Bullfighting on Trial
Remember when I said that Spain should hurry up and help bulls as soon as possible if they’re keeping an eye on animal rights? It would seem that, about a week before that, the International Court of Justice for Animal Rights had tried bullfighting and its supporters and urged the abolishment of this cruel practice.
I remember when we were getting bullfighting on TV here, shortly after the Revolution. Some of our best known sports commentators practiced broadcasting on TV on that. I guess they thought it was a good idea at the time, considering the bloody events that had just taken place and were still taking place at the time. It was probably also cheaper to broadcast than most other things.
I was watching it because there was literally nothing else to watch. The state-owned TV station had just switched from a broadcast schedule spanning two hours each day and featuring only propaganda to around sixteen hours per day (roughly, I don’t remember exactly) of “normal” broadcasts, so people stopped struggling with antennas to try catching some Bulgarian broadcasts, but private TV stations hadn’t yet surfaced. This is what was on around lunch time during the weekend (forgot if it was on both weekend days or not), I didn’t want to eat with everyone else anymore and it was a suitable excuse… I was five at the time, maybe six by the time they stopped broadcasting it. It felt wrong… Who knows, maybe watching that at such an early age has something to do with my current love for animals.
I remember seeing a comment a couple of weeks ago, while looking through various news sites to find the most suitable link to add to my post (which then kept getting postponed). It was something like “As an animal lover I hate it. As a Spanish animal lover I love it. You’ll never understand it unless you’ve been raised in this culture.” and it outraged me. What the fuck is there to love in ritualized butchery? As it was said before the Court, no tradition can justify cruelty to animals!
What if we’d create a new tradition, turn things around a bit? It’d still involve a bull and a human in an arena, but the human would be the one wounded before the fight and wielding no other weapons than the ones Nature provided while the bull would sport some enhancements (like spiked shoulder plates). It’d still be fairer for the humans than it is now for the bulls, since the bulls wouldn’t have allies waiting to intervene at the appropriate moments and they wouldn’t switch weapons during the fight. I wonder if bullfighting supporters would still enjoy it that much then… What do you think?
