Confessions of a former bullfighting enthusiast |
Bullfighting season in Spain began earlier this week at Seville’s huge annual fair, known as the Feria de Abril. A couple of days before the fair began, at a corrida de toros (‘running of bulls’, translated into English as ‘bullfight’) in the Andalusian capital’s beautiful 18th-century bullring, one of the country’s best-known bullfighters (toreros) was badly gored in the rectum. The reaction from anti-bullfighters, pouring out on social media and in comment threads, was entirely predictable: he deserved it.
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This sort of hateful, knee-jerk reaction to bullfighting can be ignored as the ranting of morons. But I can no longer dismiss the more compelling anti-bullfight arguments – that it is cruel, outdated and at the very least in need of reform – as easily as I used to.
When I relocated from London to Andalusia 11 years ago, I wouldn’t hear a word against the corrida. The bulls were a big part of the reason I had always wanted to live in the south of Spain, where bullfighting – like flamenco, an art with which it is closely related – is much more a part of the culture than in any other........