ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MAY 2004

"Barcelona is an anti-bullfighting city"

BARCELONA--Ernest Heming-way, in Death In The Afternoon (1932), mentioned Barcelona as perhaps the only city where bullfights could be watched all year round. Barcelona then supported three of the world's largest bullfighting stadiums and tourists had just barely begun to attend.

Doomed bulls await fights (Steve Hindi)

On April 5, 2004, the Barcelona city council voted by secret ballot, 21-15 with two abstentions, in favor of a non-binding resolution stating "Barcelona is an anti-bullfighting city." The vote affirmed a petition circulated by the Asociacion Defensa Derechos Animal, signed by 250,000 Barcelona citizens.

Opinion polls showed that 63% of Barcelonians now disapprove of bullfighting; 55% favored banning it.

The Barcelona resolution will not close La Monumental, the last functioning bull ring in the city. About 100 bulls per year are killed at La Monumental, chiefly to thrill tourists, in a season that now runs from March through September. More bulls are killed only in Madrid and Sevilla.

Bullfighting in Barcelona can actually be banned only by the Catalan regional parliament. The Catalan parliament in mid-2003 barred children under age 14 from attending bullfights, 18 months after Mexico City restricted bullfight and cockfight attendance to persons over 18 years of age.

BBC Madrid correspondent Danny Wood reported that the Barcelona vote "reflects a feeling that bullfighting is incompatible with Barcelona's image as a city famous for art and architecture," and "expresses a Catalan desire to forge an identity separate from Spain."

Wood may have underestimated the growing strength of the Spanish humane movement, not just in Catalan where reforming animal control is also an ongoing hot issue, but throughout the nation. Even 15 years ago, Spaniards donated a higher percentage of their income to animal welfare than either Americans or other Europeans, while polls indicated that bullfighting and cruelty linked to religious festivals were "cultural traditions" that most Spaniards would not defend.

Nor is this just a Spanish attitude. A bull ring is still under construction at Congdo, South Korea, and Asian variants of bullfighting are still practiced, often illegally, in parts of Thailand, Japan, and India, but China Radio International reported on April 2 that due to pressure from the Beijing city council a new ring billed as the biggest in Asia will not be used for bullfighting. Instead it will host circus and rodeo performances. The debut bullfight was to have been held on May 1.

Polls indicate that between 69% and 84% of Chinese disapprove of bullfighting.

The decline of bullfighting and similar events would not have surprised Heming-way, despite his own enthusiasm for bullfights. Much of Death In The Afternoon explored opposition to bullfights. Even more than 70 years ago, Hemingway found that many people from every culture considered bullfighting intolerably cruel, especially if they identify with the animal victims.

Hemingway did not deny the cruelty of bullfighting. He simply argued that it served a higher purpose, exploring the paradox that he enjoyed bullfighting while loving animals, adopting stray cats and dogs and often aiding horses in distress on the street.

Hemingway acknowledged that in other contexts he abhorred much that is done in bull rings. He frequently praised the character of the men and women he knew who detested bullfights, then sought to rationalize his own contrasting feelings.

Only decades later would studies of psychological trauma categorize the common defenses of humans who are exposed to killing in a manner clarifying Hemingway's attitude. Some people distance themselves, often through abuse of drugs and alcohol; some become sadistic; some, like Hemingway, ritualize the experience, persuading themselves that killing is for the greater good.

Hemingway in depicting bullfighting as an expiative ritual followed the ancient pattern of Spanish culture itself. Over centuries, the slaughter of unwanted bulls and bull calves evolved from routine culling by primitive agrarian societies into stabbing or burning the animals as "scapegoats," ostensibly to rid the community of evil spirits associated by the early Spanish Catholics with paganism. In actuality the ritual mayhem may have served to reduce qualms about killing animals, whether for meat or any other reason.

At first mobs did the killing. By late Roman times, however, the guardians of public order sought to limit outbursts of mob violence that spread to attacks on people and property by restricting active participation in the bull-killing ritual to members of a priest-like elite, complete with vestments.

Bullfighting in original form persists in the farra du boi ritual still practiced in Brazil. Geologist Alan P. Marcus, a Brazilian now living in Massachusetts, called farra do boi "one of the most brutal and despicable human engagements in animal cruelty today," in a recent e-mail to ANIMAL PEOPLE.

"Farra do boi has been outlawed since 1997," Marcus said, "but the governor of the state of Santa Catarina, where it occurs, refuses to denounce it, defending it as tradition, and the farra do boi continues to take place under silent watch. Onlookers and participants stick broken glass into a bull or bullock's anus to make him buck more fiercely, and then beat and literally torture the oxen until they die," often tying fireworks to the animals, sometimes setting them on fire.

"There have been 65 cases reported to the police this year in Santa Catarina," Marcus charged. "One case of the farra do boi is too many, hence 65 is as astounding and unsettling as Brazil's homicide rate," which has doubled in 15 years.

A form of farra do boi involving fireworks tied to bulls' horns was still practiced in Santarem, Portugal, at the so-called National Fair of Bulls, until February 2004, when the newspaper Publico reported that it was banned by the General Inspector of Cultural Activities.