A Tradition is Slowly Dying. Good Riddance?

I might be about to lose some friends.

That’s sad of course but I’m prepared to take the risk. It comes with talking about a certain Spanish cultural practice in terms more nuanced than condemnation to the ninth circle of hell.

I was in Valencia last week for the annual festival of Fallas (if you’re speaking Castillian Spanish) or Falles if you are speaking the local Valencian language. Fallas has grown from being uniquely Valencian to being a world event of cultural significance immortalised on a list kept by UNESCO, who seem to have jurisdiction over this kind of stuff. I had a blast at Fallas and I intend to write something about it soon but for now I want to concentrate on one specific corner of the festivities. That’s the bit that took place in the Plaza de Toros, which if you are interested is located right next to the North Station just outside the medieval city centre.

Oh dear. The Plaza de Toros. We know what that is don’t we? It’s where the Spanish practice their cruel “sport” known as bullfighting. Every civilised person knows that bullfighting is barbaric and to inflict pain and humiliation on a sentient creature in the name of sport must be condemned in the strongest possible terms. The chances are that most people reading this would agree with those sentiments to some extent.

And straight away we have a problem and I am going to try to explain why.

I lived in Madrid with my family for a couple of years in the mid 90s and in the second of those years we rented a house from a landlord who was a great aficionado of the bulls. The landlord had (still has) three daughters and the youngest of the three had inherited her father’s interest. Between them they taught me a lot about their passion and I came to a level of understanding in excess of most foreigners’ but still far behind theirs. I suppose this is why I am trying to shift my readers’ understanding just a little.

The first challenge that we have is that it isn’t easy to talk about this subject in English. The terms that have been adopted by English-speakers are more or less meaningless to the Spanish. For a start it isn’t called “bullfighting” in Spanish. There is no sense in which this is a fight as we might understand it. The bull is going to be dead at the end come what may[1]. Even if the torero ends up dead, a member of his team will finish the bull.

What’s that? What’s a torero, and how might he end up dead?

The torero is the guy in the fancy suit who waves a cape around to induce the bull to charge at it. He is also the one who (assuming he is still capable of doing so) finally dispatches the animal with a sword that cuts its spinal cord. In English he is often referred to as the matador and indeed “matador de toros” which means “killer of bulls” is a real title and is actually used. But torero is the more usual name. And how does he end up dead? It’s rare in modern times but it remains the case that 600 kilos of fighting bull equipped with sharp horns is a pretty deadly adversary. Those horns might have been designed expressly for the purpose of opening arteries. And sometimes they do. Modern medical attention means that gorings are very rarely fatal nowadays but sometimes, in a small bull ring, in a remote province, the medical facilities just might not be up to the job.

And while we’re on the subject of the toreros, just a word about the pronouns. The overwhelming majority of toreros are male but there are a few, a very few, women who have achieved that status. I saw the first female torero of modern times, Cristina Sanchez, appear as a novice at Las Ventas in Madrid in around 1994. She later “took the alternative” - “tomó la alternativa” over the border in France in 1996 to become a full matador de toros. However she retired from the ring after three years and there have not been too many following in her footsteps.

So back to the language. If it’s not a fight then what is this strange sport?

Well, for a start it’s not a sport. For the critics who cry “How can they call this a sport?” the answer is simple. They don’t. If it were a sport the newspapers would report it in their sports pages and they do not. The posh papers in Spain actually have a specific section in which they report on the Corrida – a word that literally translates as “run” – as a cultural event or even an art. Definitely not a sport.

What about the other problems?

It’s cruel and degrading!

This charge is harder to dismiss although it is worth splitting out the two components. The popular British tabloid view of the Spanish as a race of people who delight in the torture and degradation of dumb animals is almost entirely fiction. Who would have thought it? Tabloid journalists making shit up? Whatever next? I can’t speak for every small fiesta in every small town in the country but the idea that Spanish people like nothing more than shoving donkeys off church towers or setting fire to furry animals in the name of a perverted pleasure is a long, long way from the truth. The bull that enters the ring at the start of a corrida has the respect of the crowd merely for being a bull. The crowd wants the bull to do well. It wants the bull to provide a stern test to the torero. It knows that the bull will end up dead but it wants its death to be a noble one and in my opinion it is, compared with being herded into a dark cage, stunned with a bolt gun and having its throat cut surrounded by the urine and faeces of the hundreds of others that have gone before it. On the whole I would defend the charge of degradation fairly vigorously.

But cruelty? This is more difficult and there is no doubt that for the final fifteen minutes of its life the bull does suffer significant pain. An inept torero can make the final dispatch much more traumatic than it need be. Jumping back to the degradation for a moment, there are few spectacles to match the anger of a knowledgeable crowd at a corrida if the matador fails to do his job properly at the moment of truth. So, yes, the bull suffers pain for around fifteen minutes and ends up dead. Compared with a bull that has been bred purely for meat it has a few minutes more pain although arguably a lot less fear and at least it has the opportunity to strike a few blows back at its tormentor. On the other hand the four year life of  brave bull (that’s the best translation I can make of toro bravo but it isn’t exact) leading up to those fifteen minutes is more pampered than that of any other domesticated animal except possibly thoroughbred racehorses. Fighting bulls are raised by specialist breeders from bloodlines that go back through generations. Some hard-core aficionados maintain that the quality of the brave bulls has never recovered after most of them were lost during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s but it isn’t for want of trying. The program of the corrida usually lists the breeder of the bulls before the names of the toreros who will go into the ring with them.

So there are a few things that it isn’t but then what is the corrida about?

There are many ways of thinking about the corrida. It’s a direct throwback to the games in the Roman arena. It’s a spectacle on a grand scale with music and brightly coloured costumes. But what it is above all else is a place where men – and a very few women – test their skill and courage in a public arena. More or less every society there has ever been has had ways in which young men are tested to prove their manhood. Sometimes it is traditional like the Land Diving of Vanuatu, sometimes it is modern like the various gang initiations in Los Angeles and other American cities. It seems to be hard-wired into the human psyche at some level. A form of the corrida has existed since classical times but in its modern guise it dates back to the early 18^th century. For almost three hundred years it has been the most prominent way for a Spanish man to prove his courage. When the torero steps into the ring his aim is to win the respect of the crowd, to prove that he is worthy to kill the brave bull that has the crowd’s respect already.

Perhaps the most telling argument against the corrida is that it is outdated. In the 21^st century there is no justification for this type of macho demonstration of manhood. It’s an argument that has found support in Spain and the Autonomous Region of Cataluña outlawed the corrida in 2012. This might have had more to do with Cataluña’s aspirations to independence from Spain but the measure could not have passed the regional legislature without a degree of genuine support. Between 2007 and 2012 attendance at corridas in Spain fell by 40%. Partly this was due to the economic crisis but it must also reflect a waning interest among Spanish people.

So on the whole I expect that the tradition of the corrida will gradually fade away. It will linger longest in Madrid, Seville and across the southern region of Andalucía but eventually it will be uneconomic. Perhaps there will come a point when an ambitious politician will judge that there is advantage to be gained by promoting its final demise.

Meanwhile many people will continue to inveigh against the continuation of this tradition and it is of course their absolute right to do so. Those who avoid the use of animal products of all kinds may do so on the grounds of animal rights without the suspicion of hypocrisy. Those who continue to eat meat or consume cows’ milk are perhaps less certain of the moral high ground and must fall back on other arguments. Perhaps the degradation that they worry about is not that of the bull but rather that of the crowd of people that draws pleasure from the spectacle. It’s a thought.

In writing this piece it has not been my intention to persuade anyone of the value or the justification of the corrida. You will make up your own minds on that and probably have already done so. I am more concerned that if you condemn it you do so based on a clear view of what it is and what it is not. Over time it will probably go the way of other outdated traditions and when it does something will have been lost from the world. I think that is a little bit sad but I suppose I am in the minority.

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[1] Yes, I know that there is a very rare provision that a particularly brave bull might be spared to breed but I have never seen that happen and nobody I know has ever seen it happen so to all intents and purposes it doesn’t happen.