Ancient bullfight bloodsport faces its own moment of truth

MADRID - In the closing moments of a bullfight, the matador extends his arm and aims his sword at the wavering, maddened beast before him. He lowers his cape and watches the bull's head dip to expose the vulnerable spot behind the shoulders, then he runs to plunge the blade to the hilt. The bloodied animal drops to the ground and the matador turns to acknowledge the cheering crowds.

This is the kill - the climax of the bullfighter's art. Spaniards call it the moment of truth, when a man (occasionally a woman) confronts and overcomes his fear of death.

It is the crowning horror of a cruel and barbarous spectacle. More often than not, the sword bounces off the bull's spine and skips across the sand, and the matador must try again as the crowd roar their contempt and hurl cushions. If he botches further attempts, he takes a sword with a cross at the end and stabs the bull's head. If the animal still moves, an aide dispatches it with a dagger to the brain - a squalid operation loathed by aficionados and opponents alike.

It is hard to imagine the bullfight without the kill. Ernest Hemingway, in his encyclopaedic celebration of taurine matters, Death in the Afternoon, wrestles briefly with the moral dilemma, but concludes with pragmatic crispness: "My own standpoint is quite simple: I could see the bull had to be killed to make the bullfight."

More than 70 years on, in a development that would have astounded Hemingway, a campaign is growing in Spain to take the kill out of the corrida; to remove the bull from public view in its last moments of agony. Those seeking to overthrow centuries - perhaps millennia - of tradition want to abolish the public kill as the first step towards a total ban on bullfights.

Catalans, who generally consider themselves more modern and progressive than the rest of Spain on most things, are at the forefront of this anti-bullfight campaign. Catalan nationalists and separatists are among the keenest to distance themselves from a tradition some consider Spanish, not Catalan.

Late last month, Oriol Amoros, regional MP for the pro-independence Catalan Republican Left, part of Catalunya's ruling coalition, proposed an amendment to the region's animal protection law. He sought to ban bullfights and spectacles "that include the death of the animal and the application of the lance, the darts [banderillas] and the sword". The tradition must evolve, Amoros said, so that the bull is not killed.

Other MPs greeted the proposal sympathetically, complaining only that Amoros hogged the limelight by going it alone.

The proposal followed an historic declaration against bullfighting made by Barcelona City Council on April 6. That declaration was symbolic, since the regional government, not the city, rules the bullrings. Nonetheless, Spain's animal rights activists welcomed the decision as a huge breakthrough and proof that, after years of campaigning, the politicians were finally listening to their message. The Republican Left deputy mayor, Jordi Portabella, wrote in Barcelona's La Vanguardia newspaper that day: "The bull ... has a nervous system similar to that of human beings, capable of dreaming and suffering. It is peaceful, like the cow or ox, which flees from aggression and danger."

Barcelona's two great bullrings are rarely full, and Catalans say, with a hint of disdain, that the most fervent supporters are immigrants from poorer parts of the country. Campaigners want Catalonia to lead a movement to drive bullfighting from Spain.

The region has long been concerned about the violence displayed in the plaza de toros. In 1988, the Catalan Government banned unaccompanied children under 14 from the bullring and extended the ban last year to all under-14s.

Madrid has started to listen. In October, MPs insisted Spanish television herald the broadcast of bullfights with warnings of the likelihood of violent images unsuitable for children under 13.

Eye-catching gestures by British or American campaigners have long enlivened the Spanish bullfighting scene. Vicki Moore, a campaigner from Merseyside, died of injuries when gored at a bull festival in 1995. Last July, female protesters stripped to their underwear to stage a mock counter-run during the bull-running in Pamplona.

 

The cigar-chomping, hard-nosed entrepreneurs of the National Association of Organisers of Taurine Spectacles are fighting back to protect a tradition believed to date back to Minoan times.

The association issued a blistering condemnation of the Catalans' initiative as "an explicit attempt to extinguish the greater part of our Mediterranean cultural heritage".

Any aficionado will tell you that the fighting bull lives for five years in fresh air and open pasture, and dies with more dignity in the ring than a cow bred for beef or a pig bred for pork dies in an industrial slaughterhouse.

Bullfighting is, nonetheless, in decline and has been for decades. Gone is the time when the bullfight was Spain's only popular entertainment. Now football is a far greater national passion.

Aficionados agree with Hemingway that a bullfight without the kill is unthinkable. But celebrations with bulls are so deeply entrenched in Spanish culture it seems unlikely that the bullfight will fade out altogether. Animal rights campaigners have pioneered efforts to soften the corrida's bloodier edge, in parts of the country at least, but it will be a long time until they can administer the final coup de grace.

- INDEPENDENT