I don't believe that anyone connected with bullfighting would deny that what happens in the ring has an element of suffering and perhaps cruelty to it. So then it comes back to whether the suffering and cruelty is justified by its place in a tradition that has deep roots in the culture. At present, the view in Catalonia apparently is that it does not.
Animals are complicated and so is the animal-rights opposition. It's hard to read motives in animals, and hard to read motives in politics.
Bullfighting has some of the elements of a sport or contest, and in the United States most people think of it as a sport, an unfair sport. If you're in Spain or Mexico it's absolutely not a sport; it's not thought of as a sport and it's not written about as a sport. It has elements of public spectacle, but then so does, for example, the Super Bowl. It has elements of a deeply entrenched, deeply conservative tradition, a tradition that resists change, as you pointed out.
For me, bullfighting was this very spiritual engagement with power, with power and death. You're pitting yourself against a force that's stronger than you and then you're winning or losing. It's power, a power play.
I was a bullfighter. I'd like to see the tradition continue. I'm sorry that Catalonia is robbing itself of a tradition that belongs in Catalonia.
Madrid reacting with the forceful protection of bullfighting as an art form is an example of the survival of the old values.
One of the things I've been thinking about lately is how the change in values makes the survival of the old values, where they do survive, all the more striking. There are pockets of the old bullfighting world that exist more or less intact, both in Spain and elsewhere.
It's almost impossible to imagine bullfighting abolished from Spain entirely. Values do change, though.
Bullfighting is anachronistic - you enter into a bullring and you're leaving behind the values of the world outside the ring. I suppose that what I would want to acknowledge is that perhaps the tension, the crucial tension, isn't necessarily between the view of bullfighting as a tradition versus as an art form, but between the values inside the ring and the values outside the ring.
You kill, it's part of your world as a bullfighter, it's a natural part of your world, and then you leave that world and it becomes unnatural.
I never took pleasure in seeing a bull die. Relief, but certainly not pleasure.
I'm good at killing, I'm known as a bullfighter who kills well, and that I can kill well, that I can compete technically with my male peers in my technique in killing, gives me satisfaction.
In fighting a bull you're always aware of a paradox concerning your perceptions of the bull. On the one hand it's your perceptions of the bull that give you the upper hand. You read the bull, you learn to read the bull more and more accurately, and this reading of the bull is how you deploy your intelligence against the bull's intelligence. Your accuracy in reading the bull is a weapon, maybe your most important weapon, against all the bull's weapons. On the other hand, you're human, you have the human tendency to read into the bull things which may not actually be there.
Cooking certainly has some of the elements of an art form.
In one era the majority puts its faith and sympathy with the bullfighter, in another with the bull.
My own experience has taught me not to underestimate the power of those who protest against cruelty. I'd also say that there may be a tendency to view the animal-rights opposition in somewhat distorted fashion as a new development, as the product of a very recent enlightenment about the rights due to animals.
A bull will try to outwit you. It will stop and hook when the last thing you expect from it is that it will stop and hook.
If you fear something, walk into it.
Acting requires focus, too, but acting doesn't, you might say, demand focus. When you're in the ring you don't even have to think about focus because the danger is so imminent. Imminent. You train and you prepare and then the adrenaline kicks in and drives you into focusing intensely. You'd better focus, right? Or else you'll make your exit on a stretcher.
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