BULLFIGHTS

We went to a bullfight last night. The Bull ring here is the largest there is, with a seating capacity of 25,000 people. These fights occur every week for most of the year. And not only here in Madrid, as you travel through this country you see bullrings in every and town or city that can support it. Being in Madrid, the centre of this event, we felt that it is something that we should see.

Call us naive, but what we saw was quite different to what we expected it to be like. We expected it to be dramatic, exciting, full of thrill, anticipation, and atmosphere. What we witnessed was sad, cruel, and sometimes brutal. We expected it to be one man pitted against an animal. What we saw was the incessant teasing and brutalizing of an animal ending in its death. A death that served no purpose apart from the entertainment of the crowd. This was primitive and no different to the gladiator fights of old, and made us wonder how a supposed civilized country can support a ritual killing that displays such a primal display of brutality. What have they been doing over the last 2000 years whilst the rest of the world has been developing?

To explain the process of this sacrificial offering, it goes like this.
1 - The Bull charges into the ring full of anger and spirit to be confronted by six men around the circumference of the ring who wave capes and make him charge each of them in turn, around and around the ring, until you can see him heaving and gasping for breath.
2 - Two men ride out on horses that are blind folded and padded up about their bodies. You soon find out why they are padded. When the bull sees them he charges full speed into the horses. I don’t know what they do to the bull to make him do this, but when the bull see the horse, they see red.
3 - While the bull is pushing and shoving the horse around, the rider is stabbing the bull in the back with a long spear. The result of this is that the bull has blood pouring down its sides and often pumping out of the wounds. Their job complete the horses leave the ring.
4 - The teasers (the six men with the pink capes) come out again and make the bull run around some more.
5 - Now that the bull is worn out and bleeding, the Matador comes out. He has two short spears in his hands which he raises and spears into the bulls back as he runs past. He does this twice more until there are now six spears protruding from the bulls back.
6 - The matador now grabs his red cape and he dances around dodging the charges of the bull.
7 - Now that the bull is almost exhausted and slowed down considerably, the matador gets a fresh sword and as the bull charges past, stabs it into the bull as he runs past. If this goes according to plan, it will go in up to the hilt and pierce the bulls lungs and the bull will start to blow blood out of his nose and mouth.
8 - Out come the teasers again to make the bull run around, and hopefully he will stop though exhaustion and loss of blood etc.
9 - Finally they back the bull into a corner, absolutely exhausted, his head dropped almost to the ground. They still wave the cape in front of him, and you know that if he had the energy he would charge, but he is unable to move.
10 - At this point the Matador steps forward and raises another sward and thrusts it down through the bulls neck and the bull will drop like a stone, dead.
11 - Out comes a team of donkeys which they hitch the dead bull to, and they drag him out of the ring. The same bull that was 20 minutes ago charging around the ring and jumping over the barricade, is now dead and being dragged out leaving a trail of blood. And what can they do with the remains of this animal … nothing.

As if all this isn’t bad enough, some of what we saw was just butchery. When the sword was stabbed through his back, one bull ended up with it protruding out halfway down its side. Another Matador took six goes with the sword to finish it off. There seemed to be no consideration for any of the bulls as animals.

There were six bulls killed the night that we were there. The only respite was that two bulls were released (not sure what the story was here but we understood it to be the rules of the game), and also that the Matadors that didn’t make a clean kill got booed by the crowd. The strange thing is that you can read about these bullfights and the achievements of the matadors on the front page of the sports section tomorrow. They call this a sport worth reporting on?!

It seemed like a good idea to go and see something that is inherent with the local culture, it ended up in making us feel sick. We have accepted that no matter how hard you try to expand your mind and come to understand why certain cultures do certain things, there are some things that we will never understand and we will never agree with. What we have come away with, is an experience that means that we can argue about this subject with some integrity.