Death in the Ring: A Moral Reckoning with the Spanish Bullfight

It was a hot July afternoon as almost twenty thousand spectators crowded into their seats in Pamplona's bullring. Ernest Hemingway once sat in these same seats as he surveyed the Spanish spectacle known around the world as the bullfight. I had never seen one before, and I was anxious to watch the torturous acts I had heard would ensue as matadors taunted, and eventually killed, their adversary, the Spanish fighting bull. It was an ending as guaranteed as the morning sun. Yet, I had paid for my seat to gladiatorial-like performance where a matador, the crowd, and the president of the ring decided who lived, who maintained their honour, and who was shamed out of the arena.

What I watched, however, was nothing of the sort. There was no torture. Matadors and their assistants, collectively known as toreros, bravely stepped in front of charging bulls with nothing but their capes, some red and some fuchsia, to protect them. The performance wasn't about death and suffering, but about artistic skill, man's dominion over nature, and confronting the very real possibility of death in the ring. There was only one fatal blow, and the matador didn't carry the killing sword until the very end. The bull could kill him at any second with its horns, but the matador could only kill the bull at the last second. For most of the performance, it was the matador, not the bull, who stared his death in the face. Just one mistake could cost him his life. I saw such a mistake. That matador didn't die, but he was thrown into the air and bounced off a bull's horn, and his compatriots had to carry him off the infirmary for surgery.

Watching the spectacle before me, I realised it was the first time I had seen something die before me in person. This wasn't a movie, video game, or a thought experiment. Death was real in the ring. The matador lived after surgery, but the bull was not so fortunate as the next matador in line stepped in to fulfil his solemn duty to his fallen comrade. Five more bulls went in a similar fashion. In the span of three hours, I went from having never seen something die in front of me to watching six bulls die at the point of a sword. It was a far cry from modern society's usual confrontation with death. In hospitals and veterinary clinics, family are given the option to leave the room as their loved ones pass on to the next life; in the military, drones and high-altitude aircraft do most of the killing; and almost no one watches the exsanguination of the cow before it reaches their plate at a fine dining establishment. We were insulated from watching death's cruel arrival, and we had developed a natural aversion to it. In the bullring, there was no such insulation. Death came to us all. Most of the time it was quick, but sometimes it dragged on, painful and heartbreaking as the bull, mortally wounded, clung to life and refused to surrender to its fate. Spectators were hostage to the situation, as bullfighting regulations prohibited leaving the stands while the bull was still alive. We were a captive audience, forced to wrestle with the morality of what we saw and pay respect to the bull that sacrificed its life for our entertainment.

And wrestle I did. I knew the bulls performing that evening would eventually make their way to somebody's plate in some restaurant or kitchen, the same fate that awaited cattle around the world. Only the path differed. Cattle raised for meat lived for two years or less, often in over-stocked cattle farms, condemned to suffer death at the hands of an unfeeling industrial process. Death always came, and it was neither ritual nor pretty. But the consumer didn't know nor care about the mechanics. That was someone else's job in the assembly line leading from birth in a field to cooked on a plate. In the world of bullfighting, aficionados were not just party to death but paying participants in it. They had no illusions about the process, and they demanded each participant perform their duty professionally and humanely. The matador was expected to strike a fatal blow on the first attempt. A second attempt wouldn't be condemned, but more than that brought whistles, jeers, and protests from the crowd. From birth, the bull’s fate was sealed, but for its sacrifice it was granted a quick, dignified death. I had never contemplated the morality of my daily meals, but there in Pamplona's bullring, that morality stared me, and twenty thousand others, in the face. On rare occasions, the crowd blinked and demanded the bull be pardoned for his performance, allowed to live until a ripe old age as a free spirit in wide-open pastures. It was an opportunity afforded to every bull in the ring, but never to cattle on the farm.

Leaving the bullring three hours later, I was loathe to admit what I felt inside. The spectacle I had witnessed was not some cruel, tortuous event which had somehow lasted past its expiration date. No, it was a respectful, reverent, artistic performance between two equal parties. The matador and the bull were at the same time adversaries and partners, both celebrated in their own right. I had enjoyed it, and, in time, would become an aficionado myself. There was more to the bullfight than death in the ring. The toro de lidia, the breed of bull used in the bullfights, was the last remaining descendent of the wild Iberian bull. Without bullfighting, an entire species would go extinct. The toro de lidia was also raised free range on large ranches free from human interaction on the ground. For its sacrifice, it was afforded a luxurious life most cattle in the world would never know. As a cultural practice, I found it to be the most moral physical manifestation of artistic expression I had ever witnesses. Cruelty was prohibited, matadors were held to the highest social standard, and spectators intimately considered the deeper questions posed to them night after night. I had never understood the obsession some people had for sporting events; after becoming an aficionado, I still don't. For me, the deeper meanings, moral complexities, and social realities embodied in the bullfight provided something few other endeavours could - a personal stake in the performance.

The reality is we are surrounded by moral complexity, suffering, and death everyday. We simply don't see it. It isn't in our faces, and we go to great lengths to obscure it from everyday life. Yet, we have an obsession with it. First-person shooters are some of the most popular video games, war and action movies dominate the box offices, and wars across the world are covered daily in the news. So, what is the difference between this obsession and the bullfight? It isn't a complex answer - just an uncomfortable one. Our obsession is academic, a thought experiment we hope to never experience ourselves. It is something we don't want to understand, not truly, as images of death are difficult to put out of our minds. It changes your perspective on life, challenges your sense of morality, and forces you to confront your inner self as you wrestle through life's inevitable reality. The bullfight isn't an outlier in this world; it is a concentrated delivery of everyday experiences. There is brutality, there is artistic expression, there are consequences, there is mourning, and, yes, there is, inevitably, death. The same death that awaits us all.