By Neil Trent
In April, the city council in Barcelona voted to condemn
bullfighting, making it the fifth city in Spain to come out on
the side of civilization. As the capital of Catalonia and one
of the world's cultural centers, Barcelona's progressive, if
mostly symbolic, stand bodes well for everyone who wishes to
see this blood sport end.
For years NGOs, homegrown and international (including this
one), have been calling for bullfighting's demise. In
particular Spain's Asociación para la Defensa de los Derechos
del Animal (ADDA) has fought an uphill battle, securing a
quarter of a million signatures for its "Culture without
Cruelty" campaign, and generally making fellow Spaniards
question a custom that once seemed as natural as the
weather.
However, what makes Barcelona's stance so encouraging is
that it expresses the people's will. A recent poll showed that
63% of residents want to see bullfighting end in their city,
giving officials the green light (and backbone) to buck
traditions even if they don't have the legal authority to
actually impose a ban. (That must come from the provincial
Catalonian government.)
The same poll yielded another important finding: Fully 96%
of respondents indicated that any entertainment involving the
suffering of animals should be banned. In a world of war and
violence and perpetual terrorist threats, the people in
Barcelona clearly recognize that they do not have to accept
brutality in their faces for entertainment purposes. So their
government has decided to call Barcelona "a pioneer in the
abolition of bullfighting."
The hopeful news does not end there. Officials in China had
been flirting with the idea of importing bullfighting as a way
to boost tourism. Construction began on a 6,000-seat bullring
outside Beijing. Spanish matadors were poised to arrive. Then
an amazing thing happened: An angry public mobilized and spoke
out with such virulence that promoters of the plan backed
down.
"This is a very significant victory," Zhang Luping of the
Beijing Human and Animal Environmental Education Center told
The Los Angeles Times. "It shows that ordinary people's
voices can be heard in China and that policies can be
changed."
The ""no, gracias" from the world's most populous country
surely comes as a blow to bullfighting's backers. China, not
normally considered in the vanguard of animal protection, takes
its place among Egypt, Greece, Russia and others in rejecting
the importation of ritualistic slaughter.
These positive signs do not add up to a tipping point yet.
Bullfighting is alive and well in many places, including Spain,
Portugal, Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela. That means that, at
this very moment, thousands of bulls are being readied for a
terrifying ordeal.
Standard tricks of the trade are said to include
immobilizing bulls in containers, where their protruding
horns—as sensitive as human teeth—get chiseled down to render
them less potent as a natural defense. Heavy sandbags are
dropped repeatedly onto their kidneys to weaken the beasts.
Before the actual corrida, bulls reportedly are confined
in darkness, and their eyes smeared with Vaseline—the better to
make them utterly confused when released into the harsh light
of day and the deafening roar of the blood-lusting masses.
It just gets worse from there. The bulls are jabbed by
lances and punctured by barbed sticks called
banderillas, quickly followed by a matador in
embroidered pants and cape who sashays out to toy with the
hemorrhaging animal, before driving his blade deep into the
vitals for the death blow. And that's only if the matador
strikes accurately; in many cases, he doesn't, leaving the bull
to suffocate in his own blood and requiring another person to
kill the beast by plunging a puntilla into the animal's
neck.
Holy olé! By some estimates up to 40,000 bulls are killed in
this manner each year in Madrid, Sevilla, and Spanish cities
large and small during fiestas and other celebrations.
Bulls aren't the only animals who suffer in this pageant of
death. The horses who bear the lance-wielding picadors
are pictures of noble elegance as they canter into the ring,
blindfolded. Sadly, they sometimes leave spilling their guts,
literally, after a mortal encounter with a horn.
This passes for "art" among those who see bullfighting, or
tauromaquia, as central to Spain's identity. A likely
outgrowth of fertility rites in the ancient Greek world,
bullfighting was introduced into medieval Spain by the Moors.
Initially, it was conducted on horseback by the well-to-do. In
the 1700s, a legendary matador transformed it into a ground
sport, opening the way for common folk to participate. A
culture grew up around the elaborate bloodbath. It came to be
celebrated in song, literature, and the fine arts.
This close identification with the country's heritage has
won bullfighting some powerful apologists. King Juan Carlos can
frequently be found ringside, soaking in the adulation of the
crowd. The sport receives additional cachet—and cash—from the
hordes of tourists who have been led to believe that a visit to
Spain must be anointed by the blood of bulls. It goes without
saying that if more visitors just said no, a major source of
revenue would dry up.
So, despite the recent victories, this is no time for
complacency. Movements to squelch bullfighting have emerged
before, only to die. In 1567, Pope Pius V decreed that
torturing bulls for amusement runs "contrary to Christian duty
and piety," and ordered an immediate halt to the practice. The
public outcry was such that a subsequent pope recanted the
injunction.
Today, the impetus to end the cruelty is coming from the
ground up—from the people themselves—not a pope. This
groundswell just may prove the coup de grâce for a barbaric
ritual that belongs to the bloody past.
