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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
