Ending bullfighting in Spain is harder than just pointing out cruelty and suffering
After decades, bullfighting opponents may have the advantage
This week, thousands of Spaniards took to the streets of Valencia, their country’s third largest city, to protest government action against bullfighting. The next day the city’s new, left-leaning mayor, Joan Ribo, announced what he hoped would be a solution to appease them — and the sport’s passionate opponents.
“There are more and more people understanding that mistreating animals is a practice that must be eradicated from our society,” Ribo said. “I think it could be interesting if we in Spain could find a way in which the bulls did not get that final treatment.”
That treatment being a sword in the back.
The ever-fiery and ongoing debate over bullfighting in Spain has become as indelibly woven into the Spanish psyche as the spectacle itself. And it’s not just about man vs. beast, but an elite, noble patriarchy vs. a liberal, enlightened Spain.
So, like most things involving Spanish bullfighting, Ribo’s proposal immediately drew disgusted snorts. Aficionados and prominent matadors dubbed his idea “bullfighting lite.” Opponents complained that Ribo’s call for a “Portuguese-style” bullfight doesn’t quite address their concerns. In Portugal, the bull is killed, but after the fight, outside the view of spectators.
In Spain, where bullfighting borders on religion, a fervent anti-bullfighting movement has successfully persuaded many Spaniards that killing an animal for entertainment probably isn’t very “modern” — particularly since it’s not a fair battle. Cities, including some near Valencia, and two regions, Catalonia and the Canary Islands, have imposed bans.
In recent years, though, the pro-bullfighting camp has gained more traction as the country’s right-leaning lawmakers have pushed to reinstate subsidies for bullfighting and granted it a specially protected cultural heritage status.
In November, the country’s education ministry pitched a plan for a bullfighting course in public schools. Supporters said they thought it would help revive a dying pastime by bringing young people into its gory, misunderstood fold. (The proposal immediately prompted more than 400,000 people to sign a petition calling for its demise.)
Spanish bullfighting — or corrida de toro — goes back at least to the 1700s when men on foot began sparring with bulls. Up to that point most bullfighting had been done entirely on horseback, so the novel drama of a man, armed with just a cape and a sword, battling a bull drew fascinated crowds. Soon stadiums were devoted to the spectacle.
In the centuries since, bullfighting in Spain has become intertwined with the country’s identity, a dramatic staging of man over animal, of noble courage in the face of a snorting, black-eyed beastly demise. Outlawing it, fans say, would crush the country’s soul.
“The bullfighting world is aware of the problem and maltreatment we are suffering at the hands of a part of the political class,” said Jose Antonio Morante Camacho, a matador speaking to the crowd in Valencia this week. “We are here to say, this is our life, it’s a tradition.”
The controversy is an old one. Ernest Hemingway, American machismo incarnate, fell in love with bullfighting, eventually penning what many consider a bible of the sport, Death in the Afternoon. Hemingway addressed detractors back in 1932, when the book was first published:
“It would be pleasant of course for those who do like it if those who do not would not feel that they had to go to war against it or give money to try to suppress it, since it offends them or does not please them,” he wrote. “But that is too much to expect and anything capable of arousing passion in its favor will surely raise as much passion against it.”
Now, though, anti-bullfighting advocates are harnessing the power of social media — and appear to be gaining ground.
Last year a photo of a matador, said to be Álvaro Múnera, began charging across the Internet. In it Múnera appears to be sitting on the side of a bullfighting ring, his head dropping into his hand in a gesture of defeat, as a freshly stabbed bull bellows menacingly. Along with the image were the following words, attributed to Múnera:
“And suddenly, I looked at the bull. He had this innocence that all animals have in their eyes, and he looked at me with this pleading. It was like a cry for justice, deep down inside of me. I describe it as being like a prayer — because if one confesses, it is hoped, that one is forgiven. I felt like the worst shit on earth.”
But the picture of Múnera’s supposed conversion wasn’t actually of Múnera, and he never spoke those words. (Múnera, a rising Colombian bullfighter was gored and almost killed by a bull in the 1980s, and later became an anti-bullfighting crusader.) The quote came from a 1995 article in El Pais written by playwright and poet Antonio Gala Velasco.
The image and the words attached to it may have been a hoax. But the photo, the poetic words and the notion that a bullfighter-turned-animal-rights-activist said them, all coalesced into a powerful force that pushed public opinion.
In December, the right-leaning, pro-bullfighting wing lost its majority in the Spanish parliament, so for now it appears bullfighting opponents are gaining political momentum. Advocates are hoping that would mean a public demise to the public demise of bulls in Spain — the final treatment.
