Good news is scarce these days, so when we find an example, it’s worth celebrating:
In a remarkable development, a Mexican judge in June extended indefinitely a ban on bullfighting in Plaza Mexico, which, with over 41,000 seats, is the largest bullfighting venue in the world.
The pressure to abolish bullfighting has been building for years. The earliest recorded bullfights in Catalonia took place in the 14th century, but the beautiful plaza in Barcelona has been idle for a decade. At least five Mexican states have already banned bullfighting, and others are sure to follow now that, after 500 years, the death knell for bullfighting has been sounded in Mexico City.
This is a good thing. The bullfight is a gory spectacle that is philosophically indefensible, though many have tried. The best effort in English was produced in 1932 by America’s premier aficionado Ernest Hemingway. In “Death in the Afternoon,” he imagines bullfighting as a ritualized drama depicting the archetypal conflict between man and nature, ennobled by courage, grace and beauty.
But literary critic Max Eastman called Hemingway’s perspective “Bull in the Afternoon.” At best Hemingway’s vision of the bullfight is overly romanticized, incomplete and, for this day and age, outmoded. In my own experience, the bullfight is 10% art, 5% comedy and 85% butchery. And the first two do not justify the third.
Nor do they justify one admirable element of bullfighting: While the bullfight may be a dubious depiction of the conflict between man and beast, it nevertheless tells us something worthwhile about the relationship between man and meat.
After the bull is executed in the plaza, he is always butchered and consumed. The Spanish and Mexican willingness to publicly acknowledge and demonstrate the bloody connection between killing and eating expresses with brutal honesty a fact that we generally ignore.
Our meat comes wrapped in cellophane and nestled in Styrofoam, in sizes and shapes — patties, round steaks — that bear little resemblance to the animals from which it came.
Our modern way of eating makes it easy to forget that if you’re a meat-eater — and you probably are; I am too — a significant portion of your diet comes at the expense of considerable misery, pain and bloodletting.
Bullfighting isn’t dead yet, but the trend is clear. We commend Mexico and Spain for joining us in a more enlightened 21st century. But any temptation to feel sanctimony or superiority about their belated abolition of bullfighting rings hollow in the face of our reluctance to acknowledge the wretched conditions under which meat-producing animals are raised and slaughtered in the United States. Or how we otherwise treat animals.
Of course, we kill in order to eat. But our blindness to the misery and bloodletting makes it easy to also ignore the brutalities of horse and dog racing, the cruelty of marine mammal confinement, the miseries of animal experimentation and the exploitations of the American pet industry.
Would we be better human beings if we had to kill and butcher our own beef, chicken and pork? Or to watch someone else do it? I doubt it. But that should not prevent us from being more honest — and compassionate — about how we treat animals.
The renowned Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca called bullfighting “the last serious thing.” He overstates. The world is filled with serious things, and the bullfight is only one of them.
Still, the bullfight is deadly serious. The bullfighters ply their craft at considerable risk. Sometimes, according to true aficionados, they manage to tweeze beauty out of a gory spectacle of public bloodletting.
But it’s also an anachronism whose values were always largely dubious. The abolition of bullfighting is another milestone of human progress, along with the abolition in much of the world of “sports” such as bear baiting, fox hunting, dogfighting and cockfighting.
Still, at the least the bullfight is unflinchingly honest. This is something to consider over our next hamburger. Or the next time we see an intelligent beast such as a dolphin confined in what, to him, are the dimensions of a bathtub.
