On Saturday I got to experience a very unique part of Spanish culture: a Corrida de Toros. A corrida is what most people picture when they think of a bullfight, though there are actually many types of bullfights in Spain. I was pretty apprehensive about the corrida; a lot of people in my program were strongly opposed to going, and I was anticipating a lot of gore. We’d read about corridas in class, so I knew roughly what to expect. In each corrida, there are 3 matadors and 6 bulls. The matador has (I think) 20 minutes to kill the bull, and this time is divided into three tercios. In the first tercio, a picador—a member of the torero's team on horseback—jabs the bull with a pica, a lance, to test its bravery and diminish its power. Next, the banderilleros have to stab the bull with banderillas, short poker-type things. Throughout these two tercios, the matador’s team is relatively unprotected. They run around, luring the bull closer, and then they have to run behind protective walls at the edge of the plaza when the bull charges. In the last tercio, the matador faces the bull with his muleta, a red cape that he uses to attract the bull. He wows the crowd by drawing the bull closer and closer, and at the end he has to kill it as cleanly as possible. Anyway, all this sounded pretty bloody, but I was trying to keep an open mind and not pre-judge the corrida.
The corrida was potentially the least boring two and a half hours of my life. The crowd is extremely focused on what’s going on—obviously—and though I’m not a sports fan, it felt like the attention level was probably similar to that of some championship game. Except that, whereas someone who doesn’t know anything about football can be completely bored during an important game, that’s not the case when there’s a massive bull charging around a plaza. Another interesting difference is that instead of judging athletes based on points missed or earned or good or bad plays, in a corrida, the crowd is judging the matador and the bull based on their bravery and fierceness. The crowd is upset when the bull is made to suffer more than it should rather than when a point is missed. Maybe this doesn’t make a difference, but it was interesting to me.
I think one of the key things I learned through going to the corrida and then discussing it in class on Monday is how easy it is to misunderstand what’s going on. After seeing the bullfight, I was more opposed to this type of spectacle than I was going in. The bull is, apparently, stabbed repeatedly throughout the fight--first by the picador and the banderilleros, and finally by the matador--and it seemed to me that it was suffering a lot. Furthermore, it looks like the horse is getting really hurt—when the picador tried to poke the bull, sometimes the bull would stab at the horse with its horns, apparently getting in under the horse’s protective armor. One of the arguments in favor of bullfighting is that these toros bravos live long, dignified lives in exchange for a few minutes of suffering—a way better deal than the animals who are raised and killed for food. I still felt pretty uncomfortable with the violence, though, and I could see why so many people oppose bullfights. Then in class yesterday my professor talked a lot about corridas, and I realized that I hadn’t understood a lot of what was going on. The horse, for instance, is completely protected—to an uninformed spectator it looks like it is getting injured, but it is actually in very little danger. The banderilleros had been the most disturbing to me, since it seems like they’re just tormenting the bull, but actually they stab the animal in a part of its back where there’s about 8 inches of fat. This serves to weaken the bull (by bloodletting, I think, though sometimes I’m not 100% sure what my professor is saying), but it doesn’t cause it a lot of pain. Furthermore, if they didn’t do this, it would be harder for the matador to kill the bull, making it suffer more. Finally, bullfights are highly regulated so that the bull suffers as little as possible, and the corrida is overseen by a president who can intervene and command the matador to kill the animal quickly if it is suffering too much.
I went in to this bullfight with very little knowledge, and I came to uninformed conclusions. I’m still not sure whether I support the corridas, but if I’m going to get upset over animals rights, I should definitely start with factory farms, since they make bullfights seem humane by comparison. Since these bulls suffer less and are treated better than the animals we eat every day without thinking, it seems like the most upsetting aspect of a bullfight isn’t the killing but rather the fact that this killing happens out in the open for entertainment. I can see how this would be disturbing, but it’s not like the crowd has come to laugh at the animal—it’s given a lot of respect. And it seems to me far better to kill an animal out in the open, where people have to actually think about what’s going on, than to slaughter it out of sight.
Sorry, guys—I guess I ended up just processing la corrida, so this post wasn't very informative. In other news, this weekend I also slept too little, lost my voice, prepared for exams, and visited the Alhambra.
Abrazos!
No comments:
Post a Comment