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I never took pleasure in seeing a bull die. Relief, but certainly not pleasure.

Bette Ford

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.
BETTE FORD

Accuracy Human Tendency Weapon
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.
BETTE FORD

People Sports Thinking
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.
BETTE FORD

Animal Complicated Rights
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.
BETTE FORD

Robbing Sorry Tradition
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.
BETTE FORD

Natural Unnatural World
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.
BETTE FORD

Bulls Hook Trying
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.
BETTE FORD

Adrenaline Drive Exit Prepare
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.
BETTE FORD

Build Intelligence More Reading
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.
BETTE FORD

Giving Satisfaction Technique
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.
BETTE FORD

Pocket Survival Thinking
It’s almost impossible to imagine bullfighting abolished from Spain entirely. Values do change, though.
BETTE FORD

Bullfighting Impossible Spain
In one era the majority puts its faith and sympathy with the bullfighter, in another with the bull.
BETTE FORD

Bulls Eras Majority
I never took pleasure in seeing a bull die. Relief, but certainly not pleasure.
BETTE FORD

Bull Pleasure relief
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.
BETTE FORD

Believe Roots Views
Madrid reacting with the forceful protection of bullfighting as an art form is an example of the survival of the old values.
BETTE FORD

Art Example Survival
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.
BETTE FORD

Between Complete Form Suppose Technique
If you fear something, walk into it.
BETTE FORD

Fear Something Walks
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.
BETTE FORD

Country Culture Place Suffer
Bullfighting is anachronistic – you enter into a bullring and you’re leaving behind the values of the world outside the ring.
BETTE FORD

Art Leaving Views

I never took pleasure in seeing a bull die. Relief, but certainly not pleasure.

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I never took pleasure in seeing a bull die. Relief, but certainly not pleasure.

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