Death in the afternoon

Sam ARMSTRONG

57% of Spanish and 84% of Mexicans oppose bullfighting. I would say that this probably does not mean that there is a particularly sadistic streak in the Spanish nature. I doubt if it would be a problem to find 20% or 30% of Brits who do not oppose bullfighting and/or other blood sports.

I agree that the bull is a magnificent animal, and the matadors always seem a bit wimpy and small, and in puffing out their chests, show us how insecure they are.

I think also that Spain feels it may be losing its character, like all the Euro states, and might be clinging on to bullfighting because it is trying to resist change. I don't however think the cancellation of bullfighting will contribute in any way to the demise of Spanish culture. Mass immigration, especially Islamic immigration, massive holiday industry construction, and a left-leaning government will do that.

Hadrian

Thank you, Susan, for such a vivid and fascinating insight into another culture. I loved your descriptions of experiencing both a silent and deserted bullring and church.
The sense of 'connection' to past generations and their devotions is one I frequently feel in many and varied church buildings. There is a particularly evocative little Church of England off the Shambles in York, if memory serves me right. More or less redundant now, but preserving the old 'Puritan' feel of many CofEs and spoiled only by a discordant, rather tawdry picture of Mary ( I assume ) on the wall by the old pulpit.
Then there's Keach's Meeting House in Winslow in Buckinghamshire. Another plain place that wistfully exudes the atmosphere of old English Non-conformist community and worship. Highly recommended for a visit.
Well, despite your alluring descriptions of youe Spanish sojourn I think I shall nevertheless prefer to get me down to Penwith in Cornwall. Penzance, St Ives, Sennen Cove, Lamorna...who needs abroad?!!
Cornwal even has its own Celtic language.

SUSAN HILL

Hadrian..Agree about preferring English seaside of course.. though I am not a Cornwall person, being Yorkshire born and bred. Scarborough/Filey.. though not for the weather of course.
Barcelona is not for idle holidays in summer but for spring/autumn exploring - like many a city

timac

Susan, The first bullfight I saw, the matador was gored. I was appalled and entranced. Death and violence is something that is a part of the national psyche of Spain and the artistic value in violence may not be somehting you see but I can tell you the Spanish do. That we are expressing this in a contest with a bull and not each other is a reflection of the way spanish feel about animals; A means to an end not something to anthropomorphize with human rights, unlike in Britain.

I don't really mind whether they ban it or not but you should realize when you are imposing your own cultural values, memes and norms onto others as I do when viewing British accepted cultural practicies that get a Spaniards back up, like promiscuity and public drunkeness.

p.s. As you should well know, banning bullfighting in cataluÃąa has nothing to do with animal rights and everything to do with seperatism

SUSAN HILL

Perhaps 'I should well know' but I did not. Separatism is not something I especially keep up to date with.
I take your point about imposing a culture but I think finding bullfighting is barbaric is not imposing our culture but opposing theirs.

maria

brilliant article! thank you so much for descraving it so beautifully. I live in Catalonia, and the 28 of July was the day many things happend: it was the day that the public torture of an animal was abolished, it was the day polititians listend to the people that voted for them, it was the day that Catalan parliament allowed itīs society to give one step ahead in ethic and a step ahead of the rest of Spain...but it also was the day I started really believing that I could fight and, even by tiny steps, I could change the world. thanx for your support

Hadrian

timac-
Committing adultery and whoredom and utter crudity may well have become the 'accepted' norm by the children and grandchildren of the smart, anti-Christian, permissive, cynical generation of the Sixties. However that does NOT mean the older British tradition of 'puritanical' values- one of which was revulsion of needless cruelty to dumb animals- and for which we were known on the continent, is dead and buried. Nor does it legitimise an ethically relativistic approach to animal welfare or any other matter: 'they' do it in their culture so we cannot criticise. What utter rubbish. There are universal norms of civilised behaviour that our god forsaken, so called intelligentsia ( such as Joan Bakewell and her recent barbs at the late Mary Whitehouse ) seem to not just have forgotten but make a virtue out of repudiating. Little wonder the Western world is in the grip of decadent decline and loss of self respect.
There are even some 'multiculturalist' theorists who I have heard with my own ears espousing the view that such things as forced marriages in 'minority cultures' cannot be criticised, it is a matter or them, as if such practices can be kept cosily at bay from ourselves. Having just read in The Times of the plight of young BRITISH born women of Pakistani descent who refuse to be palmed off to some alien male in Pakistan, I think these relativists should jolly well hang their heads in shame before these suffering, menaced women. Some of us have know of this for many years but rarely does the Press highlight this standing disgrace in our midst. Relativism and relucatance, I call it and beating up a woman( daughter, sister especially!) or threatening her with death is downright wicked in any culture. Equally I think animal welfare doesn't vary, either.

On a lighter holiday front note, I must say the Yorkshire coast has its glories, Susan- Alan Ayckbourn's theatre is one of them!- but Celtic Cornwall remains supreme.
Good cheer to all!

Deborah Parris

Thank you very much Susan for your article. I like Maria, am proud and relieved to discover that with patience, confidence and organization, we can make this a better world, one step at a time. (This ban was brought about by a Popular Legislative Iniciative "ILP") I hasten to add that the ban is NOT related to separatism as the pro-bullfighting people are so keen to put about in order to deflect the cruelty arguement; the abolition of bullfighting movement is present all over Spain and it just so happened tha Catalunya, its citizens and more importantly its politicians were ready to take the legal step. Sorry Susan, but the ban begins on January 1st 2012; I feel sorry for the bulls who will die between now and that date. It's a bit like being killed by a bomb AFTER the war has ended. I pray that the entrepreneur will cut his losses.

wrinkled weasel

"I felt the electric atmosphere".

"the air seethes with all the prayers and music" (in a empty church).

I have often wondered about this effect. Whether or not it is entirely subjective, in which case it is the product of a fertile imagination, or, there is something tangible about memories and events that somehow embed themselves in stone, or wood or some other material. This energy seems to be present in good things and bad. I too have felt it - the good, in monasteries and churches, and the bad, well, in vast, empty houses and even in places that had little aesthetic value or were even a fertile trigger for the imagination.

People say this sort of thing about visits to former Nazi concentration camps, but does everybody? Is it a gift? I don't know.

As for bullfighting, I reluctantly agree with timac about imposing cultural values. I don't like Spaniards. They are far more racist and jingoistic than we are, and quite happy to impose dual standards on non-Spaniards. However, it is their country, and if they wish to engage in barbarism and blood-lust, it is entirely their choice. It is my choice not to watch animals being taunted and slaughtered for entertainment, as it is my choice not to watch sad young men punching each other in a boxing ring in the name of sport.

My choice is not to support it, but as a libertarian I do not censure, and as a Christian I try not to judge.

timac

For the record deborah parris, I am not for or against bullfighting and, being Spanish and a former politics and history student, it is my opinion, and that of the general commentariat (not all of whom are PP Castilians), that a big factor in bringing this legislation through was to flex the muscles of the Catalan parliament.

On rejecting cultural relativism, as any social anthropologist will tell you, leaves you a dangerous void on how to compare the actions of cultures. The "my culture is better than yours" stance not only in very difficult to justify and prove, but it has led in soc. anth. down dangerous paths such as eugenics.

Cuffleyburgers

I suspect the ban has less to do with animal welfare and more to do with cocking a snook at the rest of Spain - catalonian politicians are a pretty disgusting bunch by and large, not dissimilar to alex salmond and you can rest assured their main motivation will have been to bolster their expenses accounts.

That said, what is also important is what has been done and not just the motivation, and bull fighting in catalonia was never particularly popular and I am glad that it has been ended.

I have mixed feelings about it - the spectacle disgusts me personally but in other areas of Spain it really is a very important part of the culture - I was more of an anti until I read Hemmingway who makes the case for it much better than I possibly could.

I am not entirely convinced either by the use of the word torture either - it is undoubtedly a bloody spectacle, but the bulls are bred to fight and once in the ring they are fighting, one of the blessed features of the way we are put together is that in the heat of the fight feelings of pain are dulled by the body's natural reactions - production of adrenalin for example - we have all experienced this to some extent, and once the end comes it is relatively quick.

I personally would not put it on a moral plane with kids torturing kittens and what have you, where the infliction of pain is the objective - that is not the case in bull fighting.

Torture is also about humiliation and fear - the bulls most assuredly feel neither.

To sum up a rather long post for which I apologise, ended in catalonia - a good thing. An EU ban for example on the whole of spain - would be a bad thing.

Simon Stephenson

wrinkled weasel : 11th August, 11.33pm

"As for bullfighting, I reluctantly agree with timac about imposing cultural values. I don't like Spaniards. They are far more racist and jingoistic than we are, and quite happy to impose dual standards on non-Spaniards. However, it is their country, and if they wish to engage in barbarism and blood-lust, it is entirely their choice."

Yes it's their choice, and yes we shouldn't go about seeking to impose our culture on others. But surely we have a right to say that such behaviour appals us, and surely we also have a right to ask whether our being appalled is solely a feature of the culture in which we have grown up? Is it not possible that there are behaviours in all cultures that are the result of human failings, bull-fighting perhaps being one such behaviour, and that trans-cultural criticism is more about addressing the human failing than about any sense of "my culture is more acceptable than yours"? Isn't it the case that the most trenchant critics of bull-fighting from our culture are also strong critics of the more animalistic elements of popular culture in our own society?

Deborah Parris

Just to set the record straight, Timac, I am also "Spanish" in that I have Spanish nationality and have lived here for two thirds of my life (I'm 55). The arguement that other countries' issues are theirs alone is a bit of a sterile one as a "country" as such does not exist, only its inhabitants exist. You cannot claim that all Spaniards think alike; I'm involved in the abolisionist (spelling??) movement and I can assure you that this is an enormous movement all over Spain, even in those places such as Sevilla and Madrid. People like me who have lived in various different countries and cannot entirely call one specific country their own would be forced to have no opinions according to your suggested rule of "not imposing ... cultural values". I agree with Hadrian about the "universal norms of civilized behaviour". In answer to Cuffleyburgers, I have to disagree that the bull is "fighting" in the strict meaning of word, unless you mean that it is fighting for its life which is absolutely true - there is a small trained armed group of men out to kill the bull so who wouldn't fight given that there is no escape (bull-rings are round for this reason; nowhere to hide either). Bovines, being herbivors, have no interest in fighting with men. I disagree with other points but will not continue so as to cut this a bit short!

Belinda Parris

A breath of fresh air. Thank you Ms. Hill. It is wonderful to be able to read a little "sense and sensibility" not only about the bullfighting ban, of which we are very proud, but the fact that you mention you speak a little Catalan too. There has been so much rubbish published. I cannot thank you enough. I was very moved by your feelings in the empty bullring.

Belinda Parris

"However, it is their country, and if they wish to engage in barbarism and blood-lust, it is entirely their choice." Thanks for that as it hits the nail on the head.
It is our country and those of us who are lucky enough to live here (in Catalunya) (180,000 signed the petition)have decided that we do not want to engage in barbarism and blood-lust and Susan Hill is brave enough to say "hooray". I say "brave enough" because I have been appalled at the issues that the pro-bullfighting, the "don't cares" and the "let them do what they likes" have introduced to muddy the waters of an otherwise translucent moment in Spain and Europe's history. What is the matter with some people? Can we not rejoice as Susan Hill is doing at the end of a barbaric tradition that, albeit not the only one, and not the worst, it is still pretty horrific. It is incredible how aggressive people get when politicians vote in favour of abolishing something, and yes, killing a bull in the bullring to music is akin to other forms of organised violence and it is not something to watch and definately not something Europe should pay for in subsidies as it has been doing. So thank you Susan for your thoughts and bravura which has more to do with words these days than sticking lances into a dying animals spine to the jeers and cheers of a drunken crowd.

Alexandrovich

Yes Cuffleyburgers, they are 'fighting bulls' but having had their neck tendons severed prior to the fight, there's not much point. You must have noticed how the head droops and can only be swung, as opposed to jerked, upwards.

Hadrian

I'm sorry,Timac, but your absurd response that daring to maintain there are universal standards of morality that cross cultural boundaries can lead to eugenics is a bit like Pot calling the Kettle black.
There is an Absolute that states 'Thou shalt do no murder' and it applies equally to all. Eugenics so far as I can see grew up in a society that exalted raw, racial power and 'purity' and despised the lame and the halt. It treated the individual as essentially subordinate to the pack/state. It was mesmerised by the 'scientific' yet its sophistication simply led to 'clever devils'. It also was relativistic to the core. 'Lesser races' were seen as virtually subhuman and to be treated with as little respect. Or in the opposite extreme they were seen as 'the noble savage', an 'unspoiled' Golden age remnant, beyond the restraints or rule of our later decayed condition. Personally I think pathetic we need to apologise for daring to pronounce some features of other cultures (as well as of our own!) as barbaric pure and simple. I do not find it difficult to detect Absolute right and wrong as existing, nor as Christianity as embodying it. The Puritans may have misapplied those Standards in many instances( particularly in resorting too readily or inappropriately to the State to impose) but they saw animal cruelty for what it was and properly tried to ban it. I do not believe gratuitous cruelty to beasts is a mark of civilised behaviour. Christ reminded us that not a sparrow fell to the ground but that God knew of it, nor was Solomon in all his man-made glory, as wonderfully arrayed as the lilies of the field. Christians have a duty to nurture life and not allow glorying in its needless slaughter.

wrinkled weasel

There is a difference between indulging in cultural relativism and the pursuit of liberty. We (the British) got into a bit of trouble a while back for trying to make African Natives cover their breasts. We also, eventually, thought the better of enslaving other human beings because we did not believe that they were fully human. There is a terrible responsibility that goes with judging other cultures. Form my perspective, Bullfighting is totally abhorrent, but clearly not all Spaniards think so. If you go down the route of imposing your will on others, contrary to their beliefs, you risk being morally weak when you have to stand up for your own principles. We are constantly beaten, as a nation, with the "colonial" stick, as if we are the sole reason Africa is such a humanitarian and political disaster. On the other hand, we sometimes have to take a stand. If the Catalans, or the Basques or the troglodytes of Tossa de Mar wish to champion the right of their citizens to self-determination, maybe they should lay off Gibralter, whose people are resolutely British, and want to stay that way.

timac

Wrinkled Weasel,

Let's not bring up that particular problem! I think that the Mayor of La Linea is a grandstanding idiot for proposing a toll charge over the frontier by the way. The frontier that shouldn't even exist by E.U. law! Although, and there is some irony in this, if there were no guarded, passport controlled border between Gibraltar and La Linea, I doubt Gibraltarians would be able to maintain their unique Britishness intact. It was the isolation that nurtured their cultural identity.

Adam

Timac and Cluffey burgers, you are so wrong in your arguments, and Susan is so right!
If you speack to the real catalans and ask them what they think, is it animal rights or politics? You'll get the right answer.
And Timac your arguments are of the probullfighitng, so that makes you one of them, even though you say you donīt like or dislike bullfighting, please you have to be on one side or the other, the middle is impossible!

belinda parris

Mr. Wrinkled Weasle, I take it you are really upset about the very possible future independence of Catalonia. It would actually not be a bad thing and would be returning things to normality. Gibralter could also be returned to Spain, but it won't matter either way to us Catalans. Did you know that the occupation
of Catalonia in 1714 by French and Spanish absolutists was made possible by the betrayal of the English Parliament, at the time, of their allies in Catalonia in return for the right to sell slaves in
the Spanish Empire. Luckily this is the past so it is best left dormant, but we would do well at least to understand why the Catalans, Basques and the Tossa de Mar troglodytes" (your words, not mine) sometimes feel like doing things their way.
Now let's return to the point in question:
Bullfighting used to be a spectacle all over Europe (hence verbs such as bullying and dogs such as bulldogs) as were other dispicable shows: bearbaiting, cockfights, and dogfights (some of which are still awaiting the ban!). Catalunya has decided second in Spain that bullfighting no longer represents them and after months of debate that it is cruel and unnecessary and, as important in times of recession, uneconomical because it is grossly funded by Europe and Spain. Let's raise a glass to Catalunya. Many other autonomies will follow suit. Bullfighting is not as popular as some would have it. Madrid has 50,000 signatures already to ban bullfighting but have to deal with the hardcore Esperanza Aguirre. Things are moving so let's not panic but rejoice! I love change and I love empty bullrings which will soon fill with something much more noble.

wrinkled weasel

Dear Seņora Parris, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about Catalonia or Spain or its history. In fact, lest me see.. I spent no time whatsoever thinking about it until this thread, and then dismissed it as not being relevant to me.

p.s., please do not trouble yourself over the Troglodytes of Tossa De Mar. I made them up.

p.p.s, I knew it would be our fault, somehow.

Holier than thou

I have virtually no interest in this - other than a nagging sense that progress seems to be hellbent on turning us all into insipid little flower children. The thing that rings my nutter alert bell is the comment by someone or other that places bulls dying in a bullfight on a par with soldiers dying in war. Idiotic tripe. No pun intended.
I will eat veal 4 times next month in order to provide some yang to the universe. And if I see any bulls I'll fight the bastards - bareknuckle. Someone has to.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Hello, I did try to post on this before, but was probably a little didactic in tone, so I will moderate it.

First, imagining what a bullring is like full from seeing what it is like empty and your own preconceptions is a dubious pursuit. Yes, I know what it is like to stand somewhere sacred like Delphi and fell that it is a "thin place", a place where the veil between this world and the next is almost worn through. It is a lovely idea. However, when we are talking about legislation, this is not the way to think, and your percetion will be heavily influenced by Hollywood films through the years set in the Colisseum or Circus Maximus. This is NOT the reality. I have spent two years studying the bullfight for a book, and am now training as a bullfighter to complete that, so I can speak with some authority here (you can read a full description over at my blog, The Last Arena - In Search of the Spanish Bullfight.)

Second, the animal does enter the food chain. Parts are eaten as a delicacy, but more enters less directly as dog food, gelatin and the like. Once the whole animal was eaten - the tradition of awarding a matador an ear of a bull comes from the day when he was a servant of the knightly bullfighter who was then the centrepiece. If he killed well he was awarded the carcass of the animal for food, the ear being a ticket with which he could collect it later. Nowadays our palate has changed and softened and we prefer to dine on children, meat cattle being slaughtered between one and two years of age. Fighting bulls are fought between the ages of four and six. For the full horrors of the comparison, see the first post on my blog. A final note on this: what exactly do people think an obese person eating a burger is? Because it certainly isn't nutrition, quite the reverse. It is entertainment. And the animal died for it.

A final word in answer to Alexandrovich: look at the photos on the top of my blog. Show me the severed neck tendons. Yes, they are damaged in the course of the fight, but the animal must enter in the peak of health or be rejected by the veterinarian. Which happens all too often, meaning it has to be rounded up with steers and substituted. It is executed elsewhere.

Simon Mennie

Belinda Parris

Catalonia has historically always enjoyed considerable autonomy and was no more occupied in 1714 by Spanish absolutists(whoever they might have been)than Scotland was occupied by the English after the 1707 Act of Union.Catalonia as the chief component of the Crown of Aragon became part of a unified Spanish monarchy after the Union of the Crowns in 1469 with the marriage of King Ferdinand of Aragon with Isabella of Castile.Aragon and with it Catalonia retained its own institutions(e.g the Cortes which continued to meet at Barcelona and Zaragoza) and legal and fiscal privileges,particularly with regard to a lighter burden of taxation from the new centre of the unified monarchy now based in Madrid than that which prevailed in Castile where representative institutions were weaker and less able to resist the growing fiscal demands of the Crown.The attempt in 1640 by Philip 1V's chief minister the Count Duke of Olivares to equalise the tax burden between the kingdoms in order to better finance the war in the Netherlands resulted in a general revolt in Catalonia which severely weakened the monarchy in particular and Spanish power in Europe generally.You would doubtless be pleased to note that historians now regard the 1640 revolt of the Catalans as a milestone in Spain's decline as a global power.

Spain was never an absolute monarchy in the sense that Louis X1V's France or Romanov Russia was,but rather an agglomeration of differing territories linked after 1479 by a single monarchy.A(non Catalan) jurist neatly summarised the reality of governance in Spain in 1647 and thereby Catalonia's status :"The kingdoms must be ruled as if the king who holds them all together were king only of each of them".

As long as Aragon-Catalonia's status within the combined monarchy was respected by the incumbent in Madrid Catalonia,like the Scots who built the British empire would play an important role in Spain's affairs even as the economic centre of gravity shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic from the mid sixteenth century.Without Catalonian seafaring expertise the Spanish Armada of 1588 would have stayed in port.

The subject of Catalonia's "independence" weighed as little with British policy makers in 1714 as it does today with Wrinkled Weasel bless him.It was purely a matter of preventing the succession to the vacant Spanish crown and consequently ownership of Spain's Italian and South American territories falling into the hands of the French claimant Philip Duke of Anjou and thereby the absolutist France of Louis X1V.It would have elevated France to the status of global superpower at a stroke.The Treaty of Utrecht in 1714 recognised the Bourbon claim to the Spanish throne but secured Anjou's renunciation of his claim as Louis XIV's successor,thereby permanently separating the two monarchies.

You could therefore perhaps be a little more appreciative of the outcome of the War of the Spanish Succession as the alternative scenario,an absolutist French monarchy stretching from Calais to Cadiz and across the Atlantic ocean, would have made short work of any notion of Catalonian separateness.

While we are on the subject of betrayal
when another Frenchman,(or Corsican at any rate) made a rather more successful attempt to subjugate the Iberian peninsula as it was by the efforts of a certain Duke of Wellington and the Royal Navy that largely ensured that the attempt was ultimately frustrated.Unsurprisingly Napoleon Bonaparte proved not at all exercised by the constitutional niceties of Catalonian liberty.

As for the bulls I am glad they are likely in future to be left in peace to graze and contemplate the flora and fauna of the meadows.Bull fighting is a particularly unpleasant manifestation of Mediterranean machismo just as drunkenness and disorder in Mediterranean resorts has become the leitmotif of much of contemporary British youth.Perhaps if the latter were substituted for the matadors and picadors in the ring attendance at bullfights would rise,the bulls for once would have the upper hand and the Chancellor of the Exchequer could close half the UK consulates in Spain thereby further helping to eliminate our appalling national deficit.

belinda parris

The dead bull definately doesn't enter the food chain any more since mad cow disease. The whole carcass is now burned, not that it makes any difference to the bull. Illegal practices to make the job easier go on all over Spain and South America. Talk to the vets involved! And yes of course an obese person eating a burger is as horrific as bullfighting, so what? Two wrongs don't make a right but change can only come about step-by-step. You can defend bullfighting until the cows come home, talk about its art, culture and florituras, but at the end of the day it is just pure public butchery and, they way I see it, there is something very wrong about watching another being die in pain and enjoying it. I cannot be persuaded.

belinda parris

Thank you Simon Mennie for that very interesting and clearly set out historical summary. No doubt you are right about being better off with Spain than a vast French empire. I am not a nationalist in the radical sense of the word but Catalunya has been bullied (back to bulls!!) from all sides and continues to get lashed from the Spanish far-right whenever they get a chance. It was just refreshing to see a nice word or two in a high-quality magazine instead of the usual so I was putting a word in for the Catalans and Basques to back this up.

Simon Mennie

Belinda Parris

Thank you and I apologise for the didactic tone of the post.I appreciate that Catalonia was extinguished politically and culturally after 1939 and has undergone a powerful renaissance since 1975.I am sure Spain is all the better for it.

I suppose the region still attracts the displeasure of the extreme right as Aragon historically has been a cradle of what it sees as "anti national" forces and in particular of working class Anarchism which was a powerful force well before the Civil War-there was an anarchist inspired uprising in Barcelona in the 1900s I believe which was suppressed with much bloodshed and is still referred to as the "Semana Tragica".Unsurprisingly it was the anarchists who played a major role in the events of 1936 and the suppression of the military rebellion in what is Spain's second city,thereby helping to deny the Nationalists an early and potentially decisive victory over the Republican government.The offence was compounded in Nationalist eyes when General Goded the leader appointed to secure Barcelona for the plotters by General Emilio Mola the organising brain behind the military rebellion was tried by a republican military tribunal and shot at Monjuich.Goded,who had served with Franco in the Rif campaigns in North Africa had earlier suppressed the Asturian miners rising against the centre-right government of Gil Robles in 1934,using units of the Spanish Foreigh Legion with sanguinary results.

By a curious irony one of the co-architects of the pharaonic Valle de los Caidos,Pedro Muguruza,also designed and built Barcelona's award winning main railway station in 1929.

Simon Stephenson

belinda parris : 10.11pm

"You can defend bullfighting until the cows come home, talk about its art, culture and florituras, but at the end of the day ... [the] way I see it, there is something very wrong about watching another being die in pain and enjoying it. I cannot be persuaded."

This is the way I see it, too. It's disingenuous to argue as though it is the taunting, the infliction of pain or the killing that is in question. The central criticism is that the desire to attend such a spectacle for the purpose of entertainment displays a baseness of character above which people of civilised societies should strive to exist. It's not the promoters or the matadors who are being identified for criticism, it's the people who go along to be entertained by them.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Belinda, then what am I eating? And how is that I see the meat from the rings in Seville, Osuna, Jerez, Sanlucar and Cordoba on sale after every fight.

Simon, if the bull fight is banned, the bulls will no more be left in piece than the Fresians would be left to roam England if we gave up milk and dairy. The breeders will slaughter the cattle and destroy the land, which make up some 20% of Spain's greatest source of biodiversity, the dehesa. It will become agricultural land. I implore you, read this: http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/the-rights-and-wrongs-of-bullfighting/

I do applaud your final statement, though. It is not about the welfare, or the conservation, it is about the virtue of the audience for wishing to watch it. However, in a liberal democracy, you do not legislate on virtue. As for machismo, it has that aspect for some of its fans. For others, it is about beauty in the face of danger, and defiant immobility in the face of Death.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

P.S. Re: mad cow. The only herds in the Western world left untouched by mad cow disease were the fighting cattle of Spain. They aren't fed other cattle you see... (Ref. 'Beef: How Milk, Meat and Muscle Helped shape the World.')

Simon Stephenson

Alexander Fiske-Harrison : 12.35pm

"However, in a liberal democracy, you do not legislate on virtue."

Perhaps not, but if you are honest, and not seeking to hide something, neither do you sidetrack a confrontation about human virtue into a discussion about practicalities and peripherals. As blood-sports supporters do all the time.

Why don't you come up with an argument that defends the need for (some) humans to demonstrate our race's superiority through victory over and humiliation of lesser species, rather than trying to pretend that this isn't what blood-sports are all about?

Simon Mennie

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

I was being somewhat disingenuous in imagining that the bulls would be left to ruminate contentedly in the meadows should the corrida be banned.I was also,somewhat naively,unaware of the apparent quasi industrial scale on which the bulls are bred specifically for the ring and how a general ban could potentially affect the environmental balance of the Spanish landscape.Which begs the question on why so much of the Spanish rural economy appears to be dependent on raising animals solely for the purpose of being done to death in a confined space in front of paying spectators.

The definition of virtue and moral conduct changes from generation to generation.In an earlier age the machismo of the bullring could be in a sense said to demonstrate the highest male virtues of courage,strength,fortitude,conduct and daring in the face of death.We now live in a feminised,sentimentalised increasingly homogenised Europe in which risk aversion,the dilution and retreat of national cultures in the face of mass immigration and cheap emotional incontinence,to name but a few,form the chief social undercurrents.
Whatever one's views of the morality of bullfighting this still incoming tide,much of it borne along by EU regulation, alone does not bode well for its long term survival.

It seems in any event that Spaniards themselves,both in government and without,see bullfighting as playing an increasingly unimportant,even negative, role in their self image as a nation.The Spanish royal family itself is reported to be divided on the issue. Bullfighting has been largely driven off state television and if the 2002 Gallup poll is to be believed,nearly 70% of those questioned stated that it was of little or no interest to them,a view which seemed to be particularly endorsed amongst the younger age groups. It would be interesting to see if this result has been reflected in the yearly attendance figures at these events- how many spectators ,say, are regulars perhaps with season tickets,and how many are just tourists.

Strangely enough,and this may be no more than a statistical quirk, the approval ratings for bullfighting across the regions as recorded by Gallup seemed to be generally higher in many areas which were core nationalist territory in the civil war as opposed to those which declared for the republic

I have not read "Death in the Afternoon" and I have never attended a bullfight nor do I wish to but I do have sufficient imagination to recognise at one level the appeal of bullfighting-the colour,the spectacle,the sense of manhood being tested to the extreme.Hemingway said that it was the only art form where the artist himself places his life in danger in pursuance of his art.The corrida historically could be said to have served a useful social purpose in providing entertainment and diversion for a population many of whom lived in poverty.Manuel Azana the last president of the prewar Spanish Republic described Spain as country traditionally built on extremes using a metaphor derived from bullfighting (thereby neatly underlining its social and cultural centrality) -"ombre e sol" -the terms I believe by which seats in the ring were traditionally designated as exposed to the sun or in the shade. Spain is a different country now economically and socially and whatever my personal views it is a matter in the end for the Spanish people,not noisy outsiders or indeed the EU, to decide whether bullfighting continues or not.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Bullfighting is not a sport. I explain why in my post here: http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/the-rights-and-wrongs-of-bullfighting/

For a description of what it's positive virtues are, I turn to the words of the Spanish writer and thinker Gabriel Avalos:

"The skydiver has courage, the hunter has craft and the racing driver technique, and they all exercise them in the face of Death. In fact, they use them to cheat Death. The bullfighter goes one further, he treats Death with contempt, unworthy of even being cheated, because when it comes upon him, he ignores it and seeks to make art.He invites it to dance with the flick of the cape and every time it moves to embrace him, it finds only mocking air.

The bull - man's sustenance, man's clothing and man's burden-bearer - serves one more purpose here, and is now the avatar of Death. The matador who does not love the bull who lets him create this beauty, is not an artist at all, and can at best only produce dry exercises, paintings by number.

What people outside Spain will never understand is how rebelious in spirit, how contemptous of tradition, how modern in its futility is this attempt to create art in the shadow of Death. The modern bullfight is less than a hundred years old, dating from Belmonte's alternativa in 1913, an event which shattered bullfighting's connection to the gladiatorialism that went before him. That same year, Stravinsky debuted his 'Rite of Spring' in Paris and Picasso opened his first exhibition of cubist work in New York."

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

I think that most historical analyses of the bullfight's popularity have been factually misleading. It is often said by aficionados that there are a thousand bullfights a year now, but only three hundred in it's Golden Age of the early '20s. This is due to a confusion of counting full corridas, novice fights (novilladas) and the horseback bullfight (rejoneo). In 1932 the official figures were 219 corridas and 870 novilladas. Rejoneo had not been reintroduced at that stage. In 2008 there were 1,345 corridas, novilladas and rejoneos according to the Ministry of the Interior. Numbers are declining during the recession, which particularly effects Spain, and particularly areas where bullfighting is popular like Jerez de la Frontera. I don't think it was ever as popular as some claim, and football has certainly taken many of the young who used to go for the blood and excitement - i.e. who viewed it as a sport. Which can only be a good thing. In my view, it is currently bloated and should lose its subsidies and be forced to get smaller, with better bulls and compete in an open market place.

Simon Mennie

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

I found your last 2 posts on the subject interesting and informative.I am not sure what the connection between bullfighting, Stravinsky and Picasso is. Hitherto I would not have discerned the slightest propinquity,artistic or otherwise, between the father of modern cubism,a brilliant Russian-Jewish emigre composer and the corrida but maybe I've missed something.

I am unable to understand how bullfighting can or could be described as gladiatorial.The contestants pitted against each other in the Roman Colosseum at least enjoyed an equal chance of survival.The bull has none;its death is the absolutely inevitable indeed necessary apotheosis of the whole ritual.

Hemingway,a non Spaniard, substantially got the point about the artistic dimension of bullfighting in the Spanish conscience. Stripped of its theatre,colourful choreography and accumulated theology however bullfighting is reduced to little more than the public execution of a dumb beast purpose bred for its fate.

Fergus Pickering

Wy is this our business? It is Spanish business. I don't care for bullfights and, as far as I know, there are no plans to introduce them here. I have no paticular feelngs about fox-hunting, beyon a feeling that it sounds very picturesque. If it were left to me I'd let the hunters get on with it. I would concern myself with battery farming and how the bloody EU makes it impossible for us to ban it. Which I cerytainly would do and to hell with the poor and cheap meat. Let them eat less. It would undoubtedly be good for them.

But in general, do we not feel that foreign countries should be left alone if they are not harming us. Dammit, it many African countries they practise voodoo and sacrifice small children. Very regrettable but we are not going to do anything about it, are we? A liitle more of the cultivating of our own gardens might be in order.

I have never been to Spain. I do not intend to go there (too hot and uncomfortable). If my wiofe insists we go there to look atpaintings and palaces, I assure you I shall not visiyt a bull fight. I'm sure I wouldn't like it. But then I once went to a boxing event in this country (Oxford Uni v Cambridge Uni). I thought it savage and unpleasant and I shall not go again. But boxing fans have nothing to fear from me. I do not wish it banned just because I don't like it.

Simon Stephenson

So bullfighting is art, eh? And who can deny it?

But then, if someone made the case for 9/11 being art, who could deny that?

Holier than thou

'I won't be persuaded'. That intolerant line really grated. 'I won't be persuaded' but if you can;t be persuaded then I'll campaign to stop you doing something - and if you're a minority then all the better because the chattering (and in your case foreign, don't bleat that you're not) classes will hammer you into submission with the law. National Socialists the world over would be proud of you. Dorothy Parris or whatever your name is -scrolling up is annoyingly impossible with this comment window open - please now return to obscurity and keep your pursed lip disapproval of other people's business to yourself. Just to wind you up I feel obliged to tell you that while all else slumbered yesterday I was up with the larks and shot a beautiful buck (that's a deer - they live in the countryside). Had his kidneys for breakfast and the rest has now been butchered and distributed to worthy places. I enjoyed it immensely and I'll do it again next week. If you don't like it, tough, go and smoke a joint, milk a goat or write a memo to Harriet Harman or something, she sounds right up your street.

And nfinally, after having had a comparison of the death of bulls to that of soldiers we now see it compared by some other prat to the deaths of people in 9/11. Yet more prooof that the anti-crowd are a bunch of swivel eyed crazies with weird agendas.

Oh and I did punch a bull yesterday, only it was locked in a stall and in truth it was a more of a pat than a punch and then he looked like he needed a scratch so I scratched his woolly head while I swigged my coffee. Beautiful beast and I reckon if he could talk he'd say he'd rather take on the sword than the bolt gun. I cannot be persuaded to think otherwise.

Simon Stephenson

Holier than thou : 1.57pm

I think if you re-read what is a very short comment, you'll find that its point is not to compare bullfighting with 9/11, but to make the point that justifying bullfighting on the basis that it is art is to accept that more or less any form of human behaviour is justifiable, since more or less anything can be classified as art.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

To me it comes to this:

If I am an overweight Englishman (or American) and I decide that I "fancy a burger", which has a quantifiably negative nutritional value for me, the end result is a factory farmed 18 month old calf dies horribly and afraid.

If I am a Spaniard and I fancy watching a man face Death in the form of a bull, which has a nil nutritional value for me, the end result is a five year old bull who was reared in wild conditions dies horribly and enraged.

The latter is a better state of affairs all round. The former I still would not ban. I merely saying you can't fund one - and we all do - and complain about the other without being the equivalent of a Southern slave owner moaning about Indian sweat-shops (forgive the anachronism of the analogy). What I am not saying is two wrongs equal a right, what I am saying is that THIS IS WHAT WE DO. Open your eyes a little further than the cellophane-wrapped meat aisle of Waitrose.

As for art, I think that the protagonists of 9/11 would surely have to argue that it was art rather than martyrdom for argument to even get off the ground (forgive the pun).

As for making ethical choices on aesthetic matters, or rather creatures dying for art (putting to one side leather shoes on stage): when the State bought the Madonna of the Pinks from the Duke of Sutherland for £22million to 'save it for the nation', that is money that could have been used to pay for better drugs for a cancer patient in the NHS. People actually died when they did because of that decision. There is a very direct equation here: art does have an ethical value which you can throw into the scales. And it's a damn sight more than the aesthetic value - which it is, technically speaking - of the taste of a nutritionally irrelevant burger.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Oh, and as for the comment on gladiators, that is absolutely not the case. There were many different types of contest throughout the history of Rome, including those in which the gladiator was pitted against animals until HE died.

And to say that the bullfight is essentially about the death of animal is simply false. For most of the audience is about the dance before. Indeed, the Portugese got rid of the public death in their version (it is killed outside the ring). Reductionism is often misleading and to say the bullfight just is the kill is equivalent to saying a man's life just is his final breath. Perhaps to the morbid, but not to the majority.