as many as
40 during each bullfight. Disembowelled dying and dead horses, the
intestines of horses and the blood of horses made battlefields of the
bullfighting arenas.
In these scenes of utter carnage such bullfighters
as Joselito, ('a classical purist,' according to Alexander
Fiske-Harrison) Belmonte and
Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, the subject of the poem by the poet and
dramatist Lorca, practised their art. Like Hemingway, the poet and
dramatist saw large numbers of these dead and dying horses but found
them not in the least important.
A pre-Peto film showing the slaughter of horses in the bullring during
this period: the horrifying scenes which Lorca and Hemingway witnessed
often, the horrifying scenes which took place in the bullfights of matadors
singled out for praise by Alexander Fiske-Harrison, Tristan Garel-Jones and
so many others.
A
contemporary film showing similar scenes of disembowelling, but without
the 'artistic purity' which for Lorca, Hemingway and others made such a
difference. Before the film can be viewed, it's necessary to sign in.
The fate of the picadors' horses in the bullring before
the protective mattress or 'peto' was adopted in 1929 is a subject of
far more than historical interest. It was revulsion against the
slaughter of the horses (not shared by Hemingway or Lorca) which led to the
adoption of the protective mattress. But this didn't end the suffering of
the horses. Revulsion against their suffering - and the suffering of the bull - is much
more widespread now than then. The revulsion which makes a return to conditions
before 1929 unthinkable makes it very likely that bullfighting will
eventually be abolished.
Bullfighting has surely reached its lengthy final phase.
'From 1914 to 1920 was bullfighting's Golden Age,' according to Alexander Fiske-Harrison's blog. In this estimation, he
more or less follows Hemingway, who ' placed the
Golden Age between 1913 and 1920. In this 'Golden Age' up to 40 horses were
slaughtered in each bullfight. Alexander Fiske-Harrison tries to balance the 'artistry' and
animal suffering at various places in his book
Into the Arena (I don't accept in the least his claims concerning the
artistry) and makes his own decision as to their relative importance - a
decision which is in stark contrast with my own ideas. I don't discuss the 'artistry' at all here, only the cost in animal
suffering, and not the suffering of the bulls (atrocious though it was, and is),
only the suffering of the horses.
As for the evidence, I make use of the book by Miriam Mandel
'Hemingway's The Dangerous Summer: The complete annotations.' Miriam Mandel
has more than enough knowledge of bullfighting and more than enough
enthusiasm for bullfighting to be considered an aficionado. This doesn't
affect the thoroughness or accuracy of the scholarship in the book, but it
does affect my attitude. The book is repulsive, horrible, but invaluable.
The figures given by Miriam Mandel apply to 'The Golden Age of Bullfighting'
and to a much, much longer period before 1929:
... many horses—sometimes as many as forty - were killed at each corrida.
[bullfight]'
A great deal of information is given about the rulings and regulations
governing the bullfight. The rulings and regulations which concern the
number of horses to be provided for each bullfight reflect
expectations about the numbers likely to
die at each bullfight. The book gives this information:
'In 1847, a local ruling
required that forty horses, inspected and approved by the authorities,
stand ready for use in each bullfight. The 1917 and 1923 Reglamentos
called for six horses per bull to be fought, with the added proviso that
the management provide as many additional horses as were necessary. Sometimes all the horses would be killed and replacements would be hastily
bought off cabbies and rushed into the ring.'
The addition of (!) to this last piece of information, about the
'replacements ... hastily bought off cabbies and rushed into the ring' would
be understandable but inadequate to the horror.
The scholarly information includes this: 'Perhaps the most important marker of change is
the Reglamento (taurine code), which evolved
significantly from its early version, drafted by Melchor Ordóñez in about
1847, to the increasingly detailed and prescriptive documents published
in 1917, 1923, 1930, and, post Hemingway, in 1962, 1992 and 1996.'
Whatever the number of horses killed in the ring
- fewer than twenty, or twenty, thirty or forty - the sight of the
horses' blood, the intestines of the disembowelled horses, the horses in
agony, the dead horses, the sights which didn't disturb Hemingway or Lorca,
the sights which Alexander Fiske-Harrison overlooked or didn't think too
important - these sights aren't going to
return to the contemporary bullfight.
Miriam Mandel writes, 'Occasionally one hears reactionary calls for the abolishment of the peto, but modern sensibilities would not allow a
return to the pre-peto
bullfight that Hemingway encountered when he first went to Spain.
The peto or
'protective mattress' for the picadors' horses 'was first used at a
Madrid novillada on 6 March 1927, and it was mandated by law on 18 June 1928.' After the peto was introduced, there was a vast decrease in the number of
horses disembowelled and the number of horses killed in the ring, but as I
explain in the next section, The horses, there are
still horses disembowelled in the ring - the horses of mounted bullfighters
('rejoneador') and the horses of picadors. The peto protects against
puncture wounds but not at all adequately against the weight of the bull
smashing into it and the peto disguises so many injuries. The
horses in the bullfighting ring are still treated with despicable cruelty.
It's true that 'modern sensibilities would not allow a return to the pre-peto
bullfight' but Miriam Mandel overlooks the obvious fact that modern
susceptibilities find unacceptable - repellent - the treatment of horses and
bulls in the contemporary bullring. The page gives abundant documentation of
this treatment. What was once accepted isn't accepted any longer, except by
the supporters and patrons of bullfighting. Many of these wouldn't object in
the least if forty horses died by disembowelling at every bullfight, but I'd
claim that although there's no such thing as certain moral progress, these
people have been left far behind by this particular moral advance.
Two eyewitness accounts of the deaths of horses in pre-Peto years.
This account is by a spectator at a bullfight who was sickened by
what he saw: Sir Alfred Munnings. It comes from his autobiography, published
in 1955. The account is based on what he saw at a pre-peto bullfight.
'I have sat at dinners given by the American Ambassador in Spain with a
titled Spaniard as my neighbour, hearing things of bullfighting not written
in books. Have we read in those novels extolling the matador, of living
skeletons - once horses - ridden not only to slaughter but in a tawdry
procession? Have we read of punching, horning, or weeks of durance between
Sundays, with flies crawling over festered wounds, as the victims, not
killed, await in the stables NEXT SUNDAY’S SPORT? Watch such a procession,
and see some fifteen sorry steeds, doomed, starved, carrying heavy, stuffed
out picadors. No wonder the horses are hurled to the ground, overweighted,
weak and half-dead.
'Passing the tall archway, I had seen a little white horse. To my surprise
it was in the procession, carrying a great picador, and the next thing we
saw was the little white horse and another in the ring. This humble white
horse stood there blindfolded, his ears stuffed and tied, little knowing
what he was there for. Oh, little white horse; Little White Horse!’ I kept
repeating to myself, as the bull put a long horn right through the little
horses neck, just above the windpipe.
'Imagine the fright of the horse, blindfolded and deaf, at the sudden
stab. Then the bull, his horn through the neck of the horse began dragging
it slowly round with him, the picador dismounting and others in the ring
trying to free the horse, now no longer a horse, but a holiday victim, the
blood running down its white jaw and neck.
'When cleared, and the picador remounted, the bull charged, hurling man
and horse backwards with a crash against the wooden barrier. ‘Oh little
white horse.’ I said to myself and, the picador being rescued, and the bull
attracted away, they beat the horse to its feet with blood streaming from a
wound in its chest, down its white legs. The time was up for the horses, and
the white horse and the other - a starved emaciated bag mare were led out
to come in again. The little white horse’s end came later.
'The bay, its teeth chattering with fear, having been in before, stood
near the barrier below us, the motley red and white striped bandage over its
offside eye, its ears stuffed with tow, and tied with what seemed to be old
electric wire. The Bull made short work of the bay horning the horse from
behind. The picador cleared, and the horse beaten to its feet by red-shirted
attendants. There, from the underpart of its belly hung a large
protuberance of bowels. With head outstretched a man hauling it along on
the end of the rein, another hitting it with a stick, it was led out.
'Not a soul cared, excepting ourselves.
'But what of the white horse? He too was lifted and hurled on his back, to
the cheers of the crowd, and when beaten to his feet was stomping on
his own entrails, which stretched and split like pink tissue paper.'
This is the account of Prosper Mérimée. It's
clear from the full account he gives in 'Letters from Spain' that he liked
what he saw. He compares himself to St Augustine: 'St. Augustine
relates that in his youth he had an extreme distaste for gladiatorial
combats, never having seen one. Forced by a friend to accompany him to one
of these pompous butcheries, he vowed to close his eyes as long as it
lasted. At first he kept to his word well enough, and forced himself to
think of other things; but when the populace cried out at a celebrated
gladiator's fall, he opened his eyes—opened them, and could not close them
again. From then on until his conversion, he was one of the most passionate
enthusiasts about these games.'
He gets this wrong. Augustine was writing about a man called
Aloysius, not himself. Aloysius went to the arena to watch gladiators fight
and kept his eyes shut. When he opened them, 'He saw the blood ...
Far from turning away, he fixed his eyes on it ... he was delighted with the
contest, drunk with the lust of blood. He was no longer the man who had come
there, but he was one of the mob.' People can accept almost any cruelty, can
find delight in cruelty and the shedding of blood - at the Roman arena and
at modern bullfighting arenas. The moral objections aren't undermined in the
least by their passion for bloody spectacles.
Prosper Mérimée's
book was published in 1830 but the events he witnessed continued unchanged
until the peto was adopted - but horses have been disembowelled and severely
injured in the bullring ever since. He wrote,
'The picador, with the lance under his arm, gathers his horse well
under him; takes his place exactly in front of the bull; seizes the moment
at which the head is lowered for the charge to fix the lance in the neck,
and not elsewhere; bears down with the full weight of the body and at the
same time wheels his horse to the left, so as to leave the bull on the
right. If all these movements are well executed, if the picador is vigorous
and his horse responsive, the bull, carried by his own impetus, goes by
without touching him. Then the duty of the chulos is to distract the bull
until the picador has had time to get out of the way, but often the animals
knows only too well which is his real aggressor; brusquely he swings about,
makes for the horse at a rush, and runs his horn into the belly,
overthrowing both horse and rider. The latter is immediately rescued by the
chulos. Some pick him up, others wave their capes before the bull's eyes,
draw him toward themselves, and, leaping over the barrier with surprising
agility, make their escape. The Spanish bull is as fast as a horse; and, if
the chulo is far away from the fence, he barely reaches it. Therefore, the
horseman, whose life must depend on the chulos' agility, does not often
venture into the middle of the ring; when he does, it passes for an
extraordinary feat of daring.
'Once again
on his feet, the picador, if he can get his horse up, remounts. Though the
poor beast may be losing streams of blood, though its entrails drag on the
ground and twine about its legs, it must face the bull as long as it can
stand. When it is down to stay, the picador leaves the ring and returns
immediately on a fresh mount.
'I have said
that the lances can only make a flesh-wound and serve only to infuriate the
bull. Nevertheless, the impact of the horse and the rider, the bull's own
efforts, above all the shock of pulling up short on his hocks, tire him
rather promptly. Often, also, the pain of the lance-wounds disheartens him.
At last, he no longer dares attack the horses, or, to use the technical
term, he refuses to "enter." By that time, if he is vigorous, he had already
killed four or five horses. The picadors rest; the signal is given to plant
the banderillas.
When Alexander Fiske-Harrison described the years between 1914 and 1920
as bullfighting's 'Golden Age,' I doubt if he gave the least thought to any
other contemporaneous events. When humanity was undergoing the catastrophic
sufferings of the First World War, and the influenza pandemic of 1918 -
1919, which killed far more people than the First World War, somewhere
between 20 million and 40 million people in all, including vast numbers of
people in Spain (the term 'Spanish flu' is often used), was all this
outweighed by, compensated by, the Golden Age of bullfighting? Elementary
sensitivity should have led him to use a different term or to make his
discussion much more complex.
The bull
Before abolition in Catalonia: bull in the plaza 'La Monumental,'
Barcelona
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.
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.
From the gruesome, matter of fact accounts of bullfights on the site 'La
Prensa San Diego'
'Capetillo received a difficult first bull and encountered big troubles
at the supreme moment, requiring 12 entries with the sword.' 'Moment' is
very badly chosen. The hideous writer is Lyn Sherwood.
Daniel Hannan, a Member of the
European Parliament and devoted aficionado: '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.'
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
courage of the bullfighters - illusions and distortions
The North Face of the Eiger (Acknowledgments: flickr)
In this section, I discuss the risks of mountaineering and some
forms of rock climbing, the risks of battle and the risks of bullfighting. I
point out that the risks of bullfighting are grossly and grotesquely
exaggerated by bullfighters and defenders of bullfighting.
I begin with mountaineering. I was a cross-country skier and I've
used cross-country skis in the Alps for downhill skiing. Steve Barnett's
book 'Cross-Country Downhill,' mainly about skiing in the Canadian and
American North-West, is a fine introduction to its compelling attractions,
but my own skiing was much more limited. My rock climbing career, on the
other hand, was very brief. The experience of dislocating a shoulder twelve
times - not on a rock face - was one of the things that convinced me that I
wasn't well suited to rock climbing.
Of course, anyone who takes up mountaineering and climbing in other
settings will need to consider very carefully the risks. Many of them are
avoidable, but not all. .
Edward Whymper wrote in 'Scrambles Amongst the Alps,'
“Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought
without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness
of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the
beginning think what may be the end.”
Edward Whymper is best known for the first ascent of the Matterhorn in
1865. During the descent, four members of the climbing party were killed.
Climbers almost always use modern methods of protection, which include
not just climbing ropes but many other sophisticated pieces of equipment.
Free climbers don't. The best known free climber is Alex Honnold, shown
above. If free climbers fall, almost always they die.
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.
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. In his blog, he gives a figure for the number of
professional bullfighters killed in the last three hundred years: 533. This is
one of the lists he refers to, the annotated list of deaths of matadors
since 1700:
This document, like
the others, omits context and comparison. For example, in 1971, José
Mata García died as a result of bullfighting injuries, but would probably
have survived if medical facilities at the ring had not been very poor. In
the same year, two Spanish matadors were killed in car accidents (a
Venezualan matador was killed in a car accident as well.)
Between 1863 and
1869, no deaths are recorded for matadors. During the American Civil War in
just one prison (Salisbury, North Carolina) during a four month period (October 1864 - February 1865) 3,708 prisoners died out of
a total of about 11 000. (Information from the 'Civil War Gazette.') This is
about a 33% mortality rate. If a similar mortality rate applied to
bullfighting, then in one single bullfighting season in Spain there would be
markedly more bullfighters killed than have been killed in three centuries
of bullfighting.
Or consider this as context for the death of 533
bullfighters in a period of over 300 years: Italian soldiers
facing soldiers of the Austrian-Hungarian army. On December 13, 1916
(later known as 'White Friday') 10,000 soldiers were killed in
avalanches.
Essential background for bullfighting mortality
statistics is the frequent recklessness of bullfighters. In the Anti-blog, I
refer to Padilla, injured but not killed, who head-butted a bull, obviously
very near to the horns, twice. Padilla lost an eye as a result, but in the
same year in which more bullfighters were killed in car accidents than in
the ring, 1971, a bullfighter lost an eye in a car accident.
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.' Penicillin transformed bullfighting. Before its introduction,
accidents in the bullring, like accidents on the farm, were far more likely
to be fatal.
'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
many soldiers at the Western Front during periods of intense fighting, the
life expectancy of new RAF pilots in 1917, was a few weeks. The men who flew in RAF Bomber Command during the Second World
War were all volunteers.
55,573 were killed out of a total of 125,000 aircrew - a 44.4%
mortality rate. 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.'
Bullfighting: 'the
last serious thing in the modern world?'
See also the previous section Bullfighting and 'duende'
for more on the supposed superiority of the Spanish attitude to death,
an argument often used to justify bullfighting.
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 'Into the Arena' he claims of the bullring, "And in that ring are all the tragic
and brutal truths of the world unadorned.' 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 many millions remembered their
losses during the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and 1919 which killed 60 or 70
million people - known sometimes as 'Spanish flu,' on account of its
severity in Spain, 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 extreme
falsity of those words. Equally worthy of contempt are the words of the
writer and director Agustín Díaz Yanes who declared that 'bullfighters were
the only free men left in the world.' (Reported
in The Times Literary Supplement blog, 'Tagore in Segovia.'
The material I give on this page of 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.
During the
fascist dictatorship and during the Second World War (Franco kept Spain out
of the Second World War but supported Hitler), bullfights took place
throughout the bullfighting season, so bullfighting supporters had reason to
be content. Spanish bullfighting supporters took pride in their
bullfighters and gave them their adulation.
In this country, we have very
different reasons for pride, the courage, endurance and sacrifices made by
people in this country when it didn't give up or stand aside, like Franco's
Spain, but fought
against Hitler.
It can be argued that the prominence of bullfighting in Spain now is
a consequence of Franco's victory in the Spanish civil war. A note on the
place of bullfighting in Spanish society during the Franco era. From Carrie
B. Douglass, 'Bulls, bullfighting and Spanish identities:'
Franco and the "Spain" that won the Civil War, the Nationalists,
seemed to value the fiesta nacional in a special way. Although Franco was
from Galicia, a region without much of a bullfighting tradition, he was a
great aficionado of los toros ... Corridas were included in the bundle of
images considered to be "castiza" (pure) Spain which Franco and his
Nationalist supporters in general patronised. General Franco was often
photographed with popular bullfighters ...
'In fact, had it not been for the Nationalists (the Right) during the
Civil War the toro bravo and the corridas de toros may well have died out
completely ... the Republicans and the political left had been against los
toros ... the Anarchists opposed bullfighting totally, calling the corrida a
"remnant of medieval cruelty" claiming that it desenstized people to
suffering and distracted them from the task of educating themselves."
'The republican Lorca and
the nationalists were linked as well as contrasted. They were linked by the
cult of death. One nationalist rallying cry was 'Long live death!' Lorca:
'Spain is unique, a country where death is a national spectacle...In every
country death has finality. Not in Spain. A dead person in Spain is more alive
than is the case anywhere else.' Another republican, El Campesino, again quoted
in 'The Battle for Spain' : 'I am not pretending that I was not guilty of
ugly things myself, or that I never caused needless sacrifice of human lives.
I am a Spaniard. We look upon life as tragic. We despise death.'
Massacres on a vast scale have taken place in countries without anything
like a death-cult, but the Spanish death-cult faces enormous problems in
coming to terms with these massacres - including the massacres which took
place during the Spanish civil war.
The Spanish cult of death - not a justification of
bullfighting, something to be used in defence of bullfighting, but something
which has encouraged and been used to justify human slaughter as well as
animal suffering in the bullfight - is a sign of disease, not health. Paul
Preston is the foremost British historian of the Spanish civil war. His
books include 'The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in
Twentieth-Century Spain,' which documents the slaughter and torture of those
years. He estimates that at least 130 000 people were executed by the
nationalists during the war but the total is likely to have been much
higher. He estimates that just under 50 000 people were killed by the
Republicans. Compare the attention given to the 533 bullfighters killed in
the ring since 1700 by Alexander Fiske-Harrison. When the town of Badajoz
was captured by the nationalists on August 14, 1936, the prisoners were
confined in the bullring. Hundreds were killed in the executions which began
that night. Soon, as many as 4 000 people were killed.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison's bucolic portrayal of fighting
bulls living a life of ease in the wide open spaces of the ranches ignores
the history of such places: the misery of the landless poor in
Southern Spain, regarded with indifference or contempt by the landed
aristocracy. Land reform was one of the chief proposals of the Popular Front
government elected in February 1936 on the eve of the Spanish civil war.
Helen Graham, on events early in the war:
'It was a war of agrarian counter-reform that turned
Andalusia and Extremadura into killing fields. The large landowners who
owned the vast estates which covered most of the southern half of Spain rode
along with the Army of Africa [Franco's Moroccan forces] to reclaim by force
of arms the land on which the Republic had settled the landless poor. Rural
labourers were killed where they stood, the 'joke' being they had got their
'land reform' at last - in the form of a burial plot.
Reforms, and not only land reforms, were crushed with the
victory of the nationalists in the war, and large numbers of the landless
poor were exterminated. The wealthy land-owners who bred and reared bulls
were amongst those who benefitted from the crushing of the legitimate
government and its supporters.
The bull-rearing ranches have a very dark history, then.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison may be aware of these aspects of Spanish history,
but his writing on Spain never mentions them. A wider interest in history, a
less exclusive interest in the history of bullfighting, would add
perspective to some of his views - or even overturn them.
Bulls, elephants and tigers
In the bullfighting
arena: 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.
Bullfighting
as an art form. Bullfighting and tragedy
The top picture here shows the ancient Greek theatre at Epidauros.
(Acknowledgements: cdine's photostream.) The lower picture here shows the Roman arena at Nîmes in France, then part of
the Roman Empire. (Acknowledgements: mikeandanna'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 realized 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.'
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.') I used to
be a cross-country skier, with a particular interest in cross-country
downhill. But skiers
don't generally claim that their turns amount to an art form. I wouldn't
claim that in the least.
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 Rudolph 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.
Bullring ballet
and bulls vomiting blood
One of the comments on this Youtube video, 'Toro vomitando sangre,' 'Bull
vomiting blood'
'Don't be deceived by your eyes. Just keep saying to yourself, "This is a
beautiful art like ballet." '
To many defenders of bullfighting, including this comment-writer on the Youtube
film, my revulsion at the blood pouring out of this bull's mouth will seem
hopelessly crude and misguided. According to this
perspective, the blood and stabbings, including the vomiting of blood
after stabbing with the sword, 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 - but 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
grossly 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. No bullfighter can
guarantee that he (or she) will kill a bull instantly. A bull vomiting blood
is a common, not a rare occurrence.
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 ...'
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. (His
description of his killing of a bull makes it clear that the bull took some
time to die: it's not in the least unlikely that this bull too was vomiting
blood, like the bull in the film.)
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.'
I'd prefer to use the term 'bull-stabber' rather than
'bullfighter.' There are three kinds of bull-stabber: the picador, who stabs
the bull with a lance, the banderilllero, who stabs the bull with barbed
banderillas, and the matador, who stabs the bull with a sword. But on this
page, I use the established word 'bullfighter.'
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.
Bullfighting
and comedy
Hemingway had a less than
sure feeling for comedy. He found comedy where there was none at all, in the
death of the horses in the bull-ring, and was oblivious to comedy in his own
writing. Isn't this comic, or, rather, bizarre? It comes from the Glossary
of the book, where, as well as explaining the diseased world of bull-fighting,
he includes an entry on, of all things:
'Tacones: heels;
tacones de goma are rubber heels: these are sold by ambulatory vendors
who will come up to you while you are seated in the cafe, cut the heel off
your shoe with a sort of instant-acting leather-cutting pincers they carry,
in order to force you to put on a rubber heel. The rubber heels they attach
are of a low, worthless grade...If any rubber-heel attacker ever cuts a heel
of your shoe without your having first definitively ordered a pair of rubber
heels, kick him in the belly or under the jaw [!] and get the heels put on
by someone else...There is one sinister-faced Catalan high-pressured heel
ripper...I gave him that [whether a kick in the belly or under the jaw isn't
specified] but he is more of a dodger by now and you might have difficulty
landing on him. The best thing when you see this particular heel-selling bastard
(hijo de puta will do) approaching is to take off your shoes and
put them inside your shirt. If he then attempts to attach rubber heels to
your bare feet [!], send for the American or British Consul.'
For Hemingway, 'in the
tragedy of the bullfight the horse is the comic character ... Therefore the
worse the horses are, provided they are high enough off the ground and solid
enough so that the picador can perform his mission with the spiked pole, or
vara, the more they are a comic element.' And in connection with the disembowelling
of the horses, 'There is certainly nothing comic by our standards in seeing
an animal emptied of its visceral content, but if this animal instead of doing
something tragic, that is, dignified, gallops in a stiff old-maidish fashion
around the ring trailing the opposite of clouds of glory, it is as comic it
was the horse which provided the comic touch' then according to Hemingway
it is as comic as burlesque farce: 'If one is comic the other is; the humour
comes from the same principle ... I have seen these, call them disembowellings,
that is the worst word, when, due to their timing, they were very funny.'
See also Seamus
Heaney on the actions of the banderillero, (stabbing the bull six times)
which he thinks are 'closer to comedy than tragedy.'
The humour of some bullfighting
enthusiasts, their idea of 'fun', make a deeply depressing study. The animal
victims of the 'informal events' of Spanish fiestas are presumably regarded
as hilarious, light relief from the solemn 'tragedy' of the corrida itself.
A page on the impressive Web site of FAACE gives examples. 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.
Bullfighting and 'duende'
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.
From frantic sun to shade, overshadowing the dazed end
of the poet and his monstrous lies - fated to be scythed and beginning
to fade.
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.
Bullfighting and
seduction
'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.
San Francisco
Opera, Susan McClary and Carmen
Below, there's information about the production of Carmen due to be given
by San Francisco Opera later this year. Susan McClary, a musicologist at
Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, is the author of the
book 'Carmen.' There's a critical section on the book, with much more
information on the background to the opera, in my page on
Cambridge University (the book is
published by Cambridge University Press, a department of the university.) Susan McClary completely neglected
the topic of the ethical objections to bullfighting in her book on the
opera - even though this is the only opera to have a bullfighting
setting. San Francisco opera, in its obnoxious, misleading
publicity material, which I quote, neglects the topic too.
From the libretto of 'Carmen':
ESCAMILLO
(to Carmen)
If you love me, Carmen soon
you can be proud of me.
CARMEN
Ah! I love you, Escamillo, I love you,
and may I die if I have ever loved
anyone as much as you!
TOGETHER
Ah! I love you!
Yes, I love you!
The bullfighter Escamillo is soon to fight in the bullring. It's his
prowess in the bullring which will supposedly make Carmen proud of him.
'Meet the hottest woman in all of Seville—a free
spirit who knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to go get it. But what
happens when the attention she attracts turns obsessive? Find out in
this pulse-pounding, picturesque production.'
And this propaganda-publicity
The Art of the Bullfight
'If you want a more complete picture of Spanish culture, study
bullfighting. Famous writers of various nationalities have
eloquently expressed that sentiment from Federico García Lorca to
Ernest Hemingway, most notably in the American author’s Death in
the Afternoon. “It is impossible to believe the emotional and
spiritual intensity and the pure, classic beauty that can be
produced by a man, an animal and a piece of scarlet serge,”
Hemingway wrote in 1932.
Although he never visited the country, Georges Bizet (along with
Carmen co-librettists Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy) knew
that no story set in Spain would be complete without channeling the
passion and mythos intrinsic to the bullfight—or toreo as it
is known in Spanish-speaking countries. That fascination continues
today with films such as Blood and Sand, based on Vicente
Blasco Ibáñez’s best-selling novel, and Pedro Almodóvar’s
Matador.
'Yet for outsiders there are still a number of misconceptions
surrounding this vital aspect of Spanish culture. First, as Edward
F. Stanton writes in his comprehensive Handbook of Spanish
Popular Culture, bullfighting is neither sport nor
entertainment. It is ceremony, a way of life deeply rooted in
Spanish society—in effect, a solemn and sacred dance of life and
death. What’s more, bullfighting is theater, as cathartic as ancient
Greek tragedy. Not a competition between man and bull, but, as
Stanton writes, “a mutual participation in a prescribed ritual, or
as some have suggested, a kind of sublimated lovemaking.” But isn’t bullfighting inherently cruel and savage, in which the
bull or (less likely) the man must die? Spaniards also fervently
debate the question. “Take away the bull and we’ll see what is
left,” wrote Spanish author Antonio Gala. “Would we recognize
ourselves without the passion for and against the bull?” For the
bull is the country’s most identifiable symbol. As early as the
first century A.D., the Iberian Peninsula was described by the Greek
geographer Strabo as a dried, stretched bull’s hide. Cattle still
populate the Spanish countryside—in actuality and as 20-foot-tall,
black billboards in the shape of a fighting bull (toro bravo).
Originally advertisements for Soberano (“Sovereign”) brandy, these
billboards have become national artistic monuments.
Fans will trace the origins of Spanish bullfighting as far back
as ancient cave paintings and Roman hunts, although the historical
record isn’t so certain. What we do know is that for centuries, the
Catholic Church in Spain registered its displeasure with
bullfighting’s pagan associations, including one edict dating from
447 A.D. Two popes even attempted to outlaw the spectacles in the
sixteenth century. During the age of the Enlightenment, Spanish
monarchs also tried to prohibit the bulls, yet with little success.
Government policy changed entirely during the dictatorship of
Francisco Franco (1939–1975), when bullfighting was promoted owing
to its strong connection to Spanish tradition. Today, in spite of
protests by animal rights advocates and increasing government
regulations, bullfighting remains popular.
According to one count, there are approximately 8,000
bull-related events celebrated each year in Spain. These include not
just the formal bullfight or corrida de toros, but the
encierro or running of the bulls immortalized by Hemingway in
The Sun Also Rises; capeas, the informal caping of
calves, cows, or bulls during fiestas in thousands of town squares;
and recortadores or competitions of bull-dodgers practiced by
amateurs. In contrast, bullfighting is a centuries-old profession.
Nowadays most bullfighters or toreros are trained in formal
bullfighting schools, including one in San Diego. In 1976, it became
legal for women to be professional bullfighters in Spain.
'In Bizet’s Carmen, there are notable inaccuracies about
bullfighting, including the very term toreador which does not
exist in Spanish. (It was purportedly invented by Bizet so that the
syllables of the word would correspond with the music for the
Toreador Song.) However, as Stanton notes in his history of
bullfighting, “the most marginal ethnic group in all of Spain, the
Gypsies, have made up a disproportionate percentage of matadores,”
particularly in more recent times. The hot-blooded Carmen has met
her match not with the cool and aloof Don José but with the brave
Escamillo.
In the end, passion, dignity, and tradition have become
synonymous with Spanish bullfighting. Without bullfighters, as the
aficionado Fernando Claramunt remarked, “Spain would be like any
other place in the world. They are modern man’s last connection to
the ancient, heroic past.” '
The misconceptions and falsifications to be found in this
passage, and the many more lies and misconceptions used in defence
of bullfighting, are addressed on this page. I point out that the
bullfighters who are, supposedly, 'modern man's last connection to
the ancient, heroic past' have now, and had in the past, only a very
remote chance of being killed in the bullring, unlike the vast
numbers of people in modern times who face incomparably greater
risks.
If I lived in San Francisco, I wouldn't attend any of the performances.
I'd print leaflets to explain my revulsion and I'd offer a leaflet to people
who decided that they would attend - as I've done in the case of a variety
of causes, not just opposition to bullfighting. I hope that some San
Franciscans will do something similar just before the performances start and
during the time when the opera is being performed.
I oppose disruption and damage as campaigning techniques in the case of
all the causes which I've actively supported. I wouldn't oppose disruption
and damage in the case of Nazism, of course.
I oppose the view that because 'Carmen' is an opera which is ethically
objectionable, in part - the part which is concerned with bullfighting -
that the composer Bizet had no melodic gift or that Bizet had no musical
strengths. That would be ridiculous. If people want to go to see a
performance of 'Carmen' given by this opera company, or any other, then
they're entitled to. I hope that audiences of the opera will have enough
knowledge of the realities of bullfighting to see through the spurious
glamour. Overall, I recommended this course of action to supporters of San
Francisco Opera:
San Francisco Opera's production of Carmen
Stay away. Continue to support San Francisco Opera, but give this
production a miss. Let the public at the performances of 'Carmen' be made up entirely of believers, people who
in their ignorance really do believe
that bullfighters are 'modern
man’s last connection to the ancient, heroic past.'
Aficionados out there are welcome to point
out the mistakes and omissions they find in my account of bullfighting on
this page, if they want to, and if they can.
I don't take the view that because
Susan McClary's book 'Carmen' is very deficient in some ways, such as the
ignoring of the questions raised by bullfighting, that the book is
completely hopeless. She has many, many strengths as a
musicologist, although many, many weaknesses when she strays beyond
musicology, which is often.
I give a list of people involved in the production, but with no blame
attached, with the exception of people who did make the decisions
which compromise this production so severely, including Matthew Erikson, who
compiled the pro-bullfight propaganda on the San
Francisco Opera Website which is quoted above.
I regard live opera as very important. I live in a city without an opera
company, or a professional orchestra. Music can't flourish where recorded
music is the only music on offer. The demands on professional and
semi-professional musicians (and the staff of opera companies) are severe.
Singers, instrumentalists and conductors face immense difficulties in
launching their careers and in the rest of their careers. Except for a
minority, they are paid not nearly enough.
Cultural
stagnation
The attention given to
the bullfight in Provence, Seville and other places is a sign not of colourful
tradition but of stagnation. Any region or country with vitality tries to
preserve its strengths and reduce its weaknesses. To be unchanging, to be
oblivious to the better intellectual and cultural currents of the age, is
a sign of weakness.
Great Britain, but particularly
England, has a very high regard for tradition but it has at least recognized
that tradition can be a sign of weakness as well as strength. It's remarkable
that Britain, with all its faults, transformed itself from a bull-baiting
and bear-baiting and fox-hunting country, one with no real tradition of animal
welfare, to one with such a care for dogs, cats, and injured wildlife, and
one which has achieved a very great deal in the abolition of factory farming,
although not nearly enough. Countries, as well as people, are not condemned
to repeat the past, to perpetuate traditions that have become unacceptable
for very good reasons. Practices that seem deeply embedded in a society, too
much a part of its tradition to be reformed or abolished, can 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?
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.
Animals:
appreciation and abuse
Umberto Saba on the pathos
of one animal, the original followed by my translation
I talked to a goat.
He was alone in the field, tethered,
fed 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
posturing which is bullfighting's depraved contribution to the world.
As with 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.
Bullfighting and
mono-culture
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 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?
Miriam Mandel is the editor of 'Hemingway's Dangerous Summer: the
complete annotations,' a scholarly pro-bullfighting work - but its
accumulated detail undermines the bullfighting case (there's revealing
information about the extent of 'afeitado,' tampering with the bull by 'horn
shaving.' Miriam Mandel shows the usual aficionado's awe-struck and
credulous opinion of bullfighters, extending even to bullfighters'
biochemistry and physiology, or at least the biochemical and physiological
processes concerned in wound healing. These, it seems, are different from
those of lesser people: 'Injuries require a bullfighter to absent himself
from the ring, but these enforced absences are often surprisingly short
(bullfighters seem to heal more quickly than other people).
Fadjen, a fighting bull, and
Christophe Thomas
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.
Campaigning techniques
(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 circumstances 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 most cases, anti-bullfighting activists
use tactics which can be supported wholeheartedly, for example, the
tactics used by these
Spanish activists
shown in this film. 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.
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?'
Three Spanish
restaurants
This section illustrates the discussion of the previous section
on Campaigning techniques. It gives
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
on this page.
'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.
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 Reger Moore) 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. Abi Izzard of PETA changed her name officially to 'StopFortnumAndMasonFoieGrasCruelty.com'
(changes to documents like her driving licence were necessary) to publicize
the fact that the store Fortnum and Mason still sells foie gras - not
in the least a useful contribution.
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.
'
Human welfare, animal welfare
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.
Other
forms of bullfighting
On this page, I discuss
the 'corrida,' the form of bullfighting practised in Spain, the bullfighting
countries of Latin America and Southern France. Southern France has other
forms of bullfighting as well and Portugal has its own form of bullfight.
A page which gives useful
information about
the Portuguese bullfight and is well written, although with
typographic errors. Quotations below are from this page.
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 in general suffer far, far less than in the corrida but the risk
of severe injury and death is always present.
'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.'
In fact, the dangers to horses in Portuguese bullfights are similar to
the dangers of the horses of the rejoneadors in Spanish bullfights. This
film shows what may happen to them:
Pamplona: a proposal
Efforts to carry out reform or to abolish abuses are always more
difficult when reform or abolition involves an opponent which
has great economic power. There is, of course, no linkage
between economic power and powerful ethical arguments in favour.
The fighting in the Roman amphitheatres brought economic
benefits but required abolition. The festival of San Fermin at
Pamplona involves not just bull running but bull-fighting.
Scenes from bullfights at Pamplona are shown below.
One of the bulls which ran at
Pamplona earlier in the day. The sword-thrust (or perhaps
multiple sword-thrusts)
failed to kill it, as usual, and the animal is finished
off with a dagger.
Acknowledgments: Maroc's photostream
Another scene from the San Fermin Festival, Pamplona:
spearing the bull and terrifying the horse, or worse (but referred to by aficionados as the 'tercio de varas,' the first stage of the
bullfight.)
Acknowledgments: Elarequi61's photostream
And another scene from the San Fermin Festival, Pamplona:
stabbing the bull with the banderillas (the second stage of the
bullfight, the 'tercio de banderillas.')
Acknowledgments: Rufino Lasaosa's photostream
A San Fermin festival at Pamplona without the bullfight, a festival
without the killing, would do a very great deal for the reputation of
Pamplona and the reputation of Spain. 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, a place where there's still the thunder of hooves
and people taking their chance with the bulls, but without the barbarity.
This isn't to suggest that having a party and running with the
bulls, or watching other people run with the bulls, has anything
like the significance so often claimed. These are unimportant
rather than important, except for the people who take part. The
importance of Pamplona is primarily importance for the local
economy. Pamplona shares the narcissistic exaggeration which is
the 'soul' of bullfighting. As for the risks to life, running
with the bulls, like fighting bulls, is a low-risk activity.
For those who want it, running of the bulls could take place, just as now, offering exactly
the same experience, and there could be bloodless bullfights in the arena, like
the ones in Southern France, or activities involving bulls such as the 'Recortes.'
A recortador in action
Many animal welfarists would object, claiming,
perhaps, that the bulls would be stressed, but I wouldn't. Better this 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, perhaps for ever, 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,' an uncompromising opponent of bullfighting, included this
in one of his comments on a Website: 'I've been to the Pamplona
bull run 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.'
'I forget whether it was Stephen Ibarra or Rick Musica,
those pillars of Pamplona, who said that if they took the bulls
away from the feria, but kept the people, they’d still come, but
if they took away the people, it wouldn’t be worth it for the
bulls alone.'
I don't think people would come in large numbers to a
bull-free Pamplona but they would certainly come in large
numbers to a bullfight-free Pamplona (a 'corrida-free Pamplona,'
that is, a Pamplona where no bulls were killed in the bullring.)
A Pamplona which offered thrills, excitement, riotous living and
took away the abject barbarity would be worth supporting. As it
is, no humane person should support the San Fermin festival.
The probability of a Pamplona with bull-running but no bull-fighting is
probably remote, but if other towns offered bull-running
but no bullfighting (except perhaps for bloodless bullfighting or activities
such as 'Recortes,' these towns could attract many, many people who attend
the San Fermin festival at Pamplona but who have qualms about the cruelty of
the corrida, or no interest in the corrida. They could offer real
competition to Pamplona. Eventually, the economic arguments for Pamplona too
abolishing corridas could become very strong.
There are many, many towns and cities in bullfighting areas which could
obtain great financial benefits by offering a festival similar to the San
Fermin festival, but without the cruelty. Carcassonne in France would be a
strong contender, I think. The town introduced corridas not so very long
ago. It would gain rather than lose economically if it abolished them and
began to offer a festival of the bulls without killing of the bulls. The
appearance of the town would certainly be an advantage:
It might be expected that Spanish
towns and cities would be particularly resistant to bull-running
without corridas, certainly in areas like Andalucia, but the Spanish
financial crisis has made the chances of success greater.
Bullfighting and the Spanish financial crisis was the subject of an
article published in 'The Times' recently (4 June). A good article, not
sympathetic to bullfighting. (Notice the mention of 'the prolonged agony
that ends with the estocada (sword thrust.)'
‘… The crisis that has pushed
Spain to the brink of financial ruin has produced (arguably) an unlikely
winner – the fighting bull …
'Rather than ending their lives at the hands of a matador in the ring,
increasing numbers of toros bravos are being
slaughtered for their meat, a quick exit in an abattoir that is seen as
somewhat kinder to[than] the prolonged agony that ends with the estocada (sword
thrust).
'Since the financial crisis began, the number of bullfights has fallen by
46 per cent, from 2,177 in 2007 to 1,177 last year, according to government
figures, a decline partly attributable to cultural changes but accelerated
by economic decline.
'The cost of going to a bullfight has put off many fans … Local councils,
which traditionally have paid for bullfights during civic festivals, have
cut back on such expenditures. And the high cost of raising a fighting bull
… has hit breeders …
' "We are looking for other sources of business,” Carlos Nunez, president
of the Association of Fighting Bull Breeders, said. “We hope we can bring in
tourists to see the bulls.” …’
'82.1 percent of 16 to 19 year-olds and 63.1 percent of 20 to 24
years looking for work can't find it. In total, 66.4 percent of
people under 25 are unemployed.'
This site isn't in the least a single issue site and although I
concentrate on bullfighting on this page, understandably enough, it's not to
the exclusion of other issues. I make this completely clear. The Spanish
financial crisis isn't important only in its effects on bullfighting. The
Spanish financial crisis is important, obviously, for a whole host of
reasons. This is one of them: extreme financial difficulty - and the crisis
may become worse, immeasurably worse - will often be the precursor of
extreme political instability, instability which may even lead to wars. This
is one of the extreme dangers facing Europe as a whole, far more than a very
remote possibility for Europe as a whole, which everyone must hope will
never materialize. Politicians and others have to do more than hope,
however: they have to take decisions, often very difficult decisions.
It's impossible to generalize. There are Spanish people living very
pampered, very wasteful lives - aficionados amongst them - for whom it's
impossible to feel any sympathy if they suffer hardship. There are
also many, many good people in Spain - active opponents of bullfighting
amongst them - who face extreme hardship, and many good causes in Spain
likewise, and not just the anti-bullfighting causes.
The duties of Spanish politicians aren't in the least confined to
issues to do with bullfighting and taking steps to abolish bullfighting is
only one issue with which they should be concerned. This is an elementary
consideration. Opponents of bullfighting have to take care not to overlook
or to minimize the responsibilities and skills of politicians, which
obviously include matters such as taxation policy, planning policy,
fiscal regulation, defence expenditure, and so much else.
Financial and economic considerations have an impact on bullfighting but
the decline of bullfighting and the defeat of bullfighting interests have to
be based on more secure grounds. Otherwise, the ending of the financial
crisis in Spain could end this particular threat to bullfighting.
Ethical issues remain paramount. Pamplona's bullfighting connections
bring it great economic benefit, but the same can be said of many morally
flawed and morally disastrous practices. From a very different sphere, a
flood of imports of cheap clothing, produced by badly paid, in fact,
exploited workers, many of them children, has economic benefits for many
people. Again, these are elementary considerations.
I resist completely any suggestion that in situations of crisis, only
issues which are relevant to the crisis are important. Unless it
becomes more or less impossible, interest in the full range of human issues
(which include issues to do with animals) should continue as before. There
are many historical examples to show that this has been the case. The
stupendous cultural achievements of 5th century Athens were achieved despite
the fact that Athens fought the Peloponnesian War. The fact that Athens'
survival was so often in doubt didn't lead to any ignoring of architecture,
drama and other fields. During the Second World War, many, many books were
published in Britain which had nothing to do with the winning of the war or
Britain's fight for survival - books on poetry and so much else.
Similarly with events in other countries. The atrocities and suffering in
Syria don't consign the struggle to end bullfighting to irrelevance.
Freedom of expression
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 was invited to give a
talk at Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford, death threats were made, allegedly,
and the talk was rescheduled. I obtained a ticket for the event.
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.
Then Alexander Fiske-Harrison posted this on his blog:
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. Now his talk has been
cancelled, since hardly any tickets had been requested.
Whatever the level of threats to the author, if 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!'
'The Guide gives ticket agencies for the purchase of bullfighting tickets
and where to find a bullfighting museum. Although
it quotes polls saying that 75% of Spaniards have no interest in the sport,
there is no mention of the large and growing anti-bullfighting movement
spreading through Spain.
'The only attempt to show the “other side” is the question “An epic drama of
blood and sand or a cruel blood “sport” that has no place in modern Europe?
(Page 221)
'But the Madrid guide makes it obvious where the ‘Lonely Planet’ stands on
the question of bullfighting. At the very beginning of the guide a picture
is chosen featuring the interior of a pro-bullfighting restaurant
concentrating on bullfighting memorabilia.
'They also write: ‘Nothing can exceed the gaiety and sparkle of a Spanish
public going eager and full-dressed to the fight’ (Page 101) ‘at once
picturesque, compelling theatre and an ancient ritual that sees 30,000 bulls
killed in 17,000 bullfights each year in Spain.’ (Page 222)
'Tony Moore, Chairman of FAACE, wrote to the Editor on the 7th of January
2009 saying
'Your writer would be better employed making a good job of researching what
is a very controversial subjecting instead of repeating the same old staid
clichés. One wonders if he is just lazy or in the pocket of the bullfighting
industry.
'You are doing no favors to Spain; they want to break away from the outdated
and cruel picture that bullfighting paints.
ask you to make sure that when the subject of bullfighting is mentioned in
one of your travel guides, if you do not condemn it, at least you should not
promote it!
There was no reply to his letter.
The author of the guidebook wrote this, but not
as part of the guidebook. It was written in 2006 but the
situation seems not to have improved - for bullfighting's defenders, that is
- since then. For one thing, they have been defeated in Barcelona and the
rest of Catalonia. They've made attempts to minimize the ban on bullfighting
and explain it away but there's evidence that when it did happen, it was
regarded as a severe setback.
'That bullfighting should become a thing of the
past in separatist Barcelona is less important than that public apathy is
taking hold in Madrid, Valencia and Andalusia, Spain's bastions of
bullfighting. "Before, you put up a poster and the people came," says Juan
Carlos Beca Belmonte, the manager of Madrid's Las Ventas bullring, Spain's
most prestigious plaza de toros. "Now we are the ones who have to chase
after the crowd." Luis Corrales, president of the Platform in Defence of the
Bull Festival, says: "There used to be only bullfighting or soccer, or maybe
a movie. But now there are so many other leisure choices." Spanish state
television, mindful of the corrida's diminishing appeal, has also cut by
almost one-third the air time it devotes to bullfighting, and many private
channels no longer broadcast from the ring. The concomitant fall in
advertising revenues is exacerbating the financial crisis confronting
bullring operators, who must pay up to $50,000 for a full quota of bulls and
as much as $575,000 for a top matador and his entourage for a single corrida.
To break even for each fight, promoters must sell at least 75 per cent of
seats. At one level, rumours of bullfighting's demise are premature, for
this remains a multimillion-dollar industry that employs 150,000 Spaniards.
Every year, Spain's 60 major bullrings draw about 20 million spectators who
pay $1.35 billion into the industry's coffers. The mid-May Fiesta de San
Isidro in Madrid, which heralds the start of Spain's most important
bullfighting season, is a major social event where the great and good of
Spain gather to be seen in illustrious company. Matadors, defined by their
statuesque grace, dazzling traje de luces (suit of lights) and glamorous
lifestyles, are national celebrities whose private lives are dissected by
Spain's scandalised and scandalous prensa rosa (pink press). But the fact
that the average Spaniard is now more likely to know a bullfighter's face
from the pages of a magazine than they are to have seen him in the bullring
reinforces the widely held view that bullfighting's glory days have passed.
The figures that attest to the size of the industry also conceal the serious
financial difficulties that confront almost every major bullring. Even
members of the bullfighting fraternity admit that they no longer stand at
the centre of Spanish life. "My goal is for bullfighting to form a part of
today's society, instead of remaining on the margins," says Alejandro Seaz,
a Spanish businessman and bullfighting promoter. Of far greater concern for
supporters of bullfighting are two simple, telling statistics: the average
spectator at Las Ventas bullring in Madrid is a fiftysomething male and just
17 per cent of Spaniards younger than 24 say that they are at least
"somewhat interested" in bullfighting. In an attempt to attract a younger
generation of bullfighting aficionados, and in order to pay the bills,
promoters have been forced to transform the amphitheatre-style bullrings
into multipurpose arenas. Bullfights now share the stage with rock concerts,
and sanitised performances akin to circuses (where the bulls are not killed
and acrobats leap over the bulls' horns) have begun to replace the
traditional battle to the death between man and beast. In Valencia, ticket
prices, which for keynote bullfights can run as high as $200, have been
slashed, cocktail bars installed and free glossy magazines handed out so as
to widen the corrida's appeal. In the largely conservative world of
bullfighting, however, resistance remains to the idea that the tradition
must reinvent itself. The corrida is an essential pillar of Spanish cultural
identity, their argument runs, and something quintessentially Spanish would
be forever lost were bullfighting forced to change. According to Jose Maria
Garcia-Lujan, a lawyer involved in the running of Las Ventas: "They don't
like to touch anything, lest the magic wear off". There are nonetheless
signs that the magic may have already worn off for an industry showing the
unmistakeable signs of permanent decline. Increasingly abandoned by younger
Spaniards, tarnished by sordid kiss-and-tell scandals and suddenly
peripheral in the country of its birth, bullfighting is being forced to ask
whether it can survive as a viable tradition beyond the current generation
of aficionados. The question has been asked before, not least by Hemingway,
one of bullfighting's most trenchant defenders, who wrote in the 1930s: "How
long the bullfight survives as a lynchpin of Spanish life probably depends
on whether the majority of the population thinks it makes them feel good."
Whether because bullfighting no longer makes Spaniards feel good or simply
because they have better things to do with their time, the answer has never
been less certain.'
Courageous men, courageous women, and animals
Tristan Garel-Jones, in his 'Proclamation of the Maestranza
Bullring:' 'In
the Anglo Saxon world ... they are no longer able to look death in the face.
Indeed they are hardly able to pronounce so much as the word.' Alexander
Fiske-Harrison, speaking in support of Tristan Garel-Jones: British and
American culture is 'a culture which is afraid to even think of death.'
See also the section The courage of the
bullfighters - illusions and distortions. I show that the risk of a bullfighter being killed in
the bullring is very, very low. The section includes material on the
risks faced by bullfighters, rock climbers and mountaineers amongst others,
including the remarkable achievements of Alex Honnold. Above, Alex Honnold on Liberty Cap, Yosemite, climbing without a climbing rope
or any other form of protection - free climbing.
This is a very varied section, like some other sections of the page. So much writing in support of bullfighting is
suffocating in its exclusion of the world beyond bullfighting. I see no
reason why my anti-bullfighting page should follow this example. The
supplementary material I include in this section and other sections of the
page goes far beyond the limited world of bullfighting. I give reminders of
human courage and artistic achievement which owe nothing to bullfighting and
discuss wildlife and wildlife conservation - and many other topics.
Another example to show the variety of the page: it includes a
section which compares the technique of violin playing and the 'technique'
of bullfighting. The composer Philip Venables contacted me to ask if he
could use this text as part of the violin concerto he was writing. (His
works very often make use of texts.) I agreed, of course, and the world
premiere of the concerto took place at the Royal Albert Hall in August 2018,
at a Proms Concert. The violin concerto was a tribute to the Hungarian
violin teacher Rudolf Botta - I was one of his pupils.
In this section, I concentrate my attention on British and American
courage because the ridiculous 'Proclamation' of the ridiculous Tristan
Garel-Jones mentions the Anglo-Saxon world
and the ridiculous Alexander Fiske-Harrison mentions British and American
culture, but I also discuss the heroism of a Belgian woman.
Lord Garel-Jones, in the Maenstranza Proclamation: 'The English word
"pet" has no exact translation into Spanish ... The British have this
sentimentalism towards animals ingrained in their DNA.' Below, photograph
from the collection of the National Library of Scotland, with the
caption:
'OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN ON THE BRITISH WESTERN FRONT IN FRANCE. R.A.F.
men with their pet rabbits at a Squadron near the lines.'
Below, Sergeant B Furst with the squadron
mascot on return to Duxford, Cambridgeshire after combat during
the Battle of Britain, September 7, 1940. Earlier that day, he had
shot down the Messerschmitt of Wener Goetting, who parachuted
from the plane uninjured and was made a Prisoner of War.
Amongst those who attended the unveling was former gunner
Col John Andrews of Winchester, Hampshire. He attended in memory
of mules who helped during his time in the jungle in Burma in
1944. He said, 'My life was saved by the mules ...' [Two
mules are shown above.]
PDSA Director General Marilyn Rydstrom said the memorial was
'the nation's long-awaited and very welcome tribute' to the
animals.
'It will also stand as a testament to the extraordinary bond
that animals share with mankind in times of extreme adversity.'
The Proclamation of the Maestranza
Bullring
('El Pregón
Taurino de la Maestranza') was issued on Easter Sunday 2012
by Tristan Garel-Jones.
In the words of Alexander-Fiske Harrison, the Proclamation was
At the beginning of his speech in defence of bullfighting is this
extraordinary and disturbing statement: 'It was he, [Juan Belmonte, the
bullfighter] during a conversation with a group of intellectuals in Madrid
in the middle of the Second World War who said: "Every Englishman - unless
the contrary can be proven beyond doubt - is a spy.' For Tristan Garel-Jones
to say this, to accept, it would seem, its dismissive view of the
English - it was made by someone living in Franco's pro-Hitler dictatorship
against a country struggling to survive, but not just to survive, to play
its part in liberating Europe - is almost surreal in its offensive
stupidity. It's common for lacklustre speakers to make a strained attempt at
humour at the beginning of a stilted speech. The quotation was a way of
leading to the not so hilarious, 'I do assure you that the Brit who
speaks to you today is not a spy!' Perhaps there
were a few polite chuckles or perhaps there was embarrassed total
silence. I wouldn't know. Perhaps the audience erupted in
appreciative, uproarious laughter.
Four women members of Special Operations Executive were executed at
Ravensbrück during the war, each of them suffering from extreme malnutrition
and the effects of relentless hard labour. Each of them had been tortured
for days after being captured. Each of these volunteers faced the same risks
as members of the resistance. The courage needed to parachute from the
aircraft intto enemy-occupied territory, to face from that moment acute and
unrelenting danger, is beyond praise. The four members of SOE who were
executed at
Ravensbrück are
Violette Szabo,
Cecily Lefort,
Denise Bloch and
Lilian Rolfe. Between 20 000 and 30 000 prisoners died at
Ravensbrück. They came from over 30 different countries.
A copyright-free
photograph of
Andrée de Jongh isn't available.
The New York Times obituary article includes a photograph. These are
photographs of (from left to right) Violette Szabo, Cecily Lefort, Denise
Bloch and Lilian Rolfe:
The reference made by the bullfighter Belmonte during the Second World War was probably to Englishmen in Spain at some time during the war
years rather than Englishmen in general. Many Englishmen and other
nationalities did find their way to neutral Spain during the war years, as
escaped prisoners of war, and were able to make their way back to Britain
from Gibraltar. Spain may have been officially neutral and a place of safety
for escaped prisoners of war but supported the Axis powers in many ways.
About 45 000 Spanish troops fought with the Nazis on the Eastern front.
There were a number of lines over the Pyrenees into Spain. One of them,
the
Comet line, was organized by
Andrée de Jongh, a member of the Belgian resistance. The line began in
Brussels, With the British organization MI9 she helped 400
members of the Allied forces to return to Britain.
How can the courage of a bullfighter be compared
with courage of the Belgian resistance and the other resistance movements?
They were in acute danger not for very short periods at a time, like a bullfighter, but
for months at a time or years. If captured, it was overwhelmingly likely
that they would be tortured and executed. When bullfighters are injured,
they are whisked out of the arena with the adulation of the bullfighting
public and given immediate medical treatment. When resistance workers were
tortured, there was no solicitous care for their injuries.
Andrée de Jongh was captured and tortured but she looked so unlikely a
member of the resistance that the Germans didn't execute her. (But her
father was executed by a firing squad.) She was released, arrested again
later and sent to
Ravensbrück, the concentration camp for
women, and later
Mauthausen. At both these camps, the system of Vernichtung
durch Arbeit (Extermination through labour) was in force. Andrée de Jongh survived the war, however, and devoted her life to
the care of patients suffering from leprosy by working in a hospital.
From Douglas Martin's obituary article published in 'The New York
Times (18.10.07):'
'Derek Shuff, in his book “Evader” (2007), told of three British
crewmen whose bomber made a forced landing in 1941. They found their way to
the Underground and were ensconced in a safe house when a slip of a young
woman appeared.
[After telling them that it was her job to get them to Spain]
'She left and the three sat in stunned silence. One finally spoke.
“Our lives are going to depend on a schoolgirl,” he said.
'Two of the men survived the grueling trek along what became known as
the Comet escape line, because of the speed with which soldiers were hustled
along it.
'Ms. de Jongh eventually led 24 to 33 expeditions across occupied
France, over the Pyrenees to Gibraltar. She herself escorted 118 servicemen
to safety. At least 300 more escaped along the Comet line.
'When the Germans captured her in 1943, it was her youth that saved
her. When she truthfully confessed responsibility for the entire scheme,
they refused to believe her.
'The citation of her Medal of Freedom With Golden Palm, the highest
award the United States presented to foreigners who helped the American
effort in World War II, said Ms. de Jongh “chose one of the most perilous
assignments of the war.”
...
'The Comet operation was complex: organizers needed to recover fallen
airmen, procure civilian clothing and fake identity papers, provide medical
aid for the wounded, and shelter and feed the men as they moved along their
long obstacle course.
'It was also so dangerous that Ms. de Jongh warned recruits that they
should expect to be dead or captured within six months. Her own father was
captured and executed, along with 22 others.
' ... she was sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp.
There, among skeletal and shaven forms, she was so unrecognizable that the
Gestapo could not identify her for requestioning.'
When have the British and the
Americans been afraid to look death in the face, even to think of death? Not when it counted. Not when British cities were being bombed in the
Blitz, not when British and American troops were landing on the beaches on
D-day to liberate Europe, not when their ships were being torpedoed, not
when men of the merchant navy were volunteering to serve on oil tankers, not
when the gruelling war in the Pacific was being fought. In all spheres,on
land, sea and in the air, and not just in defence of their own countries and their own legitimate national interests
but in defence of subjugated countries, British and American blood has been
shed again and again.
British casualties during the Second World War, civilian and military,
included 450 900 killed, whilst 418 500 Americans were killed. Meanwhile, in
Franco's Spain, officially neutral but supporting Hitler's Germany, two
matadors died in the bullring. As I note above, no bullfighters have been
killed in Spain in the bullring in the past twenty years. How exactly are
the British and Americans supposed to learn how to face death like the
Spanish? How is their view of death to alter? Why should it alter? Is it true that the Spanish are deeper
and more profound than us in their attitude to death or an illusion? See
also my examination of some Spanish attitudes to death in
Bullfighting and 'duende.' When the bullfighter Manolete died, Franco declared three days of
national mourning and Spanish radio in that time played nothing but funeral
dirges.
(Manolete is one of the minority of matadors who died not as a result
of a car accident, suicide, venereal disease or other natural causes
but from injury in the bullring.) Is this a 'healthy' attitude
to death or an excessive one? See also Bullfighting: 'the
last serious thing in the modern world?'
Above. part of Tyne Cot cemetery, between Ypres and Paschendaele
(now 'Passendale'), with
the graves of 11 954 soldiers, on land assigned in perpetuity by King Albert
I of Belgium in recognition of the sacrifices made by British and
Commonwealth forces in the defence and
liberation of Belgium during the First
World War. Below, the Menin Gate Memorial at Ieper / Ypres recording the
names of 54 389 officers and men from United Kingdom and Commonwealth Forces
who died in the Ypres salient before 16 August 1917 and who have no known
grave.
Below, part of the American cemetery near Omaha beach, Normandy, with the graves
of 9 387 American service men and women who died for the liberation of Europe
on and after D-day.
Tristan Garel-Jones and so many other apologists for bullfighting are
in the grip of a severe error, which
I'll call the deficiency error: Spanish culture and the
culture of other bullfighting countries are regarded as complete and
balanced, whilst the cultures of non-bullfighting countries are regarded as inadequate, deficient,
like a diet which lacks some essential nutrient. They suppose that countries
which lack the bullfight can only admit to inadequacy and look on in
admiration at the courage and achievements of bullfighting countries.
This deficiency would be corrected, allegedly, if only
the non-bullfighting countries took up bullfighting. Once the British,
the Americans, Belgians, Dutch, Swedes, Danes and others begin training,
from childhood, in proper bullfighting schools, as matadors, banderilleros
and picadors, once fighting bulls are imported through Dover,
Rotterdam, Antwerp and other ports, once lorries transporting bulls to
the bullrings become a familiar sight on motorways, once the construction
industry has provided the bullrings for the bullfighters, once bullfights
are held in London, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Brussels, Amsterdam, New
York, San Francisco, Stockholm, Copenhagen and many other places, once the
BBC and other broadcasting organizations start televising these bullfights,
once aficionados in these countries are no longer compelled to make long
journeys to satisfy their artistic desires, once achievement is recognized
by the cutting of bulls' ears and tails, then people in these countries will
be able to lift their heads up high. They will no longer have to admit to
such inadequacies as a deficiency of courage and an impoverished artistic
life, one which lacks the traditions of la corrida, los toros bravos, la
fiesta brava. Once a British, American, Belgian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish or
bullfighter of some other nationality is killed in the bullring (although it
may be a long time before this happens at current fatality rates - zero
fatalities in the last 30 years), then his or her countrymen and women will
have an example of the highest courage of all to honour and admire.
Football, cricket, baseball and other sports will survive and be supported,
but people will increasingly recognize the immense superiority of
bullfighting, will recognize that bullfighting is an art form, not a sport.
Newspapers will have proper taurine correspondents, like the taurine
correspondent of The Spectator, who is, or was, Tristan Garel-Jones.
Bullfights will be reported in the culture sections of The Sun, The Times,
the Guardian, The Now York Times, De Telegraaf and other newspapers, not the
sports sections. 'Celebrity gossip' will include more and more gossip about
matadors.
The rest of the proclamation is yet more evidence that bullfighting supporters are panicking. (See also
The Declaration of Asotauro,' 'For lovers of bullfighting [literally, 'lovers of
bulls'] 'the time has come to take the offensive, leaving no lie unanswered,
no fallacy unrefuted.')
These ringing declarations have to be followed by
attempts to answer the objections to bullfighting, such as the detailed and
comprehensive objections I give on this page. I've drawn the attention of
many individual bullfighting supporters and bullfighting organizations to
this material and received replies - the most common responses amount to
'I'll see what I can do,' - but silence has followed. Not one defence of
bullfighting against these arguments. If these people and organizations
consider that there are lies on this page, then go ahead and answer them, if
they consider that there are fallacies on this page, then go ahead and
refute them. Any bullfighting defender who does respond to the arguments on
this page will have to follow much higher standards of critical reading and
critical debate than Alexander Fiske-Harrison, who did claim to find a lie,
a fallacy on this page. His claim that I'd referred to him as 'the
acceptable face of Nazism' was nonsensical, and I explain why this is so in
the section 'Into the Arena' which begins with comments on
bad causes. By his own admission, he'd only
read a little of what I'd written about him.
My contact in the Club Taurino of London was one of the people who said
that he'd see what he could do. In fact, I've made strenuous efforts to
begin a debate with members of the club, as I explain in the section which
discusses the Club Taurino. In the light of
their failure, these words of Tristan Garel-Jones in his speech in Seville
don't inspire the least confidence:
' ... we need to be very aware that nowadays global discussion takes
place through the internet. The detractors of the Fiesta are extremely
active in promoting misleading information about the Corrida seeking to gain
acceptance for the view that it is a cruel bloodsport. The London Taurine
Club [the Club Taurino of London] - "aficionados" in the truest sense of the
word - are very aware of this danger. A group of members are planning to
launch a web site whose aim would be to respond one by one to the falsehoods
that are put about on the internet and to explain the true reality of the
Fiesta.'
I look forward very much to the launching of this new site (if it ever
happens), and to making a contribution to a vigorous exchange of views. I
look forward very much to studying and responding to the arguments of the
aficionados in defence of the 'fiesta brava,' to be supported, obviously, by
all the appropriate historical, philosophical and factual evidence
they can find.
The regal proclamation of Tristan Garel-Jones contained gross falsifications. According to
Alexander Fisk-Harrison, in his own speech in Seville:
'As Lord Garel-Jones said in his speech, the American and British mind is
repelled by this aspect of the bullfight in a way which is symptomatic of a
culture which is afraid to even think of death.'
He comments on sentimental attitudes to animals as if they were a
universal feauture of British life. Sentimentality exists, but it's far
better for a culture to have a humanitarian attitude to animals, with
sentimentality as an emotion taken to excess, than for a culture to lack
this concern for animals, without the excess but without
the warmth and without the moral and practical concern. Again and again,
British people have shown an affection for animals in dire, dangerous
circumstances. For example, this is Lt Colonel Singer, a medical officer
attached the Black Watch, 3rd Battalion the Royal Regiment of Scotland,
serving in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, on what enables soldiers to
withstand the intense pressures (his fine piece begins, 'Today we have a
service to mourn another dead soldier ... Today's service is one that will
be repeated across all bases in Afghanistan, large and small.')
'Soldiers ... cite the incidental therapy of our search dogs ... in the
main delightfully energetic spaniels. To see them being walked of an evening
lends a peculiar air of normality to this place, like a patch of Hampstead
transposed to Helmand.' ('The Times Literary Supplement,' 20.04.12) The appreciation of the role of animals in time of
war has a long history.
This is Lord Garel-Jones in full flow:
'The english word "pet" has no exact translation into Spanish ... The
British have this sentimentalism towards animals ingrained in their DNA ...
In the adult world this translates into realities which are, at times, funny
and, at times, profoundly immoral. Every day the British press carries a
string of animal stories.'
Lord Garel-Jones' devastating indictment of British civilization, as he
obviously sees it, would benefit from a much wider range of evidence.
British 'sentimentality' towards animals, as Lord Garel-Jones thinks of it,
goes back a long way. What would he make of this, from the First World War -
not a war in which the British troops could be described as soft
sentimentalists? Lt Denis Barnett: 'There is a little grave about 2ft by 3ft
in the middle of a bust-up farm, and the cross there is this: 'Here lies
Tim, a little brown dog, killed by a shell during the bombardment of this
house by teh Germans on April 23, 1915. R.I.P.' That was the end of our
mascot.' (From Richard van Emden, 'The Soldier's War: The Great War Through
Veterans' Eyes.' I give another example from the book below.
He could consider this, for example. I have a publication called 'Sheffield at
War,' published a few years after the Second World War ended. It contains
just the sort of sentiment which he would condemn as sentimentality. It
contains so much more, of course, such as this: In the air raids of December
12 - 13 and December 15, '602 people were killed and 1 671 injured. Of
Sheffielders: 'If the object of the raids was to break their spirit this,
too, failed: it left them an embittered and more determined people.' One
hotel 'a seven storey building - received a direct hit from a heavy calibre
bomb,' killing nearly 70 people. Survivors who were rescued 'told vivid
stories of how they spent the night trapped in the cellars. How they could
hardly breathe for smoke and dust ... how they dug with their hands to make
an air vent - how they dozed, weary and light-headed from the loss of
blood.' Accounts of the devastation and photographs of the devastation are
followed by accounts and photographs of Sheffield's contribution to the
military campaigns. 'Heavy losses on Italian Front' is the heading for one
substantial article.
After this, there's a long section on the massive and astonishingly
varied contribution made by Sheffield's steel industry and other industries
in the city. A few examples: 'For the first 18 months of the war
the only drop hammer in the country that could forge crankshafts for
Spitfires and other important planes was in the Vickers works at Sheffield.'
The hammer weighed over 200 tons. The factory of the English Steel
Corporation manufactured bullet-proof plates to protect the pilots of
spitfire aircraft. Firth Brown produced 'over 1 000 000 tons of high quality
alloy steels' during the war. Firth Brown could 'make shells to go through
any armour and armour to resist any shell.' They manufactured many, many
other things as well, such as marine forgings, components for submarine
detector gear, and tools: 'In one week, during the peak period, over 250 000
individual tools were produced.' The gigantic Mulberry floating harbours
were essential to the success of the D-day landings. Firth Brown (and other
Sheffield firms) manufactured components for these harbours, for example
'special brake mechanisms ... were entrusted to the firm's engineers and
metallurgists, and called for a very high standard of foresight and skill on
such an untried and almost visionary undertaking.'
The publication has eighty very large pages devoted to death, injury,
determination, devotion, engineering achievement, but one of the pages has a
section, illustrated with photographs, that Lord Tristan-Jones would dislike
intensely, underneath a title in large print at the top of the page:
THIS GOLDFISH PROVED THAT IT COULD "TAKE IT
! "
These two brothers found their goldfish was safe, although the bowl was
half-filled with debris after a bomb had fallen near their home.
SO DID THE CANARY!
Yes, this canary certainly has something to chirp
about. He was found alive after the house had been badly damaged by a bomb.'
Is this harmless, human, endearing, or evidence of
something rotten in British life, as Lord Garel-Jones would have us believe?
(On the evidence of his comments in 'The Proclamation.) On the
next page of 'Sheffield at War,' there's a section on H.M.S.
Sheffield, 'adopted by the city in October, 1941.' Amongst other
achievements, it was involved in the very, very dangerous Arctic convoys:
H.M.S. Sheffield 'safely escorted convoys through Arctic gales, U-boat and
air attacks to Russia ... 'the ship was part of the cruiser force ... which
took part in the sinking of the Scharnhorst, which was trying to attack a
North Russian convoy ... During one passage through northern waters she
encountered terrific storms which lasted for three days. Seas over 50 feet
high swept down on the ship ... For three days the ship fought the gale,
then the weather cleared and a course was set for port.'
Not long ago, I took part in a demonstration to free Annie the elephant
which I attended in Cheshire, : a peaceful and good-humoured demonstration,
one of a series, which didn't prevent anyone from going to the
performance of the circus which owned Annie, although hardly any members of
the public did buy tickets. If this is described as an example of
English sentimentality as regards animals, then I'd object to the choice of
the word 'sentimentality.' This was an elderly elephant suffering from
arthritis which had been repeatedly beaten,
the beatings recorded
on film by Animal Defenders International. The adverse publicity was
successful. The elephant was rehomed in spacious surroundings at Longleat.
Lord Garel-Jones agrees that there are 'serious and useful
organisations.' He gives an example - The Royal Society for the Protection
of Birds.' But he says that 'there are others some of which, at least, might be described as eccentric. One of the
charities he names in this category is the Buttercups Sanctuary for
Goats.' Goats are domesticated animals, of course. Many of them
are kept for milk and cheese production, of course. When they are abandoned
or badly treated, they deserve adequate care and attention. He seems not to
have bothered to find out anything much about the work of this sanctuary. If
he had, he would have found out that the work of this charity is
outstanding. The RSPCA (which he would almost certainly consider a 'serious
and useful animal charity' regularly hands goats which have been rescued to
the sanctuary for treatment and long-term homing. Some of the goats cared
for by the sanctuary::
'A pigmy goat found abandoned by the RSPCA and brought to Buttercups
in 2008. At the time of his rescue, he was in a very poor state ... He
was covered in engine oil and had an infected ear as the result of a poorly
fitting ear tag. He was also suffering from foot rot, an agonizing bacterial
infection of the foot’s horned area which causes the whole foot literally to
rot away if untreated.
'He needed ongoing treatment over several months, and a creative
approach was required to treat his unusual injuries ... Today [he] appears
to be fully recovered from his problems.'
Another case: 'Stocky was found with another goat locked in a
shed. Both had been starved to such an extent that Stocky's friend could not
stand. They were riddled with lice (left), so much so that their backs were
bald, and they stood and slept in their own urine. Unfortunately, when the
RSPCA came to their rescue, Stocky's friend could not be saved. A happy,
healthy, Stocky at the sanctuary [photo given on the sanctuary's Website.]
If Lord Garel-Jones is astonished that anyone can like goats,
there are plenty of counter-examples, including ones from a long time ago,
in the harshest of circumstances. Another example from Richard van Emden's 'The Soldier's
War: The Great War through Veterans' Eyes,' one of the many fine books of
oral war history:
Lt Denis Barnett: 'I've lately made the acquaintance of a great character, the
machine-gunner's goat. She's a most extraordinary beast ... She will fall in
with the gun teams; you can pull her away by main force, but she comes back
at the double ... When the guns are up, she stands in front and licks their
noses lovingly. We're all very fond of her, and the gunners have adopted her
entirely ...'
The poet Umberto Saba even found a linkage between the
plight of a goat and the plight of humanity - a bleak,
compassionate and not at all sentimental vision. In view of Lord
Tristan Garel-Jones' disapproval of the dominance of English, I
don't provide a translation here, but I do give my translation
in the section Animals: appreciation and abuse
Another charity he describes as 'eccentric,' evidence of the
sentimentality of the British, and one which he probably knows almost
nothing about, is the Froglife charity, which works for frogs, toads, newts,
lizards and snakes. Each of these groups of amphibians and reptiles is
threatened by habitat loss.
In the land I rent, I constructed two raised beds
with a pond between them, on an area which couldn't otherwise be used
for growing, or not without enormous effort. (I'd already created a pond in
the other allotment which attracted a wide range of wildlife, including
damsel flies - the pond is too small to attract dragonflies.)
The area had been used as a
rubbish dump long ago, and under the very thin layer of soil was an enormous
quantity of broken glass, plastic and rusting metal. It was meant to be
functional, to help with water storage and supply water in times of drought,
but it was intended eventually to be a thing of beauty too. I planted the
native white water lily, sedge, and later, aquatic mint. I planted Hemerocallis day lilies - in front of the pond. I thought it would
have only limited wildlife potential - the height of the raised beds
would deter such animals as hedgehogs, frogs and toads. In spring, though, I
found that frogspawn had been laid in the water lily basket, and was
overjoyed. Just as the pond is intended to be more than functional,
amphibians are more than functional. They perform a very valuable service
for gardeners, as slug controllers, but they are representatives of the
mysteriousness and majesty of nature, despite their humble status - but for
me, they aren't humble animals at all. I wasted no time in installing a
sloping board to allow frogs to leave the pond - without it, they would
certainly drown, and other boards to allow animals access to the tops of the
growing beds.
George Orwell wrote about other amphibians in his essay, 'Some
Thoughts on the Common Toad. 'How many a time I have stood watching the
toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn,
and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if
they could. But luckily they can't.' He also wrote, 'I think that by
retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies
and - to return to my first instance - toads, one makes a peaceful and
decent future a little more probable ...' George Orwell was no soft
sentimentalist, of course. He found joy in the sight of the humble common
toad. He volunteered to fight for the Spanish republic, threatened by the
coup of General Franco, and endured hardship and risked his life in
the Spanish civil war. Hs magnificent book 'Homage to Catalonia' records his
experiences. He was shot in the throat by a sniper during the war.
'What a characteristic and peculiar pleasure there is at
the sight of every free animal pursuing its business without let
or hindrance, going in search of its food, tending its young, or
consorting with others of its species! It may be only a tiny
bird, yet I am long able to watch it with pleasure; or it may be
a water-rat, frog, or better still a hedgehog, weasel, roe or
stag!'
This passage, from the play 'The Caucasion Chalk Circle' by Bertold
Brecht, mentions blackbirds. George Orwell would have agreed that taking
pleasure in the singing of a blackbird, finding joy in the singing of a
blackbird, isn't a matter of negligible importance, something for
sentimentalists.
THE SINGER
As she was standing between courtyard and gate, she heard, or thought
she heard, a low voice. The child called to her, not whining but calling
quite sensibly at least so it seemed to her: 'Woman,' it said, 'Help me.'
Went on calling not whining but calling quite sensibly: 'Don't you know,
woman, that she who does not listen to a cry for help but passes by
shutting her ears, will never hear the gentle call of a lover nor the
blackbird at dawn, nor the happy sigh of the exhausted grape-picker at
the sound of the Angelus.' Hearing this Grusha walks a few steps
towards the child and bends over it, she went back to the child
just for one more look, just to sit with it for a mement or two till
someone should come its mother, perhaps, or someone else - She
sits down opposite the child, and leans against a trunk. just for a
ment before she left, for now the danger was too great the city
full of flame and grief. The light grows dimmer as though evening and
night were falling. Grusha has gone into the palace and fetched a lamp and
some milk, which she gives the child to drink. THE SINGER
loudly: Terrible is the temptation to do good! Grusha now settles down to keep watch over the child through the night ...
For a long time she sat with the child. Evening came, night
came, dawn came. Too long she sat, too long she watched
the soft breathing, the little fists till towards morning
the temptation grew too strong. She rose, she leaned over,she sighed, she
lifted the child she carried it off.
Human life has particular claims on us. If someone comes upon a baby and
a chick and can save only one of them, it should be the baby, but the
thought experiments of moral philosophers shouldn't be used in nonsensical
ways. The idea of 'giving something back' is an important one. If someone
has found great fulfilment in the hills and mountains, as a
mountaineer or hill walker, then the idea of giving something back to the
hills and mountains may well demand action to oppose an unnecessary scheme
which destroys a particular hill or mountain. If someone has found joy in
birdsong, then caring for an injured bird which seems to have a chance of
survival - and seeing the bird fly into the sky after treatment - is giving
something back. The bird can't have the claims upon us that a baby will
have, but it can still seem to be calling: 'Help me.'
For me, the common swift (Apus apus) has a particular interest. The migration routes
of these birds between Britain and Africa involve
flights of 22 000 (14 000 miles) a year, but they fly much longer distances
than that. Swifts are the only birds which are constantly airborne, except
when they nest and bring up their young. They feed and drink whilst flying,
mate whilst flying and even sleep whilst flying. Each year, they fly at
least 200 000 km
Jennifer Owen's classic of garden ecology, 'Garden Life,' from the entry
for May:
'The welcome return of old friends
My attention is repeatedly distracted from planting and weeding as our
local swifts, newly returned from Africa, wheel and scream overhead. Their
arrival is so welcome that for the first few days after they arrive, I tend
to stop whatever I am doing andwatch their aerobatics every time I hear
their excited calls, until my neck aches from looking skywards.'
From the entry for July:
'Suburban 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 of evening, lift the spirits of
the most earthbound gardener.'
There are many excellent Websites concerned with swifts and showing
concern for swifts - swifts are threatened, their numbers are declining,
mainly as a result of changes to buildings which block off their nesting
spaces. This is one Website,
created for everyone who is interested in this extraordinary bird.'
People 'give something back' by putting up nest boxes and by persuading
local authorities, schools and other bodies to erect nest boxes. The may
treat injured swifts and rear young swifts until they can fly. If people
choose to spend time in this way, watching swifts and working for the
welfare of swifts, why should Lord Garel-Jones object in the slightest?
Isn't this a better use of time than watching hour after hour after hour of
the more mindless TV programmes?
Wildflowers, swifts, amphibians, just about every living thing which
brings happiness and joy now requires work to safeguard its future, and Lord
Garel-Jones' protestations and accusations of sentimentality miss the
point.
The froglife charity works to make such experiences as George
Orwell's less of
a rarity. Not only that, they combine care and consideration for animals
with care and consideration for people, including very damaged people.
Presumably, Lord Garel-Jones knows nothing about this aspect of their work,
even though the information is very easily available, from the charity's
Website, for example. The charity works with young offenders. The varied
activities include 'The development of a wildlife allotment
site (containing several wildlife ponds and a butterfly garden amongst other
things).' Another project aims to help 'young people who are experiencing
difficulty in their life, for a wide variety of reasons, and engage them in
outdoor practical work that will benefit both wildlife and people in their
local community. Green Pathways introduces young people to conservation and
increases their confidence and their enjoyment of the outdoors whilst
allowing them to absorb knowledge of the natural environment in the natural
environment.'
Froglife: ' Frogs, toads and newts are dependent on
ponds and other water bodies to lay their eggs. These species all have an
aquatic larval stage and the loss of ponds inevitably means the loss of
amphibians.
'Froglife is trying to
rectify the dramatic decline in the number of ponds through various
projects.'
The satisfactions of creating and maintaining a pond are very great,
and I'm sure that Lord Garel-Jones is very badly mistaken, in his attitude
to this organization and in so much else, of course.
'Here is J M Coetzee writing in his direct and unadorned way
about dogs, some of the reasons which lead an animal lover to destroy dogs,
and a tragic dilemma presented unflinchingly, without sentimentality, in a
way well beyond the scope of Seamus Heaney in this poem or in any of his
poetry. This is from J M Coetzee's novel 'Disgrace:' 'The dogs that are
brought in suffer from distempers, from broken limbs, from infected bites,
from mange, from neglect, benign or malign, from old age, from malnutrition,
from intestinal parasites, but most of all from their own fertility. There
are simply too many of them. When people bring a dog in they do not say
straight out, 'I have brought you this dog to kill,' but that is what is
expected...'
From my page Aphorisms, 'The dog lovers who destroy
the unwanted dogs they're unable to rehome are to be admired, not the dog
lovers who give their dogs expensive hair-trims and shampoos, the best of
everything.' (I used to work for an organization which offered subsidized
spaying and neutering of dogs and cats, to reduce the need for euthanasia -
but the enormity of the problem made it completely unrealistic for this
organization to avoid carrying out euthanasia: either that or death by
neglect or starvation.
He devotes some of his time to a discussion of what he calls
'mono-culture,' including the dominance of English. If ever there was a
culture which cultivated mono-culture it's the bullfighting culture of
Spain, which singles out bulls for attention, neglecting the vast and varied
worlds of other living creatures, and which singles out bullfighters for
adulation, with a view of human achievement subject to extreme
{restriction}. The section mono-culture
gives amplification. To suppose that opposition to the dominance of
the English language has any linkage at all with support for bullfighting -
allegedly because languages other than English are threatened and
bullfighting is threatened - is yet more evidence of his incapacity for
coherent thought. As for myself, I can claim that I'm almost certainly less
likely than Tristan Garel-Jones to ignore languages other than English, to
promote a mono-culture of English. This site includes my translations from
French, German, Dutch, Italian, Latin, Modern Greek and Classical Greek. The
ignoring of death isn't an accusation which can be made against me. My page
in Large Poem Design, Poems, gives many poems of
mine concerned with death. My page Aphorisms
includes a section which gives aphorisms of mine on 'Life and death.'
There are many other sections of the site which are relevant.
In his article 'The Fascination of the Corrida,' published in
the prominent British magazine 'The Spectator' nearly ten years ago, Tristan Garel-Jones wrote,
'The editor of The Spectator invites
me to be the
taurine [bullfighting]
correspondent of this magazine. [The present editor of 'The Spectator
had nothing to do with the appointment.] I guess I shall be the only taurine
correspondent in Britain and I cannot take for granted that British readers
will be familiar with terms like volapic any more than Hispanic readers
would be with LBW in the event that El Pais were to have a cricket
correspondent.' (01.02.03)
He claims that
Belmonte 'changed the fundamentals of the art in Joycean fashion.' The
reference, of course, is to the Irish modernist writer James Joyce, the
author of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. If there's any justice in the world
at all, then this pretentious and grotesque claim will have earned him an
automatic appearance in Private Eye's 'Pseuds' Corner.' Belmonte is one of
those many, many matadors who didn't die in the ring. He committed suicide.
During most of his 'career,' vast numbers of horses as well as bulls died in
the bullring, as many as 40 during each bullfight. From the section
above, 'The Golden Age of Bullfighting:' 'Disembowelled dying and dead horses, the
intestines of horses and the blood of horses made battlefields of the
bullfighting arenas. In these scenes of utter carnage moved such bullfighters
as Joselito, 'seen as a classical purist,' according to Alexander
Fiske-Harrison, Belmonte and
Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, the subject of the poem by the poet and
dramatist Lorca.'
This film shows what horses suffered when Belmonte was in
the ring.
'My hope is that as Spectator readers deepen their understanding of the
corrida we may, perhaps in two or three years, be able to organise a trip of
aficionados to witness one of the greatest artistic spectacles in Europe
today - the Goya-esque corrida in Ronda.'
I believe that this expedition to look death unflinchingly in the face from
a good viewing point in the bullring, or this jolly jaunt to see some bulls
killed, followed perhaps by sherry and tapas or excellent wine and a gourmet
meal in pleasant surroundings - whatever his plans or his views may
have been, never materialized.
The notion that Spectator readers have to leave these shores to experience
explorations of death in art would be a travesty, of course. Would he
discount 'King Lear,' Britten's 'Peter Grimes,' Janacek's 'House of the
Dead,' and all the other evidence to the contrary from the astonishing
cultural life of this country? If so, he could start by reading the
articles of the Spectator's fine opera critics.
I discuss Bullfighting as an art form above. I
include this: '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.'
A visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, to stand before the Vermeers, the
Rembrandts and other paintings in that stupendous collection, would show
suffering and death confronted, explained, found impossible to explain,
raged against, transcended, balanced by consolation and joy, not inflicted.
After Tristan Garel-Jones' miserable article there's this: 'The
fee for this article has been donated to the World Wildlife Fund.' If the
World Wildlife Fund was aware of the source of this donation, what was the
World Wildlife Fund playing at in accepting this morally compromised money? In France, Spain and other
bullfighting countries, bullfighting organizations often give money to
charities, and the charities often hand the money back. When they try to
give money to charities, the charities often refuse. Alliance Anti-corrida
in France is one organization which is very active in pursuing the matter.
After approaching l’Association des paralysés de France, which
supports paralyzed people, and l’Association pour le don d’organes,
concerned with organ donation, these organizations decided no longer to
accept donations which originated with any bullfighting activity.
The Honorary President of The World Wildlife Fund in Spain is King Juan
Carlos, well known as a supporter of bullfighting, by his words and his
appearances at bullfights.
I use the term 'cross-linkages' to refer to linkages between people whose
views are opposed in some significant way: there's a cross-linkage between
people who support the death penalty (I oppose it) but who share my
oppo-inio no pacifism. There's a cross-linkage between me and Tristan Garel-Jones.
He supports bullfighting and I obviously oppose it. He supports the British
Humanist Association and I share his secular, non-religious and
anti-religious view of the world. But my anti-religious views are subject to
{restriction}, as my page on Religions makes
clear.