Junk Explained: What Is Bullfighting, And Why Is It Still Around?

Every few months, with almost clockwork regularity, a story about someone getting badly injured at a Spanish bull fiesta will flit across news services, soon to be replaced by the next social media scandal du jour. This time it’s a story about an American tourist, a 20-year-old from Georgia, USA named Benjamin Miller, who was gored on Saturday (warning: graphic photos) during a running of the bulls event in Ciudad Rodrigo, Salamanca province.

While these stories provide a moment of distraction for most of us and are soon forgotten, they have life-changing consequences for those involved. Benjamin Miller’s injuries, according to the Associated Press report, include “damage to his thighs, sphincter and back muscles”; in 2010, the matador Juan Jose Padilla (again, warning: even more graphic photos) copped a horn to the face that entered through the base of his jaw and exited through his left eye socket, leaving his face permanent paralysed and blinding his left eye. As for the bulls involved in these incidents, their lives are irrevocably changed, too – they get killed.

What exactly is bullfighting?

Unsurprisingly for such a controversial practice, a lot depends on how you define it. The Castillian Spanish term is la corrida de toros or, more colloquially, la fiesta (‘the party’ or ‘the feast’). Corrida translates strictly as ‘bullfight’, but comes from the verb correr, which means ‘to run’, ‘to flow’, ‘to shoo’ or ‘to chase away’.

Spanish defenders of the corrida object to the English translation as ‘bullfighting’ because they perceive it not as a sport but as an artform. (Writeups of corridas appear in the arts section of the Spanish national daily El País, not the sports section.) Certainly it is true that there’s more to a bullfight than a dude with a red cape fighting a bull to the death – the corrida goes through a number of delineated phases, each with their own strict rules. The end is nearly always the same, though: the death of the bull.

Strictly speaking, Benjamin Miller wasn’t injured in a bullfight but in the preliminary encierro, or “running of the bulls”. In Ciudad Rodrigo’s annual carnival, the bulls are run between pens and the bullfighting ring erected beforehand in the town’s main square, and foolhardy locals and tourists can attempt to outrun them. A similar and more famous running of the bulls occurs in Pamplona, in Navarra; Pamplona’s encierro, like Ciudad Rodrigo’s, also ends in a series of bullfights. 

Bullfighting isn’t just a Spanish activity – bullfights also occur throughout the Spanish-speaking world, particularly in Latin America. Famous Matadors form part of an international circuit, and frequently travel around South and Central America in order to take part in flights. In addition, there are other forms of bullfighting practiced around the world: there are local variants in both Portugal and the south of France, as well as a number of bullfighting-like events in the Middle East and South-East Asia. Bullfighting is banned in several areas of the world: in Spain’s Catalonia and Canary Islands regions, and in Costa Rica, for example.

The controversy

Any spectator event that starts with a live animal and ends with a dead one is bound to be controversial, but animal rights activists and others have very good reasons to particularly abhor traditional Spanish bullfighting. Over the course of the corrida, the bull is first enraged by the actions of the toreros, then stabbed with a lance, then planted with barbed spears (bandilleras), then further enraged by the matador, then – if all goes according to plan – killed by the matador, who plunges a sword directly into its heart. That’s an agonising enough death, but if something goes wrong it can be even worse for the bull: if the matador misses the bull’s heart during the final stage of the fight, the bull’s lungs will be punctured and it can either slowly drown in its own blood, or endure several attempts to land the killing blow. Only in exceptionally rare circumstances does the bull receive an indulto or pardon, which spares it from being killed. (A detailed description of the average corrida can be found in GQ’s article about Juan Jose Padilla, if you can stomach the pictures of his injuries.)

Defenders of the corrida argue that it is more than a sport: that there is no scoring system, no ‘winner’ or ‘loser’. Bulls raised for the corrida, they argue, are treated well, at least until their final moments. Spanish veterinarians who support the corrida argue that a skilfully killed bull feels practically no pain owing to the adrenaline coursing through its body. Bullfighting aficionados also like to charge its attackers with hypocrisy: given the terrible conditions of life and death for factory-farmed animals, why do animal rights activists concern themselves with the relatively small number of animals who die in bullfighting?

But perhaps the staunchest defence is cultural. Humans fighting bulls is a long tradition, dating back to Roman times (although the current practice is much more recent, dating back to the middle of the 18th century), and, according to the aficionados, it’s an integral part of Spanish national identity. The truth, however, is a little more complex.

Cultural heritage and the politics of autonomy

While bullfighting is legal in much of Spain, it isn’t legal everywhere. The Canary Islands banned the practice in 1991, and Catalonia followed suit much more recently, in 2010. How this happened itself reveals a great deal about the fraught politics of culture and regionalism in Spain.

Spain is not technically speaking a nation but a kingdom under the rule of the Spanish royal family; the kingdom bundles together a group of disparate ‘nations’ and regions into one official entity spanning two continents (parts of Spain, such as Ceuta and Melilla and the Canaries, are geographically part of Africa). Like a lot of other countries in the European Union, Spain is highly regional: each separate region has its own distinct culture, and sometimes even its own officially-recognised language. (There are even more officially unrecognised languages.) And there are, of course, conflicts within and between regions – for example, Valencians believe they speak a separate language called Valencian, while their Catalan neighbours to the north insist that Valencian is merely a dialect of Catalan.

This diversity means that it’s hard, if not downright impossible, to talk about a single Spanish national identity. There’s a huge difference between the Spain of Andalucía in the south and the Spain of the Basque Country in the north – not just in terms of culture, language, climate and terrain, but also in terms of how comfortable the residents are to be part of the Spanish kingdom. Although there is an Andalucían separatist movement, it is not well-supported, while the Basques are so passionate about independence from Spain that they formed several terrorist and paramilitary organisations dedicated to killing people until the central Spanish government bowed to their demands. (The largest of these groups, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, only agreed to a ceasefire in 2011, and bombed Madrid’s international airport as recently as 2006.)

Bullfighting remains a fraught issue in Spain because of its history as a tool of national unity, particularly under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Franco sought to unify the Spanish state by suppressing minority languages such as Catalan (Catalonia, not coincidentally, had been where the fighting against his coup d’etat was fiercest), suppressing minority cultural activities, and promoting a ‘Spanish’ monoculture in which bullfighting flourished. The Catalan ban on bullfighting thus has to be understood in the context of an increasing cultural and political autonomy for the region in post-Franco Spain: by banning bullfighting, the Catalan government is asserting not only its relatively recent autonomy from the central Madrid government, but is also repudiating non-Catalan cultural traditions.

The idea that the Catalan government might be using animal welfare as a fig-leaf to cover less pure motives is supported by the fact that the non-fatal but arguably cruel Catalan tradition of bou embolat – a running of the bulls where flaming balls or fireworks are attached to the bulls’ horns – has not been banned. (By contrast, the 1991 ban on bullfighting in the Canaries barely registered at the time; the movement for Canarian independence is much less developed than the Catalan one, and bullfighting had never really taken off there.)

Is bullfighting on the way out?

In reaction to the 2010 Catalan ban, Madrid’s local government declared bullfighting to be a culturally important activity in the same year, and the conservative Partido Popular, currently in power, have recently passed legislation that designates bullfighting as “cultural heritage worthy of protection”. Broadcasts of bullfights on state television, banned by the former socialist government, have resumed. Polling in Spain seems to indicate that bullfighting will be around for a while yet: a 2010 survey by El País indicated that 60% of Spaniards do not enjoy bullfighting compared to 37% who do, but 57% were opposed to the Catalan ban. The prevailing attitude in Spain seems to be a laissez-faire one: let the minority who enjoy it watch it, even if most don’t like it.

If that doesn’t sit well with you, there’s much you can do: you can give a donation to the Spanish Asociación para la Defensa de los Derechos del Animal (Association for the Defense of Animal Rights), and you can endeavour to avoid supporting seemingly harmless festivals with bullfighting at their core, such as Pamplona’s encierro, if you are visiting Spain. One of the great things about the diversity of Spanish cultures, after all, is that there’s more than enough to go around without tourists having to see a bullfight.

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Chad Parkhill is the Program and Production Coordinator for the Emerging Writers’ Festival, and has written for  The Australian, The Lifted Brow, Killings, Meanjin and The Quietus amongst others.

Feature image by Paul Arboleda, for AFP/Getty