One piece in our latest issue that’s sure to provoke debate is Alexander Fiske-Harrison’s account of contemporary bullfighting in Spain. It’s a topic close to the author’s heart, and he eloquently defends the modern spectacle of the bull-ring as an art form while acknowledging the moral compromises inherent in a festival that has slaughter at its heart.
As Fiske-Harrison has explored in his previous postings on this blog, what it means to behave “well” towards animals is a very different business to what it means to behave well towards other people. Given, however, that our behaviour towards animals does not simply exist in an ethical vacuum, most modern societies find themselves in a peculiar position: horrified by bull-fights or fox hunts, yet economically predicated on the industrial rearing and slaughter of many millions of animals.
Can such contradictions be reconciled? Can we justify our pleasure in either the spectacle of a bullfight or the savour of a steak dinner? As ever, let us know your thoughts below.
I think this is very fair treatment of this morally difficult topic. Ever since I read Hemingway’s “Death in the Afternoon” I’ve had a respect for bullfighting and refuse to condemn it. Fiske-Harrison brings the subject up to date, incidentally with a thrilling account of a ‘good’ bullfight.
Sir,
I remember this author indulging in a pugilistic exchange in the letters pages of the Times Lit. Supp. on the subject of whether or not the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was autistic. After reading this essay, I am brought to mind that the analysis of autism is as a lack of understanding of the content of other people’s minds. It is quite clear from the both the lyricism Fiske-Harrison has devoted to the writing in the first half of this piece, and the logic he has applied to the argument in the second, that he lacks not understanding of how to manipulate another mind but instead any common feeling for his fellow creatures - the hallmark not of the autist but the sociopath. This is an irredeemably brutal and barbarous event whose aesthetic triumphs can no more override its fundamental ethical flaws than the awe-inspiring drama of Caravaggio’s ‘Judith Beheading Holofernes’ could justify public executions. I understand Prospect believing that there was a debate to be had here, and now that those on the side of the bullfight have put forward their strongest arugment and most elegant phrasing, we can still see the gaping chasm of inhumanity - and inhumane-ity - that lies at the heart of their philosophy and their appreciation of this needless and gory spectacle.
Yours truly,
Dr. G. Avalos
I always hope the bull will kill the matador.
I don’t really understand the references to spamming, but agree with Dr Avalos in questioning the logic of Mr Fiske-Harrison’s apologia for the corrida dressed up as moral debate.
We are asked to trust the eminent biologist Fiske-Harrison, late of ape research in Georgia (US or Caucasus?) in his assertion that animals, apparently, don’t feel pain:
“As for the bull, I do not claim that it does not suffer, although we can tell from its behaviour, particularly under the picador’s lance, that the adrenaline coursing through it must numb its pain to some extent. I know of no other breed of bull, let alone another species of mammal, that will charge again and again on to a lance, its only saviour being the crossbar. I would almost agree with Juanjo Urquillo, a vet at the largest Spanish bullring in Madrid, who said a few years ago, “The only time I get really upset is when the bull is handled badly by man… Man has a responsibility to the bull to fight it expertly. And in a good corrida the bull feels no pain.”
Yet we are told that by the time it is killed, the fear-crazed bull has been tortured for up to 15 minutes by men on horseback with spears. Apart from that, it’s a very noble death, and one for which el toro should be jolly well grateful.
We are further asked to entertain the dubious Darwinism of the author’s assertion that since animals cannot defend their rights, they have no rights and that humans are thus empowered to do with them as they feel fit.
The genetically dubious assertion that ‘The Iberian bull’ is no more intelligent than a shark obscenely further implies that brutally killing sharks for ’sport’ is OK. The inference that this strain of bull has been bred to be less intelligent makes this is the more shocking. If the objective is indeed a thrilling contest between man and beast, why not breed super-intelligent bulls? (They’d sensibly refrain from fighting, presumably, unlike their brainless tormentors and spectators).
Try this simple counter-argument: the systematic ritual torture and death of a solitary animal at the hands of a group of well-armed higher mammals for no other purpose than entertainment cannot be termed noble (or human) under any sane criterion.
This onanistic pastiche of Hemingway delivered in the manner of a Victorian gentleman explorer owes more to the purple prose of a Phileas Fogg crisp packet than to genuine reportage. I’m delighted that my name was not on the masthead as the publisher of this mawkish nonsense. More in sorrow than in anger, John Kelly.
I watched about 40 bullfights in Madrid and Seville, longing to find the Hemingway in them. AFH’s text acknowledges that this fight was as unlike the ordinary fight as Ali’s cerebral victory over George Foreman was over the normal ugly spectacle. Normally, the bull tries to escape until it is cornered; finally, like a trapped dog, it fights back and everybody, matador included, scrambles for dear life, diving behind barricades. The picadors finally sever the goring muscle and the matador, literally tiptoeing out, dares a pass or two; then, after seven or eight ghastly swords (people around you muttering, “Nada! Nada!”) leaves the poor beast puking blood till it dies. AFH acknowledges he’d finally seen the fantasy fight that college sophomores reading Hemingway dream about. And it still reads like Michael Vick defending dogfights. AFH, with all the entertainment now available 24/7, why do you choose this? Sadly, George J. Leonard.
Means do not justify ends - not in research or education, certainly not in spectable or art. Civilized humans understand his/her obligation not harm a vulnerable other - human, nonhuman or inorganic matter. The playing field is stacked against the bull. No sportsmanship is possible.
Alternative activities, such as team sports, effectively release and absorb aggression.
Some comments seems to have overlooked that Fiske-Harrison confesses to being ambivalent. He is not setting forth a “justification” as much as attempting a more balanced account. In this vein I think his draft needs to explain more completely the physiology of the banderillas and lance as well as review “fact or fiction” accounts as to whether the bull is goaded and enraged (i.e. “tortured”) before the fight, and so on. I think this is critical because it makes for the difference between a “torture spectacle” and a “death spectacle”.
As far as I am concerned, our industrial animal food production is nothing but systematized torture that is 1000 times more cruel than any arena. There is no excuse for “raising” meat that way and even less for eating it. Anyway one sincerely concerned with animal welfare will save his “outrage” at bullfights for the last.
Those not blessed with Iberian blood tend to have a hard time fathoming the thrill of the torreo. More than the thrill of vicarious danger, it is an existential thrill that reverberates on a taught line drawn between courage and intelligence, life and death before resolving into a kind of sadness and sympathy. To say as much is simply to talk. I think that appreciation of the torreo involves openness to a certain primal depth of feeling that spooks many people.
I confess to having been thrilled by a good “bullfight”. I also confess that as I have gotten older I would just as soon pet deer and talk to birds.
Santiago
From the article: “Whether or not that artistic quality does outweigh the moral question of the animals’ suffering is something that each person must decide for themselves—as they must decide whether the taste of a steak justifies the death of a cow. But if we ignore the possibility that one does outweigh the other, we fall foul of the charge of self-deceit and incoherence in our dealings with animals.”
The animal has no voice in the debate as to whether one outweighs the other. Therefore the debate and its possible conclusions are invalid.
Uh…… what language would you use to poll our fuzzy friends?
Before I attempt to answer the posts above, I think it is worth noting that the responses to this essay here and elsewhere (e.g. on the BBC’s message boards), have highlighted a philosophical and sociological phenomenon I find intriguing. It has been remarked on before that there is a fracture in our morality following a faultline between a more robust warrior-greatness ethic and a more Christian and yielding one. This is something well analysed by Alasdair MacIntyre and before that elegantly described and decried by Friedrich Nietzsche. What I had not realised, though, was that there are those who ruthlessly patrol this border claiming only their side exists. They also, realising at some conscious or unconscious level that reason cannot be used here to justify their claims, rely on surprisingly violent and underhand rhetorical techniques. It is all rather reminscent of Wittgenstein’s remark (published in ‘On Certainty’):
“Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and an heretic. I said I would ‘combat’ the other man, – but wouldn’t I give him reasons? Certainly; but how far do they go? At the end of reasons come persuasion (Think what happens when missionaries convert natives.)”
So when I say about these posts that I only wish people would think before they speak and read what I have actually written before they think, I am more than aware that there are strong motivating reasons against this ever happening.
To answer the posts in order:
Dr Avalos can accuse me of sociopathy if he wishes, but it is my emotional responses to the bullfight, especially my sense of risk for another human and my sense of loss at the death of another living being, that feed the very aesthetic senses which I claim may, I repeat may, justify the bullfight.
tpx makes the frankly nauseating (but not uncommon) statement that he would like to witness the death of matadors. There is a lighter version of this thesis which involves people saying they wish the bullfight were fairer. I address the point in my article that it is not a sport, nor intended to be a fair fight (And if it were? Are hunting or fishing fair? Or, on a parallel argumentative line: do you say it would be nice for the abbatoir worker to occasionally fall into the meat-grinder?) However, I would like to address the glibness that drives this point with a reminder of the differences between man and animal. This is Hemingway’s account from the infirmary after the terrible goring of Gitanillo de Triana by Fandanguero in 1931. Gitanillo had previously survived an automobile accident.
“When his father came to see him, Gitanillo said, ‘Don’t cry little papa. You remember how bad the automobile thing was and they all said we wouldn’t get over it? This is going to be the same way.’ … Those people who say they would pay to go to a bullfight if they could see the man gored, not just always the bulls killed by the men, should have been at the ring, in the infirmary, and later in the hospital. Gitanillo lived through the heat of June and July and the first two weeks of August, dying finally then of meningitis from the wound at the base of the spine. He weighed one hundred and sixty-three pounds when he was gored and he weighed sixty-three pounds when he died, and during the summer he suffered three different ruptures of the femoral artery, weakened by ulcers from the drainage tubes in his thigh wound and rupturing when he coughed… The people who say they would pay to see a bullfighter killed would have had their money’s worth when Gitanillo became delirious in the hot weather with the nerve pain. You could hear him in the street. It seemed a crime to keep him alive, and he would have been much luckier to have died soon after the fight while he still had control of himself and still possessed his courage rather than to have gone through the progressive horror of physical and spiritual humiliation that long enough continued bearing of unbearable pain produces.”
These are clearly not things that could be said of a bull.
Moving onto Mr. Kelly, and ignoring his lazy attempts at ‘ad hominem’ arguments and fumbles at literary criticism, I must emphasise that at no point do I “tell” the reader the bull is “fear-crazed”; quite the reverse. I have seen fearful bulls - they do not fight, they run away. Also, “crazed” implies wildness, unpredictability. This is the very thing they are not. A crazed bull would most likely yield a dead matador. To elaborate the point I was trying to make about whether they feel pain from the other side, the matador Cayetano Ordonez (whose father Paquirri died in the ring) was recently badly gored with six-inches of horn in his thigh, but tied off the leg with a tourniquet and fought on. When asked by a journalist how he managed this he took out a ballpoint pen and said, “If someone comes up to you with this now and sticks it into your leg all the way up to here, then that is going to hurt a lot,” measuring out several inches, “but if it happens at a moment when the adrenaline is flowing, when you are fighting, then it is just not the same.”
Equally, there is no reference to Darwinism in my (by no means uncommon) philosophical proposition that animals do not have rights. Nor do I hold that we can do with them as we wish - if I did, there would be no point to my essay at all. The infliction of suffering, from the incarceration of people to the domestication of animals, must always be justified. I have attempted one route of such a justification in my article, a route which also happily avoids the philosophically vacuous but standard one of cultural relativism. Beyond these two points Mr Kelly’s arguments seem rather to collapse into incoherence (spectators are “brainless”, human activities are not termable human under any sane criteria etc.), so I shall leave him there.
Mr Leonard offers a far more powerful and insidious empirical argument. But I have a great deal of difficulty in believing that he witnessed 40 bullfights at the two greatest centres of the art in Spain and saw only bad bullfights; I have never, in 100 fights (including those of novice matadors with 2 year old bulls), seen one as bad as he is describing.
I suggest that Ms. Mandell reads the essay. I do not claim sportsmanship for the bullfight, and, as for means justifying ends, what about the abbatoir?
Mr Zigmund’s suggestion that there cannot be conclusions in the debate of justification without the voice of the animal being considered is sufficiently answered by Sr Barfó y Basofia’s answer of in “what language.”
Your article (and the comments that have followed) reminds me of one that I read a long time ago in the Miami New Times.
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2003-01-23/news/dogfight-club/
Just like dog fighting, bullfighting involves enormous sums of money. If money was taken out, would bullfighting still exist? How can someone objectively say anything about bullfighting when they are profiting from it?
Death can be beautiful, but to me, it feels ludicrous to call any type of sport where an animal is killed purely for pleasure an art form. The fact that animal farms use inhumane practices isn’t a justification for bullfighting. It merely shows that we, as humans, have a long way to go when it comes to compassion.
Spain, depending on which resources you use, seems to have a widespread culture of killing animals for sport. This is seen through the various Blood Fiestas that towns organize and participate in. These towns cry that it is their culture being attacked when ever people protest about the cruel events. What kind of person is proud to be living in a culture that celebrates cruelty?
I was wondering how long it would take for a reader to impugn all of “Spain” for bullfighting, and suggest in pure Black Legend style that some abstraction called “Spain” has a greater love for animal cruelty than other cultures. Let me remind that, unfortunately, cruelty animal is alive and well in ALL cultures, Britain included (how often do we need to be reminded of fox hunting, just to begin with?). Second, poll after poll for decades now have made it evident that no more than 1 in 7 Spaniards takes any active interest in bullfighting. Not only is the response of the overwhelming majority of Spaniards indifference (and among under-50 Spaniards, widespread distaste), there is in fact a large and growing movement in Spain to ban bullfighting altogether (a movement that even has its own one-issue political party on the national ballot). I have heard others try to draw even broader conclusions about supposed Spanish propensity to violence, but this too is a crock: Interpol statistics show that Spanish violent crime levels are lower than France’s and Italy’s, to say nothing of Britain’s or the U.S.’s. However, quite apart from the ignorant sanctimoniousness of this kind of “reasoning,” what really galls this reader (an American, by the way, who has lived and worked in Spain off and on for many years and can attest to the overwhelming indifference to bullfighting of most Spaniards, especially outside of Andalusia) is the refusal of so many foreigner tourists to recognize their own complicity in what is after all a business, whatever else it is. George Leonard’s reply is a perfect illustration of this madness: it took him 40 (40?!!) bullfights to figure it out, all the while helping pay for the spectacle. To what end? For the pleasure of parading a putative moral superiority? It’s precisely this kind of stomach-churning hypocrisy that I’ve seen in so many tourists who should have spent their time doing something else. Well, I’m sorry: if you go to a bullfight, you are part of the problem. And with 60 million foreign tourists in Spain every year, even if only a small percentage decide they’re somehow obliged to attend a bullfight because it’s allegedly an inalienable part of the culture (when there’s so much else to Spanish culture they blithely proceed to ignore), then bullfighting will survive and even prosper despite the indifference and even growing hostility to it professed by many Spaniards. So, please, if you don’t like violence to animals, for God’s sake don’t go to a bullfight: take in the glorious art and architecture, music, theater, dance, gastronomy, fashion, shopping, sexy women and men, etc. etc.–give the bull a break.
I’ve burned through a lot of words in the forty years or so since graduating from Loyola University as an English major, but I can’t remember ever reading a more thought-provoking article than this one. While in the gentle care and tutelage of the Jesuits through both high school and undergraduate studies, I had six years of the Latin classics and two years of Homeric Greek, but no work in either language left me as moved by what the Romans called ‘lacrimae rerum’ as did this powerful and wonderfully written piece. It is a novel condensed into eight printer pages, almost forcing one to confront the oxymoronic nature of the human animal and to extrapolate and examine ethical issues of real complexity. Become a vegan..or eat meat and selfishly ignore the mass desecration and holocaust of our fellow creatures while decrying the brutality of bloodsports…wear leather shoes while marching for animal rights….etc.,the questions multiply in a moral hall of mirrors.
MacIntyre’s shortcomings are different from Neitzsche’s, though he claimed to ground his ‘historical’ ethical philosophy in the latter’s aphorisms, and indeed in even deeper strata, back to Aristotle’s antiquity. Let us strive for a more nuanced understanding of the variety of moral claims, than is allowed from by “robust warrior-greatness ethic” vs that “more Christian and yielding one.” Not that AM is all rubbish: we should all be so careful to know when we are concealing personal preferences in the guise of impersonality.
I would be pleased to read, Mr. Fiske-Harrison, a succinct statement of your impersonal justification for not rejecting bullfighting as an entertainment dependent on the death of a feeling creature. Without a clear statement of such, your strongly written essay is ornament on bloodsport.
It is interesting that you observe that common feature of ethical debates — one side asserting that theirs is the only perspective — but, if I may courteously observe, you do the same, when in your article you dismiss the idea that animals have rights. The model of rights-entailing-beneficiary-duty is not a sufficient one for many thinkers; the least that can be said is that it does not map onto the ethical systems we observe in even the least reflective human interactions. We can imagine many situations of moral concern in which those affected are unable to articulate their position. You might not find this a compelling example, but then you are only called to admit that others — who are thinking deeply about it — disagree with your assertion that speech, or higher cognition, is prerequisite to mattering in an ethical manner.
There seem to me to be a couple of logical mis-steps in this article.
The worst is the age-old claim that meat-eaters cannot take a moral stance on any form of animal cruelty until they address the implications of their dietary preference. I am a vegetarian so in some ways find this argument almost as attractive as the most hardened blood-sport enthusiast, but ultimately it is fallacious for two reasons. Firstly, one cannot take tha attitude that moral problems must be dealt with in a chain, where major-impact problems must be solved before minor-impact problems can be addressed. If that were the case, nobody could do anything about public health systems in the United States before the African AIDS crisis had been solved. Secondly, I suspect that the people involved in bull-fighting, from matador to audience member, are almost certainly all meat-eaters: their cruelty to the bull is in addition to their cruelty to the animals they eat, so there is no either/or ethical situation here.
The other issue I have is one of aesthetics. Despite some genuinely good prose, Fiske-Harrison’s article did not convince me, any more than Hemingway did, of the aesthetic beauty of the bull fight. Even here it comes across as a dull, repetitive spectacle during which an animal is slowly and bloodily tortured to death. The clothing seems garish and ridiculous, the music tinny and boring, the moves restricted and predictable, and the idea of putting human lives in danger for such a spectacle absurd and unimaginative. And yet this is a description of the very best bull-fight, rendered into glowing prose by a seasoned writer with a love of his subject. This illustrates the problem of the argument from aesthetics that Fiske-Harrison seeks to make. If he wants to avoid moral relativism, I’d support him: it is possible to begin from first, inviolable moral precept and work outwards from there thus avoiding relativism even in a non-religion-based ethics. But aesthetics are inherently, unavoidably relativist, for all that the Duke of Sutherland wishes to pretend otherwise. There are learned professors of literature who think Hamlet a waste of time, art experts who think Picasso an over-sold hack, musicologists with little time for Mozart, and the list continues. Works that were thought unassailable genius decades ago are forgotten, while a total failure like Moby-Dick is now hailed as a cornerstone of American literature.
Therefore, basing a moral argument on aesthetics is shaky and seems insupportable. For me and for (as one commenter points out above) most Spanish people under fifty, there simply is no aesthetic dimension to the bullfight. What the writer is asking is that we jettison our moral precepts in favour not of our but of his aesthetic principles. Which is, whether he wishes to acknowledge it or not, yet another example of empty relativism.
I will freely admit that I am not a philosopher and I do not have time to answer every assertion in the article. I guess my most important question is this: does it even matter whether some people get some aesthetic gratification out of it? Does aesthetic gratification justify inflicting harm on a sentient being who has no choice as to whether he partakes of this spectacle?
If the subject (victim) were human would this article have been written? If so, I think the DSM-IV-TR may have something to say about it, and so may the authorities. If a fight between an animal and a human, where the animal had an equal chance, would be “grotesque”, is a bullfight not the same?
And as for the issue of animals not having rights if they cannot be “called upon to uphold those rights for themselves”, that is a rather backward notion. Should children and the mentally disabled be denied rights, because they cannot be expected to uphold those rights for themselves? I think that the rational human being is in a position to uphold said rights, and therefore shoulders the responsibility. Yes I do find it somewhat hypocritical that people eat (factory farmed) meat - needless to say I don’t - and protest bullfighting, but it can be argued that people need meat. Can the same be said of bullfighting? More importantly, do we have the right to inflict our whims on the animal whether it has rights or not?
As for the comparison between bullfighting and the lion attacking the wildebeest, this seems puerile. It is the nature of a predator to kill and eat prey. But humans can choose which aspects of our nature we express. Again, the bull has no say in the matter.
At any rate I find it sad (and as a psychology student, disturbing) that people consider the torture and death of a sentient being, an aesthetically pleasing spectacle.
watch portugese bullfighting the bull is not killed,no weapons are used
A brief word in response:
I will henceforth ignore the fact that so many criticisms above, in standard moral philosophical debating manner, themselves ignore the principles which underlie so many everyday human actions, e.g. the eating of meat is, for many, much of the time, “an entertainment dependent on the death of a feeling creature” (in answer to Mr Bos). If bullfighting is justified or not, it is not because of this.
What I wish to concentrate on – and this was in small part the purpose of the essay – is how industrialisation, urbanisation and a host of concomitant forces have pushed us to a point where our own senses can no longer serve as accurate sources for our moral sentiments. We are so divorced from not just what I deem to be the unnecessary anguish of farming (although here is not the place to analyse intensive farming methods) but the necessary anguish of living itself. There seems to be an sliding act of bad faith going on here at the level of entire nations. Millions – billions – of animals are being slaughtered to feed us and no matter how well it is done, we cannot help but inflict suffering. What is more, as many animals are slaughtering each other, and here the question must rise, would we stop that if we could? I talk about British families happily watching lions eviscerate wildebeest in my essay, not to make the point that if they can do it so can we (as suggested by the emblematically named EvylShnukums – sentimentality is indeed a sin). What I am pointing out is that if the justification for banning the bullfight is the removal of preventable suffering from the Earth, then we should be intervening in the Serengeti just as much as Seville. As the eleventh bok of Isaiah had it, “”And the lion shall eat straw like an ox” – or perhaps tofu, fenced off from the antelopes in some safari park somewhere. As Nietzsche put it, there is a terrible “hostility to life” here. It is the horrifying endpoint and reductio ad absurdum of this fraction of an ethic left unchecked and unbalanced by the removal of its visceral conterpart which is deemed unnecessary, and thus abhorrent, in a peaceful and industrialised society where everything nasty is hidden away out of sight - just like the slaughter of the bulls outside the Portugese bullring (to answer Mr Archipow).
When have ever our senses been a reliable guide to moral action?
The argument is not that we might prevent the suffering endured by the bull; but that we should not endorse a recreational activity whose sole purpose is pleasure at the spectacle of that suffering.
It is unfortunate that such an eloquent writer as yourself, Mr. Fiske-Harrison, would dip into the shallow end of the tactical pool, and evade a direct question by consigning it to “standard moral philosophical debating manner.” I’ll ask again, hoping to clarifying the purpose of the question this time by emphasizing “entertainment”: can you give an impersonal justification for not rejecting bullfighting, being as it is an entertainment dependent on the violent death of a feeling creature? I should admit that I am presuming that we share an ethically compulsory revulsion at violence-as-entertainment. Unless you think it is within man’s telos to desire such spectacle?
Whilst on the staircase I think to say: I much appreciate your willingness to engage the topic in this faceless forum.
I’ve seen lots of bull fights, but don’t bother anymore.
What kind of sport is this? The bull ALWAYS loses. (OK, 99.999999999999% of the time)
Re-work the script so the bull WINS about half the time, and you’ve got an actual “sport”.
Son
For an alternative view of bullfighting (and some graphic images) see: http://kristismess.blogspot.com/2007/04/bullfighting-cruel-and-unusual.html
I farm cattle in Australia for a living. I also eat meat. Humans after all have an omnivore’s gut.
The modern art of managing cattle from birth to slaughter involves never ‘fighting’ them. A beast in paddock or yards is always given a (limited) choice, and a good stockman ensures that the choice a beast makes is the one preferred by the stockman. The less noise, prodding and whacking involved in getting a beast from yards to truck, the better.
Any slaughterman or butcher will tell you: the more frightened the beast, the tougher the meat. So right up to the point in the abbatoir where the beast is stunned before dispatch, the idea is to keep noise and factors that might stir the animal up to a minimum.
Bullfighting is just the opposite.
As one commenter observed, if it was a true ’sport’ the bulls would win 50% of the fights. If it was a true ’sport’, one of the contestants would not be maimed and injured in order to lessen his chances of winning. The objective of the exercise is to prove the superiority of the advantaged bullfighter over the disadvantaged beast, not quickly, but over a suitable and lengthy period of time.
The crowd in the stands of course, cheering their ridiculous ‘oles’,
are being conned. By the management.
The bull ring is directly descended from the Roman arena. Anyone capable of cheering as a bull dies in such a way, is of course just about there in terms of capability for cheering as people die.
Feudalism never died in Spain, and it never experienced an Enlightenment or a liberal revolution. Nor did its colonies in the Americas. And it shows.
Franco and Pinochet were the true political face of this death culture. The killing of their political opponents, en masse, was no big deal to either of them.
Bullfighting is a sport only in the sense that pro wrestling is a sport; essentially the corrida is a snuff version of WWE’s Summerslam. The bright lights, the terrible music, the false drama, the rigged match - all of these are dreadfully familiar to fans of The Undertaker and John Cena.
As for the question of animal rights: Fiske-Harrison states that he does “not believe animals have rights in the strict ethical sense of the word. If they did, they would have duties to uphold those rights for themselves, which is a risible notion.” I look forward to his next article, in which he will surely advocate that young children should be killed if they look at him funny.
Mr Fiske-Harrison, I am disappointed that you mention me but do not engage with anything I said. Preventing an animal from eating its natural prey is not only futile but undesirable. Besides the obvious ecological consequences, it would be another example of imposing our will on other sentient beings, just like bullfighting and eating meat.
I do not believe that the question is one of preventable suffering so much as of unnecessary suffering. Lions must eat wildebeest, whether I like it or not, but we do not have to have bullfighting.
I read this blog with sadness but no surprise. They are animals. If a mosquito bites you, you kill it. If a dog attacks you, it is ‘destroyed’. Everyone is talking about “suffering” and “cruelty” as though the bull is a person or as though all “sentient beings” including erath worms should be treated equally. You British can delude yourselves about your nature more than I had thought possible and make yourselves unhealthy by doing it. Now they say the people in your country are less likely to intervene in a crime than any others in Europe! Wake up before it is too late.
To answer Mr Bos:
I am not sure what he means about our senses being a “guide to moral action”, but to elucidate what I meant in my own statement: the information of our senses stirs moral sentiments within us, but these are dependent on that information being correct. For example, one wonders if the moral sentiments stirred by the horror with which people perceive the bullfight might be different if those people had had to watch the death of every animal they had ever eaten?
As for the death-based entertainment charge - to say it again: given that much - if not all - of the meat we eat is for pleasure, and that this is dependent on the death of a feeling creature, until I encounter a knock-down argument for vegetarianism I am happy to take certain pleasures which are dependent on the death of a “feeling creature”.
Finally, the statement, “I am presuming that we share an ethically compulsory revulsion at violence-as-entertainment” is a presumption far too far. And not just for me, but also for anyone who watches any form of contact sport or Hollywood film. To abhor the violent qua violent is to abhor the human - and that isn’t even ethically sound let alone compulsory.
Following your implication, AFH, I’ll say that I do believe those moral sentiments would not change in relation to the death of the bull, but rather, toward the death of the beef cattle. Your analogy to carnivorism fails; the pleasure one experiences in eating meet relates to the gustatory sensation, and is not a response of pleasure in reaction to the death of an animal. If it were possible to derive perfect substitites for flesh from vegetal sources, would your pleasure be less?
As for senses: During the era when survival entailed daily violence, strong connections (the ethologists can tell us) developed between the neural centers of action and the neural centers of emotion. By means of which, many people know experience a visceral thrill as they watch violence on screen or stage, though violence in real life is not (often) accompanied by pleasure. That’s what I mean when I say that the senses aren’t a guide for moral behavior. To be human is to experience thrill at violence, but it does not follow that what is native to the psyche is morally desirably. Watch: I abhor violence qua violence. This contradicts what ethical principle?
Mr Bos remarks, “those moral sentiments would not change in relation to the death of the bull, but rather, toward the death of the beef cattle.”
This is an empirical point, and, following a more scientific method, I’ll abandon the a priori and look to the world for the evidence. When people lived closer to the animals they fed on, was bullfighting more or less popular?
Meat-eating is not a perfect analogy I agree, but to say watching the pleasure of bullfighting is “a response of pleasure in reaction to the death of an animal” is as reductionist and thus wrong (as all reductionist explanation in art is) as saying the pleasure of seeing Othello is a response of pleasure in reaction to domestic abuse. I do agree with your earlier and more correct formulation that it is “dependent” on the death of the animal, but so is meat-eating. And yes, even a meat-substitute which would fool the keenest palette would still not be meat (I remember Hilary Putnam in another context arguing that the ability to understand this distinction was a hallmark of the human). A perfect meat-substitute, is, for me at least, less than meat. In fact, it is only in a world where the meat and the animal are so far divorced that anyone could even dream of making such an argument.
As for violence, that of the rugby football field seems fine to the majority of the civilised world and I can find no ethical problem with it. Therefore simple violence qua violence seems one of those things “native to the human psyche” to which there is no general “revulsion”, “ethically compulsory” or otherwise. Context is everything.
I saw my first bullfight in Seville in May 2008.
After the fight a close friend of mine told me that what we had witnessed would return time and time again to my thoughts and he was right. On returning home I was tried to explain to my wife what my feelings were and the best I could do was to say that I had been profoundly changed by the whole experience of a bullfight. However I could not convey in what way I had changed or why. But thinking now on some passing comment made to me in a bar after the bullfight something came to me. Our remoteness from death, the danger of death and its finality is something that most of us run and hide from. Where do we witness it now outside a war zone or slowly in a hospital? But there it was in a bullring in Seville and I wanted to run and hide from it, but I stayed. I need to go again to find out why.
Sir,
It has been interesting to see the range of arguments that this article has unleashed upon the world, from the ridiculous to the, well, ridiculous. The more they attack, the more Mr. Fiske-Harrison seems to abandon his original position that the bullfight “may” be justified and forced to take the position that it is tout court. However, this may be simply a matter of appearance as what he actually does is bat away a host of minor arguments against the bullfight as invalid since they would count against “the principles which underlie so many everyday human actions.” This is perfectly true, a fact which merely frustrates the baying hounds at his heels even more. I wonder if there is laughter behind the icy facade of politeness with which he publishes his posts? Is violence always wrong? Probably not. Is the death of animal an undesirable event at all close in level to that of a human? Again probably not. Can the aesthetical overrule the ethical? I detect Mr. Fiske-Harrison’s favourite philosophers here. Wittgenstein would have allowed it as a possibility since he says in the Tractatus “ethics and aesthetics are one” and we can be sure Nietzsche would have at entertained the idea at least at some point along his meandering philosophical path and deteriorating mental health.
However, the question I would like Mr. Fiske-Harrison to answer is this: even if there is truth in your accusation that we have become what you seem to regard as a weakened, Christianised, urbane people, is this movement away from being a strident, pagan and barbarous one not progress? And if not progress itself, then at the very least, the neessary price of it? More keenly, does not the bullfight only exist because other bloodsports lacked the aristoratic patronage, with all the ceremony and grandeur that entails, and that it was this that allowed it to gain what aesthetic virtues it may have, which in turn has allowed him, ex post facto, to attempt a justification which civilised ears could bear to hear for an activity which their eyes could not bear to see. In conclusion, is this entire excercise not an act of “bad faith” by the author himself?
Yours truly,
Dr. G. Avalos
I did not reduce (and will therefore not respond to your Othello argument), though I might have been more careful in preventing you from suggesting I did. The pleasure in a bullfight depends upon, but does not solely consist in, the death. There is also choreography (as we might see on stage) and courage (as we might see on screen) and pageantry (as we might see in politics), all of which evoke aesthetic response. A response as native to the human psyche as the thrill of witnessing violence. The difference between the bullfight and these other spectacles is that the spectators are not bothered by, but are lifted to their feet by, the suffering death of a creature.
Can you imagine an artistic experience as full as the one you depict in your article, if the bull does not suffer and is not killed? If not, is that the same reason you cannot allow for being as satisfied by a perfect (note the use of the superlative!) meat substitute, since for you, it is “less than” meat? Since you have adopted empirical standards — how excellent, since in such discussions the rhetorical often reigns — I will ignore your reference to the acutely rhetorical Putnam. The two questions I ask above are close kin to the one I asked earlier, and which I still assert goes to the heart of this matter…
Can you give an impersonal reason why the death of the bull is not unjustified?
DOn’t worry about the possibility that I too wonder if you are laughing coolly at me and the other baying hours; I shall presume, out of good faith, that you are not, and furthermore that you have a less distorted understanding of Wittgenstein than Dr. Avalos puts on display.
‘the time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men’ - Leonardo da Vinci
Not quite yet, though. Still, what did he contribute to human understanding?
” Those not blessed with Iberian blood tend to have a hard time fathoming the thrill of the torreo”
Are you kidding? Thank GOD that I wasnt born in some Spanish backwater where the peoples idea of a good time is toturing animals.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison - You sir, are a fake. An eloquent fake. An agitator, instigator, and libertine. Not short on brains, but short on everything else, sad really. If you would pull all of that intelligence out of you a** and put in back in you head, you could be brough back from the brink. I bet you sit around your mothers house in a tweed jacket, acting superior.
Unlike those of us who are not content to sit, but instead take out sense of superiority to the internet whilst we denounce as libertines those who disagree with us. Let us be generous, and admit the possibilty that our disagreement is an honest one, and that it may be pleasingly understood or perhaps resolved if we continue to exchange civilized discussion.
I enclose a link to a page on YouTube which, I have just discovered, has the actual bullfight described in this essay. See for yourselves: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj2C6iRv5aw
I’m afraid that for me, the spectacle — like the bull — does not speak for itself. Nonetheless, thank you for the video link. Seeing it only leads me to ask, more pressingly now: what impersonal reason justifies the death of the bull?
”Those not blessed with Iberian blood tend to have a hard time fathoming the thrill of the torreo”
An interesting sentiment. Let’s try it a different way and see how it reads:
”Those not blessed with British blood tend to have a hard time fathoming the thrill of bear baiting”
Yeah, I thought so. It’s bullshit, exposed further by the fact that not everybody with Iberian blood thinks that bullfighting is Teh roXXor.
In the opinion of the contributors how acceptable would a bullfight be if it took place on the open plain with the bull free to retire at any point?
Given that agressivness is a trait actively nurtured by the breeders my assumption is that the bulls fight one another in the “wild” and need little encouragement to face a would be opponent. The Matador would have to retain the cape and sword to allow some balance, and a team of others to assist if he were gored. The horses would need to be unprotected, as in the original fights, but not blindfolded. So all the players would have the ability to turn away. But if they chose to compete would that match be equal? Would it be as artistic,or even more so?
For what reason, Mr. Smith, would the threat of intentional injury to either man or bull have to be a neccesary in order that it be beautiful? It is as if, having unquestioningly accepted that the bullfight must take place, you are now looking for conditions under which the artistic effect could mitigate the violence involved. Why fight the bull at all? There are other ways to create beauty.
The author of this article, despite his deliberate attempts to appear somehow coming from a neutral position –and he is not– and his perhaps unwilling attempts to misguide the reader with wrong information (although his description of the bullfight itself is not too far from the truth, his explanations about the bulls life and nature certainly are), possibly because he has fallen deeply into the jaws of the bullfighting industry’s propaganda machine (which I know very well, since I was born in Spain, I am an ethologist and animal protectionist, and I am currently specialised on the subject of bullfighting), seems to focus his main thesis on the concept of ‘Art’. He seems to believe that all is justifiable in the name of art, and the aesthetics of a bullfight is a currency one can actually exchange for animal suffering and human degradation.
Such currency is obviously worthless, and to prove it imagine the following: imagine a bullfight that is exactly as the one the author describes, but instead a bull a child has been used (better a teenager, since the bulls in bullrings are actually teenagers, dying at four years old when they can live up to twelve years or more). The aesthetical value would be exactly the same, with the same music, customs, dances, colours, and of cause the same ‘conceptual’ aspect of live and death, drama of suffering, struggles of life, ancient tradition (children’s sacrifice was indeed a tradition once, was it not?), and so on. Imagine that such teenager was actually kidnapped as a baby from his mother, and fed and kept in a relatively hassle-free environment for the purpose of being sacrificed in the ritual spectacle when he would reach a certain age. So far, we are having here the exact same situation, but with a different species as the victim. That being the case, not only nobody would ever dare to describe the event as art, but of course the perpetrators of the event would be immediately jailed for life (and so the kidnappers and keepers, perhaps known as ‘breeders’), and their ‘intellectual’ supporters –as the author– would be, at the very least, put in a ‘children abuse register’ of some sort. And yet, we are talking here about the same ‘aesthetic’ value, because one cannot claim that the ‘drama’ involved in torturing and killing a child is less powerful that the one involving a bull instead.
Why we have such a different social response to two events that are virtually the same? Because ‘art’ is not a philosophical event, is a social event in itself, and although aesthetics do play some role in it, in the end a work of art is a social convention base on giving artificial worth to an object or performance that somehow ‘speaks’ to an audience, and, most importantly, it remains within the basic acceptable rules of the society of that audience. If such rules are broken, all aesthetics value is worthless, and the object can now be classed as rubbish or the performance as a crime. To accept bullfighting as an art it has to fit into the basic rules of the 21st century world society (we do not longer live in isolation in separate tribes, so art now is an universal concept and therefore the society that judges it is the ‘world’ society, not a small tribal one), and it certainly does not. Not only bullfighting is considered as an abomination by the majority of people in today’s world, but it is actually banned in the majority of countries in the world, and is no longer supported by the majority of people of the countries where it is still performed (so, not even the ‘tribe’ where it was born likes it anymore).
If aesthetics cannot really justify torture, then the authors is left only with one thing. He seems to be confessing that he enjoys witnessing torture, and therefore the pleasure he experiences can only be described as morbid, sadistic or even perverse. And as we all know, people whose behaviour grant any of these adjectives are very good in ‘rationalising’ their feeling, and they like to get together with others of similar disposition so they can create their little worlds with their special rules, language and values, where they can indulge their interest undisturbed. Are they evil? No, I don’t think so. They are also victims, sometimes of their upbringing, sometimes of their genes, sometimes of their traumas. In this case, they are all victims of the social disease I call ‘tauromachy’. Certainly, if we all help –and it is in everyone’s interest to do so– some can be cured. Impossible? Not really. Even a prominent 1980’s bullfighter, Albaro Munera “El Pilarico”, is today a strong anti-bullfighting campaigner and he now describes what he used to call art as brutal murder.
I would imagine that it would not be too late for the author to return to the times when he was an animal lover, before he was contaminated by this disease, and be free to use his many talents to a full potential for the greater good.
The comment from the Australian beef rearer McDougall upthread was valuable. More valuable still, it would have been, had Mr McDougall once witnessed in Seville a near-perfect bullfight (as I have done). I grew up on a dairy farm and thus have witnessed everyday animal life and death in the civilised English countryside. I had not appreciated the Spanish 15 minute max. rule. Contributers please contemplate the everyday fate of millions of farm animals in even the best regulated abattoirs, or elsewhere in the country environment. I can appreciate the drama and the art in a bullfight. I don’t need to see one again, but if I were a bull I would rather end my life in a Spanish bull ring than in a Spanish abattoir.
In answer to Jordi Casamitjana’s statements about my neutrality and expertise, I should point that we recently met in the London studios of the Al-Jazeera television network, where we were both interviewed on this topic and following which he has seen fit to post on this blog. Noting the biblical injunction about remarking on the mote in thy brother’s eye when you have a beam in your own, I feel the need say a few things about our respective positions, firstly on the subject of neutrality.
Mr. Casamitjana’s business card describes him as “campaigns co-ordinator” of the Comite Anti-Stierenvechten International (International Anti-Bullfighting Committee). I, on the other hand, have never at any time received any payment from any organisation related to, for or against, the bullfighting industry, nor even spoken with anyone related to that industry, for or against, until my meeting with Mr. Casamitjana. My opinions about the bullfight have come purely from careful observation, a perusal of the regulations and history of the fight, a wide-ranging knowledge of animal behaviour and careful consideration of the philosophical issues involved.
As I mention in passing in my article, my first two years at Oxford were as a biology student, although my Master of Arts is in philosophy, politics and economics, and my Master of Science, from London, is in philosophy of science. However, as my byline in the magazine clearly states, I view myself as a “writer,” with no more expertise (or neutrality) than that term can bear. Mr. Casamitjana calls himself an ethologist, and he does hold a bachelors in biology from Barcelona, but then says on CAS International’s website that in his “scientific opinion” the bull’s charge should be interpreted as an attempt to “push away” other creatures. This would make their wonderfully penetrating horns not only redundant, but an inexplicable evolutionary development in so passive a creature. He goes on to say that the bull appears to be looking for “mercy” or “help” from the spectators and toreros at the end of the fight. This blatant piece of anthropomorphism makes a mockery of the serious scientific enquiry of true ethologists who conduct their less ‘opinionated’ research, using funding from less compromised sources than Mr. Casamitjana’s own income, such as Professor Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, whose work on chimpanzees is the subject of the only other piece of writing I have ever published on animals (and one where I argued for total reassessment of our dealings with apes in order to better serve their welfare - see ‘Talking With Apes’, cover essay, Weekend section, Financial Times, November 24, 2001).
As I have remarked above, I do distinguish between species - we all do, hence we don’t avoid treading on ants but do on dogs - but that does not make me anti-animal. For that reason, I find arguments about putting teenagers in the ring risible. This is equivalent to the claim that those who use animal-based products in the creation of works of art such as hides and dyes are morally equivalent to those Nazi’s who used human skin for lampshades. The end point of such arguments should be obvious: moral vacuousness in debate, nihilism in practice.
Mr. Fiske-Harrison, I’m disappointed that you oriented your response to Mr. Casamitjana’s potential conflict of interest, rather than his substantive comments. Surely you have something do say in your own defense, against his persuasive analogy that if you believe there is something other than beauty which justifies the death of the bull, you have not told us what it is?
It is a question I’ve asked several times during the course of this exchange, and I am puzzled why you have not yet been able to answer: what impersonal reason justifies the death of the bull?
If it is the case that you think that my question is rhetorically leaning, let’s hear that.
Dear Mr. Fiske-Harrison:
You write, elsewhere on this blog, that “it is simply impossible to come up with a full ethical view of a situation involving other species using only the rather impoverished menu of facts on offer from ethology, physiology, genetics etc.” I’m afraid this doesn’t shed much light for me as to what source of information would be adequate to develop as full as possible an ethical view of such situations, e.g. bullfights? It would seem that you think aesthetics should be taken into consideration. I’d be grateful if you could take the time to clarify, and perhaps shed some light on that prior frequent question as to what impersonal justification you cleave to as a rationale for the death of bulls in bullfighting rings. I hope you will come out of the woodwork to engage the question, lest you be misunderstood as one of those who emerges only to impugn the credentials of critics.
Sincerely,
Zachary Bos
Mr. Fiske-Harrison
I find it always satisfying when, after putting on the table an argument in a debate, I am replied with an attempt to discredit me as opposed to address the argument. This always indicates that my argument is strong. Let’s use the same analogy style. If somebody else rather than me had written what I have written, would you then accept the points made in the post?
Anyway, let’s briefly address your comments, since fairness dictates so. I am not neutral, and I have never claimed to be (the analogy of the ‘beam’ would only have worked if I had). I am absolutely an anti-bullfighting person, totally at the side of the animals, and in this case, the bulls. I am indeed paid for what I do, since I am the campaign co-coordinator of an international anti-bullfighting organization, and my job is to work towards the abolition of bullfighting (designing campaigns, participating in debates, develop research and investigations, etc), but would that imply that I do not believe on what I said? Of course not, I could not fight for such abolition, paid or not, if I did not believed in it (and I would never have been employed if that was the case; it would be as employing a policeman that does not believe in the legal system). Do medical doctors not believe in the welfare of their patients because they are paid to cure them? Would children charity workers not believe in helping children because they are paid to save them? And, besides my current job, I am indeed an ethologist and therefore I do have a scientific background that allows me to give scientific opinion on a subject. Of course this does not make me an animal lover (as you know, many vivisectionist or animal abuses of all sorts have degrees on biology, from Oxford or elsewhere) but the way I have used my scientific knowledge over the years, for example using it to protect animals, does.
It does seem that, like your enjoying of a out-of-date practice such as bullfighting, you are not aware that, in the 21st century, things have change. Animal protection is today a profession, and although there are still lots of volunteers in this sector, there are many professionals too, and I just happen to be one of them. If anything, this, instead of discredit my arguments, should reinforce them, since it would mean that I do know deeply about the subject, I had the time to study the issue in detail, and I do know how the bullfighting industry operates, what is real and what is not. In other words, my knowledge on the subject comes from a professional expertise. Is that not good enough for you?
I never claimed that you received any payment from the industry (then you would have been kind of ‘neutral’ , just doing for the money), but that you have been convinced by the arguments of their PR machine, perhaps not even realising that what people told you or you have read is in fact propaganda. You cannot convince us that all the bullfighting lexicon you used in your article, and all the classical naïve arguments that are constantly used by the industry (such as the bullfighting bull is an sub-species in danger of extinction, which is not), all came only from your imagination (how would you know about ‘querencia’, a term and a concept that even the average bullfighting supporter would not know, if you had only observed some bullfights?). So, you are one of them. Yes, one of the pro-bullfighting supporters, in Spanish known as ‘taurinos’, one of them. That is why you were asked to participate in the Al Jezeera TV programme, since they had with me an ‘anti-taurnino’, and they needed a ‘taurino’ to balance the piece. You are not one of us, the animal protectionist, or one of the ‘neutrals’ that have not taken a position on this animal issue.
Regarding your comments about the ‘wonderful penetrating horns’, where these horns come from? Were they created by humans through artificial selection so to transform an animal that had ‘harmless’ horns into an aggressive animal that had ‘swards’ in their head? This does not seem likely, since then it would not make sense that the same breeders try to file the tips off before a bullfight in the practice called ‘afeitado’. Then it must be natural selection. Would natural selection make horns designed to push away attackers so blunt that they do not hurt them, or sharp ones would be more effective, and therefore increase the evolutionary fitness of the animal in question? And of course, not to forget that they also use them to establish dominance among males when competing for females. Mr Fiske-Harrison, having an effective defensive weapon does not mean that this weapon is used also to attack. Bulls are herbivores, as are buffalo, hippos, elephants, deer, boars…they all have defensive weapons that can kill, and have killed, humans, and none of them are predators or ‘maniacs’ that attack for no reason. All of them, put under the same situation than the bullfighting bulls, from the selected breeding, the stress of the transport and the torture itself, would more or less react in the same way, with small differences due to their size and anatomy.
Finally, just the comment that because I can use anthropomorphic analogies I must not be a ‘true’ ethologist. These are analogies, intended to open the mind of the reader to a ‘different point of view’, but in fact the one you mention can also be interpreted as literal in many respects. If you knew enough about ethnology, you would know that the act of ‘asking for mercy’ is very common in the animal kingdom, and it is used by many ‘true’ ethologist, as you say (such as Jane Goodall, for instance). There are a series of well established body language postures that trigger an inter-specific response designed to appease an attacker, and everybody that has seen a dog been attacked by a human (or any other species) would recognise them. You must have heard of ‘submission’ postures in your biology studies, have you not?
But to the point; Mr. Fiske-Harrison, ignore who you think I am, and who you think I should be, and if you can address my arguments as what they are, arguments. Otherwise you seem to kind of accepting them and by trying to ‘accuse the massager’ it looks like they have indeed touched a wound.
I asked the same question, Mr Bos, early in this discussion. I share your view that Mr Fiske-Harrison is unlikely to respond, seemingly pre-occupied with bombastic ripostes to his critics, of which there are legion.
The hackneyed arguments that meat eaters are hyprocrites if they complain about animal cruelty and that animals, as lower on the great chain of being than humans, are fully available for exploitation, particularly in the name of aesthetics are indefensible. That’s why Mr Fiske-Harrison chooses to bluster about chimpanzees and (rightly) about the folly of anthropomorphism, oblivious to the fact that the bull in his story is called ‘El Cid.’
His peculiar claim that the bull does not feel pain - citing the example of a matador who challenged a journalist to stab him in the thigh with a ballpoint pen (!) after a bullfight further confuses the issue of human and animal sentiments.
His further comparison of bullfighting with a game of rugby is not worthy of comment. Rugby players, boxers or full contact martial artists choose to compete and place themselves in danger. This much again is obvious. Mr Fiske-Harrison may well byline himself a ‘writer’ but in his inability to brook any form of disagreement and refusal to clarify his position on the key issue - whether torture of a dumb animal can be seen as aesthetically justified except in his own terms, he labels himself as a solipsist.
He’s entitled to his opinion, nonetheless, even if he denies the right to his critics. Moreover, Fiske-Harrison baiting has been fun. I still contend that the article was pornographic, an obvious and sentimental apologia of bullfighting that owes more to Tommy Steele’s ‘Little White Bull’ than ‘Death in the Afternoon’ but I am probably wrong: lots of others really liked the style and diction, and their view is as good as mine.
Reading the posts above I wonder if perhaps I have misunderstood the purpose of this blog? I am treating it as a place to answer those arguments which are not obviously – admittedly in my opinion – answered in my original essay (or elsewhere in the blog). Hence, I did not see the need to further answer Mr. Bos’s questions. I have already said that I do not believe violence always to be wrong – as in a “just war” or a contact sport – that I do not believe killing animals always to be wrong – as in certain forms of medical experimentation or the abbatoir - that I do believe the majority of people use, explicitly or not, aesthetics to justify the killing of animals - choosing steak over soy products - and that I do believe the bullfight to have an artistic content, therefore opening the possibility of justifying the bullfight’s undeniable cruelty via this route. Whether anyone thinks this possibility is an actuality, I leave them to decide having described a bullfight to the best of my ability. Following a Wittgenteinian line of believing that, in matters of ethics and aesthetics, showing is more important than saying, I try to refrain from merely asserting that the bullfight is beautiful.
Mr. Casamitjana may not like my ad hominem arguments, but they are in direct response to his post concerning my neutrality and knowledge (which I did slightly amend first thing this morning). If one counts the British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan (who explains the concept of ‘querencia’ in detail) as part of the bullfight ‘industry’ then I am, by those lights, compromised. As for my statements about subspecies, the original draft of my article cited the paper justifying this distinction: ‘Genetic diversity and differentiation in Portuguese cattle breeds using microsatellites’ from the April 2004 issue of Animal Genetics. This citation was cut for reasons of space. Mr. Casamitjana’s statements about putting teenagers in the ring I find silly - as well say fly spray is akin to Zyklon B. For exactly the same reason, I do not accept arguments about apes applying to cattle. It is, for very good reason, illegal to kill apes for food in the UK.
Mr. Kelly’s arguments I simply find confused and confusing. Does he eat meat? If not, he must at least eat plants. Therefore, unless he condones cannibalism, he cannot fail to accept some notion of a chain of being. I am merely trying to tease the notion out along reasonable lines. At no point do I say we can use animals according to whatever whim or fancy takes us, this is why I think there is a problem justifying the bullfight. However, I think that a great deal of the problems with that justification also apply to the justification for killing and eating - merely for pleasure - members of the same species, although a different subspecies thereof.
As for the accusation of being a solipsist – surely it is the fact that I am not alone which is what is so disconcerting to those who loathe the corrida?
To attempt again to clarify for Mr. Bos what I fear may be our great area of difference: I do not believe I can go further in justifying the bullfight than I have, but nor do I believe I need to. An analogy would be if someone who had never been to the theatre held the view that the internal anguish actors impose on themselves was a form of self-torture which no decent person should pay money to encourage (pace, I am not claiming this is at all similar the bullfight). My counter-argument would be that, first, the self-torture is perhaps not so important as they sugggest - people do similar things all the time, and second, the beauty of the play justifies the occurence. Some people - most in the case of theatre - will agree with this argument, in the case of bullfighting in the UK, most will not. The form of the argument remains the same for both, though.
As for my other posting about our knowledge of animals, I was not speaking of aesthetics in that case. I was talking about personal experience being a more important element in driving our moral sentiments than the dry facts of science, which is why I called for a sort of writing which never exceeds the scientific facts - hence my dislike of statments about bulls begging for mercy, especially from another species - but which can bring the situation accurately and fully to life. The book I cite in that case, ‘In The Kingdom of Gorillas’ (2001), by husband and wife team Dr. Bill Weber (a social scientist) and Dr. Amy Vedder (a biologist), is an excellent example of this.
P.S. Re: interspecific gestures of submission, I am aware of no such thing. There would be little point in the antelope pleading with the lion, and thus in it evolving the ability to do so - running is a better survival strategy than negotiation. The fact that some gestures may cross species due to a shared evolutionary heritage or convergence, I cannot deny. The dog’s response is, of course, derivative from its lupine ancestors, and evolved purely for use within the wolf pack. I will add that I have never witnessed such behaviour in the ring, nor amongst herbivores of this type within their own species in the wild. The standard format is to fight until you judge yourself to be losing, then run away - a choice the bulls seldom seem to make. Teeth, claws, horns and tusks are there to fight with - defensively or aggressively - for reasons of predation, dominance or sex. The bull perceives the man and the horse as a threat and usually follows its nature by attacking them. Some