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.
