On Bullfighting

For my travel writing in Spain class this week, we had to read an essay by Richard Wright on a topic of great controversy: bullfighting. During class we critically analyzed the cultural and artistic relevance of bullfighting to Spain and whether or not we believed it should be allowed. In today’s blog I’d like to share with you the response I wrote for class, with a few thoughts after the discussion tacked on at the end. By the end, I hope you’ll understand my points, but I’m curious: what do you think? I have a friend from Spain (hi Laia!) and a variety of people who I know read this blog from both the meat-eating and vegetarian camps, and I’m eager to hear your thoughts.

As of starting this response, I’m 7 PDF pages into the Wright reading, but I doubt my opinion is going to change much by the time I finish. Writing this response is actually my current coping mechanism for getting all the way through the essay, because good lord is it brutal.

Coming into this subject my mind was mostly made up, but this essay just tipped me over the edge. Do I think bullfighting should be allowed? Short answer: No.

The way Wright describes the ring and the preparation of the bull beforehand, it’s hard not to draw parallels to the ancient Roman gladiator fights, or dog fighting, or cock fighting, with one major difference: one side of this fight is severely advantaged. This difference is more cruel than any other kind of sport violence because it’s not really pitting two forces against one another and may the best one win, it’s seeing how long it takes for the the advantaged side to win. And at the point where “winning” means “brutally murdering the opponent”, the activity becomes deplorable.

My roommate is an ethics major, so we talk about things of this nature a lot. Morally, we could hypothetically justify bullfighting because of stories like the first matador, Chamaco, who bullfights to support his family. But ethically? Ethically we can never justify it. There is no argument that would make raising an animal specifically to kill it later ethical, and that’s just looking to agriculture. It’s even more unethical to raise them specifically to kill them for sport, where points are given for the most artful murder. Personally, I can’t rectify that with my own moral compass. Nothing would justify bullfighting for me. Especially if 8 PDF pages (and two pages per PDF page makes that 16) into an essay the poor, abused animal isn’t dead yet.

In class several other students brought up this idea of agriculture (most of us having read Eating Animals a while back) and how we have no right to judge the Spanish when our factory farms are even worse. The argument went that since bullfighting bulls are pampered their whole lives until the last twenty minutes or so, it’s actually much more humane than, say, an American cow living in its own feces. But here’s my problem with this argument: it’s non-topical. Moral relativism has no place in this debate. It isn’t valuable to weigh one travesty against another; the fact remains that they’re both still travesties. It doesn’t matter which action is worse as based on a scale of largely-interpretive criteria, what matters is whether or not the individual action itself is moral or ethical. Bullfighting, simply, is not. Justifying an action by saying it’s not as bad as another action isn’t justification: it’s an excuse to feel better about yourself.

Think about it this way; let’s imagine you (the reader, whoever you are) and I are sitting in a room. All of the sudden, my vision goes red and I punch you in the face. Your first reaction will likely be “What the hell was that for?! How dare you?!” At this point, I pull up a picture of a physically abused housewife on my brand-spanking new iPhone, named Sam Lockie-Waring. “At least I haven’t been systematically beating you for seven years.” How are you going to respond?

A: “You’re right, Bri. I’m sorry for being upset. It could have been a lot worse.” OR

B: “YOU STILL PUNCHED ME IN THE FACE.”

Let’s be honest; you’re gonna go with option B. And you would be right. My punching you in the face is not affected by someone else getting punched in the face consistently; at the end of the day, I still punched you in the face, and that’s still not ok. Moral relativism is only a valuable avenue of argumentation and logic if we’re faced with a choice, but in this scenario we aren’t choosing between bullfighting and factory farms. They are separate entities that are individually crappy and should be viewed as such.

I recognize that bullfighting is a cultural tradition in Spain (at least in Southern Spain) and in many other parts of the world, but guess what? So is slavery. Wright’s journey to Spain, in fact, was for “seeking answers to why his ancestors were enslaved by Western civilization.” I also recognize that bullfighting is often seen as an art form. But guess what else is considered art? Starving dogs. Guillermo Vargas exhibited an emaciated, starving dog as an artistic statement in Nicaragua in 2007. Something can be artistic and still be inhumane and unethical. In my personal opinion, regardless of its importance to art or an art movement, the moment at which an art form seriously harms or kills a sentient being, it has no place existing.

You cannot separate bullfighting’s bloody sport aspects from its cultural art form. For this reason I don’t believe bullfighting should be allowed. But now to you, the reader. Do you agree? Should bullfighting be allowed? I’d love to hear your thoughts.