A show of bravery or the ultimate cowardice?- The Spanish Bullfight

I haven’t posted for a while. I am sorry.

This blog post could be quite.....controversial. I know there are a lot of people out there who are very against bullfighting, and I understand all the reasons why. It is not a humane sport, by any means.

However, whenever we had to do the obligatory debate about bullfighting in whatever Spanish class I was in at the time, I could see both sides of the argument.

Bullfighting has been, and still is in some parts of the country, a big part of Spanish culture. Whether for the fights themselves, or purely for the stadiums, the pictures of bulls everywhere, the cry of “ole!”

I went to my first (and most probably my last) bullfight ever on Saturday. When my flatmate told me that there was a bullfight coming to Toledo, to be honest it didn’t cross my mind that I wouldn’t go. When else am I going to be able to experience something so Spanish, apart from whilst I am here? Love it or loathe it, it embodies for many people Spanish culture (along, of course, with flamenco dancing, siestas and tapas). Good or bad, this was going to an experience.

I write my next sentence tentatively. I can’t say that I enjoyed it per se, but I must admit that I felt a huge sense of excitement, adrenaline, being swept up with the crowd watching these magnificent beasts charge around the bullring until their untimely death. And they were magnificent beasts. You could see their muscles moving underneath their shiny coats as they ran.

Some were more angry than others, some more strong. Generally it went from the first bull being the weakest until the last (in this case the sixth bull) which was the strongest, the most angry, the most likely to give a good show. And that last bull.....well, that last “fight” blew me away.

I don’t think you can really call it bull “fighting”. True, bulls and man were not born equal; bulls are an awful lot stronger than a man and have a much higher capacity of being able to kill (without having to use weapons such as knives or guns). However, this aside, when the bulls get into the ring, of course they are pretty quickly stabbed in the back with a lance by a man (a picador) on a horse. Later on he is stabbed again. These lances are left inside the bull, so that gradually, the bull loses it’s strength.

So then, a fair fight? Absolutely not. Of course, they have to weaken the bulls to be able to perform the “dances” with the bulls, but this is supposedly a show of man’s power over the bull. Except, of course, the bull has been weakened so much that it doesn’t really have a chance. And that’s where the element of cowardice comes in.

Not to say that I would be able to stand in a bullring with a bull and not run away screaming. I’m not sure I could ever look a bull in the eyes knowing that he could disembowel me with one flick of his head. But then, of course, that is one of the many reasons why I would never be a torero.

The last fight, as I mentioned before, was the one that stuck with me. I knew the torero was crazy when he knelt in front of the gate from which the bulls entered. On his knees, he had the pink flag in his hands. As the bull entered, the torero used both arms to pull the cape around his body, making the toro follow it. Later on, after a scuffle, the torero ended up on the floor. After getting up and recovering, he knelt in front of the bull, and blew it a kiss. All for show of course, but I have to admit that in that moment, I understood why people would want to attend bullfights.

It’s something that I am never, ever going to forget. I wish that the bulls didn’t have to die, that there was some way they could do this whole thing without killing....but of course, that is the whole point of these things. It’s like the Romans who used to attend gladiator fights; partly for the show of skill, and partly the excitement of knowing that someone at least was going to die that day, in front of their eyes.

I am in no way glorifying what I saw that day. I am glad I went, if it only means that I can better form my opinion about it. That I’m happy that six bulls had to die that for me to do so? Absolutely not. But before this I had never understood why bloodlust was so entrenched in human nature; now I have a much better understanding.

(I'm sorry for the poor writing, I only slept for one hour last night :()