I went to the bullfights in Mexico in the summer of 1981. It was the off season so I saw novice bullfighters. If the fighter does well, he can be awarded an ear, two ears or two ears plus a tail. I saw four or five fights and only one got one ear. One time the bull did so well that the crowd chanted “toro toro toro toro!”
At the end the bulls are butchered and the meat is given away for free to the poor.
Forty-five year old memory so some facts may be off.
So bullfighting is still a thing also in Mexico? Fuck them too. And I can’t understand anyone who voluntarily witnesses such a thing and even pays money for it, really. Maybe they should sell tickets to watch the regular ongoings in slaughterhouses too…
The bull’s name is Clandestino, he was bred by the ganadería Hermanos García Jiménez. Cite in Spanish.
I grew up in Spain and was taken to bullfights a couple of times as a kid, and in the '60s and '70s they sometimes showed a fight on TV, when there were only two channels, which means there was nothing else to see. I get the animal cruelty angle (although it is not that cruel, the bulls have a good life until they are brought into the arena, where they die fast-ish. Not like the poor things we eat).
But I do object to bull fighting. Because it is boring. Boooooring.
Yes, that is the only interesting outcome. Like the accidents in Formula 1. Like following the President hoping he will be shot. Like watching rocket launches to see whether this time they explode. Not even the rockets are interestig enough, statistically.
Now that is really gory. Interpreters get to slaughterhouses with food inspectors in the EU and I have been told stories that could turn you into a vegetarian. No, I never did those tours, but I know colleagues who did and talked about it. The food industrial complex is orders of magnitude worse than bull fighting. Even the workers get exploited. And very badly paid. And it seems it is not only disgusting, it is also boring beyond belief. And smelly.
And no: I am not a vegetarian.
For your and everybody’s information: I am, for 30 years.
I know, and I respect that. And I am eating less and less meat, mostly poultry. But I am not that far. Yet. Maybe some day.
That’s a good start and more than most people are willing to invest. 
I do believe that pretty much anything that is live but also on TV typically has more ‘dead air’ in the arena if you’re watching it in person rather than on TV, whether that’s pro sports or one of the reality talent shows like Idol or America’s got talent. With the latter there’s the mop off the stage of the last guy’s sweat & pull up their tape marks & setup for the next act that you never see on TV & don’t need to sit thru unless you’re there in person. If there’s a TV timeout & I’m at home I can be in the kitchen or bathroom in seconds & back in time to not miss any action unlike if I was in the stadium & just sitting thru the dead air because I can’t get anywhere & back quick enough.
Google tells me that it’s largely been banned there but only fairly recently. They have a thing called bloodless bullfighting where no bulls are killed and the horns are wrapped up to reduce the chance of people being gored.
Oh, no, the corrida does not have much “dead air” or downtime. It is a choreography, well rehearsed, and the acts follow in fairly quick succession. First the torero confuses the bull with a cape, then the horse comes in (the riders are called picadores) and they hit the bull with a lance in the back, then they stick the banderillas in the bulls back to make him angry and weaken him, then they kill him. It is the acts themselves that are boring. Except when the bull gets the torero, which is so seldom that we are discussing the one time this has happened in the last years.
Apart from that it is always the same: the bull charges, the bull misses, the bull charges again, the bull misses, the bull charges again…
Boring. Dumb.
That’s good to hear. I seem to remember that in Southern France, which also has a tradition of bullfighting, the fights have turned into non-bloody events too in the last few decades.
So it’s the choreographed and ritual torturing and killing of a respectable animal. How anyone can take that as entertainment, I’ll never understand.
This is the proper way to sport with a bull: bull leaping.
Have you seen what the bulls do to the cows?
They go back to mythological times, talk about the Minotaur, the bull as deity in the Holocene, tall tales about death and rebirth… If there is anything even more boring than a corrida it is the chronicles of the corrida. There is a whole esoteric language about that ritual that could put an ADHS kid to sleep. There used to be a section in the Spanish newspapers about bullfighting, like there is one about football or finances. Snobs. Boring snobs.
I’m a country boy, but even I have never seen a bull mating with a cow. Those poor creatures have only multiplied by artificial insemination for decades…
This is what I also had in mind posting the whole time, that’s a fair sport. And in the case of a collision, the bull always wins. I think they really do that sport still in Spain.
The words “rectal wall repair” ought not to be part of any “sport.” Honestly, I think it’s the perfect swan song for the sport. The thing of all things has finally happened, and we can just call it a day.
From the photos of the bull, it looks like the tips of his horns had been filed down to make them blunt. Dang lucky for the matador.
The “sport” is in frank decay, this is just a tiny grain of sand in that avalanche. If anything, this will increase viewership for a while. Let’s hope it is a dead cat bouncing.
Nope. That is forbidden. The bull knows his horns, if you alter the length (it is called “shaving”) you make him more dangerous, because he aims erratically.
OK, sometimes it happens. More seldom nowadays.
But they’re surely thinking about it…
Interesting. I’m a little surprised. Not sure how common it still is, but in the dairy area I grew up in, there were breeding paddocks where the bull was kept with a cow. It was everyone’s duty to note when the cow was “covered” by the bull. So that the next cow could be switched in.
But beside that, I assumed fighting bulls were pedigreed like race horses, with rules for live cover only.
Y’know, any athletic activity where I can wind up violently and literally losing my actual arse … is a bad idea. The Spanish report a bit upthread refers to the casualty as “genio” but, no, I don’t think that means what they think it means.
Picture it: one day being to Pamplona during San Fermines, and sitting on a high balcony drinking wine while watching the Trampling Of The Tourists, all resplendently bedecked head to toe in Chicago NBA garments boldly labeled BULLS
From Mad Magazine’s Guide to Europe: “The most commonly looked-up phrase in Spanish phrase books during the Running of the Bulls is ‘Help, I’ve got a horn stuck up my ass!’”
You are right, better photos here. (link to photos blurred because they are fairly awful.) I think the one I saw must have been just filling in A bull rather than THE bull from the fight. The horns look completely different.