A human party, too human

This way the bullfighting party can be qualified when it is the fans who speak, and not because of them the anti-bullfighters who caricaturize their feelings by blaming them for all kinds of perversities. So did the colonizers with the towns they called savages, before some select spirits proposed a more respectful and open vision of these ignored cultures.

Yes, bullfighting is tremendously human because it is primarily the spectacle of fragility. For an afternoon of bulls to fulfill all their promises, it is necessary that the day does not bother the air, that the bulls are in conditions and have onslaught in accordance with the technical and aesthetic possibilities of the matador, and that he wants to suddenly rise beyond of the obligations of his profession to feel and express his mystery, as Rafael El Gallo said very well.

That is why fans resemble devotees, maintaining the tireless hope of the miracle at the cost of many disappointments. It is undeniable that the bullfight has its share of cruelty, in the etymological sense of the word, but the whole show tends to make it forget: forgotten fear, forgotten blood and violence when the onslaught of a brave bull, subjugated by deception , lengthens and merges with the bullfighter in an unlikely harmony , as if the man by the magic of the temple had the ability to hypnotize the bull and stop time. It is a mirage of course, because here everything is ephemeral starting with the work drawn on the ring, which dies at the same moment it has been glimpsed, and definitely with the bull that has lent itself to it.

Bullfighting is the art of flying forms , which are known to be born in a perishable world, and that want to compensate for their fleeting character with the insatiable search for beauty in the labyrinth of the movement. That is why the temperament is its greatest virtue , because it is the attempt, slowing down the lots, to postpone the inescapable end of the poem that the man is improvising for a few minutes with his bull, blended with him. Reason why intellectuals of the stature of Valle-Inclán and Pérez de Ayala , paying tribute to the young Belmonte , dared to affirm that bullfighting, due to this very transience, is more moving than the other arts. For his part, José Alameda , an exile from the Civil War, considered that this party is "human, too human", because it condenses all the vicissitudes of life and death with which man feels confronted throughout his existence.

But on the other hand bullfighting is animalistic , because it is based on the closest possible and complicity with the animal. Countless hours of conversation with bullfighters, ranchers and fans have confirmed it. Bullfighting is first of all mating with the bull, even - as the bullfighter and writer Juan Posada told me - to become both a man and a bull, Minotaur in some way, allowing his opponent, after having perceived them, to express all the potentialities of his bravery that without bullfighting they would have been unpublished. In this sense, the bullfight, which meets the five criteria set by the Unesco convention to identify an intangible cultural heritage , meets in particular that which refers to the "knowledge of nature and the universe."

Speaking of Unesco, it is convenient to return to the concept of culture as defined in the text of this convention of a marked anthropological character: it is the set of practices, traditions and feelings that reflect the experiences of a community and with which it is identified . Each of these cultures, as long as it is in accordance with the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and as long as it is shared and transmitted to the new generations (this is the true meaning of the word tradition), must be respected in its diversity, even if within a region it remains a minority. Here witch hunts, ideological or political inquiries are not worth it. Their freedom - in this case that of the fans - must be preserved against any external imposition or prohibition , even if they are based on the result of the vote of an alleged majority. This would be equivalent to instrumentalizing a seemingly democratic process to reestablish censorship, a curious setback to other times in which the dictatorship of the "morally and politically correct" was imposed for all. Being a minority does not disqualify a culture. That is what Unesco says through its conventions of the years 2003 and 2005.

And two more things in the face of accusations turned into repeated slogans and stereotypes: talking about torture about an untamed animal, whose fight to the death is a permanent danger to the bullfighter, is an insult to the true victims of this disgusting act.

On the other hand, animal welfare is a very relative concept ; relative to the way of being and behaving of each animal, of company, wild or of the field, because the animal itself only exists in the mind of some radical animalists, perhaps impacted by the Disney characters and very far from the realities from the rural world The bull fighting, raised for at least four years in freedom and in extensive, natural and protected spaces while other cattle go to the slaughterhouse a few months later, undoubtedly enjoys a privileged well-being until the last twenty minutes of his life. And what about the stallions and wild cows, raised with the same care and respect expressed to this exceptional breed that would disappear at the same time that bullfighting was prohibited, in the same way that the entire ecological environment linked to its breeding? Would it not be more urgent to ensure the welfare of some pet animals, condemned to live in small spaces and clearly misfit for them, and sometimes abandoned by their owners when the holidays arrive? God free us from urban or living ecology!

François Zumbiehl is a writer, doctor in cultural anthropology from the University of Bordeaux and vice president of the French Observatory of bullfighting cultures.

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