A load of bull

I confess: I used to 'follow the bulls'. A youthful fantasy that I had something, anything, to do with Hemingway. I lived in the US long enough to get pangs of nostalgia about life in Spain. That included being clued up on the 'art' of bullfighting. But something happened shortly after my return to this country almost twenty years ago, after attending a couple of bullfights.

I was sitting in a local bar watching the San Isidro season on TV, a major month-long season in Madrid. All of a sudden I asked myself, "What the hell am I doing here?" I haven't been to a bullfight since that day. Occasionally I have watched something to do with the corrida but always about the breeding of those magnificent animals, or the horses that attend the rejoneo, or bullfighting on horseback. As a former horseman, I am in awe of their riding skills and the training that goes on behind the scenes.

As I write, Cataluña is debating banning the bullfight from the region, and Madrid has just announced that it will declare it a Bien de Interés Cultural. In Andalucía, the President of the Partido Popular, Javier Arenas, has announced that he will seek a parliamentary debate and subsequent 'non-law proposition' to "defend our traditions, our culture and our fiesta nacional (another name for the bullfight)."

Call it political polarization: Cataluña is governed by a centre-left coalition and Madrid by the Partido Popular; Andalucía has been run by the PSOE since the advent of democracy thirty years ago and whom Arenas has been trying to dethrone for at least four elections. But I don't want to get political on the subject of bullfighting: let the politicos do that, it's their job.

No, I want to look at the word 'culture' as it is so often applied to the corrida. In English the word is used as something positive ('a cultured people', for example) but I have always felt that the word cultura in Spain ought to be written 'kultur', in the Soviet fashion. The country is plagued with casas de cultura that are usually no more than places for the local politicians to hold political meetings and the occasional 'cultural' event - ones that espouse only the interests of the local governing party even though the building is a public asset 'owned' by everyone, of any political colour.

Used in the more English sense, and associating it with bullfighting, goes a little deeper. Add 'tradition' and I have a problem.

Is there anything cultural about killing defenceless animals? Is it right just because it's a tradition? Is every tradition the right thing just because it has been done for a long time? Clearly not.

The debate is on, yet nowhere have I read about the possibility of bullfighting without killing the bull onstage, as they do in Portugal and a few other places in the world, though the bull is usually killed outside the ring, and used for meat, unlike the ones in the picture above -by JimenaPulse, to whom thanks- which get cremated.

As I said, the debate is on.

(c) Alexander Bewick 2010