To:-- The Prospect Magazine
Re:--"A Noble Death?" a commentary by Tom Chatfield on bullfighting.
Some comments seems to have overlooked that Fiske-Harrison confesses to being ambivalent. He is not setting forth a "justification" as much as attempting a more balanced account. In this vein I think his draft needs to explain more completely the physiology of the banderillas and lance as well as review "fact or fiction" accounts as to whether the bull is goaded and enraged (i.e. "tortured") before the fight, and so on. I think this is critical because it makes for the difference between a "torture spectacle" and a "death spectacle".
As far as I am concerned, our industrial animal food production is nothing but systematized torture that is 1000 times more cruel than any arena. There is no excuse for "raising" meat that way and even less for eating it. Anyway one sincerely concerned with animal welfare will save his "outrage" at bullfights for the last.
Those not blessed with Iberian blood tend to have a hard time fathoming the thrill of the torreo. More than the thrill of vicarious danger, it is anexistential thrill that reverberates on a taught line drawn between courage and intelligence, life and death before resolving into a kind of sadness and sympathy. To say as much is simply to talk. I think that appreciation of the torreo involves openness to a certain primal depth of feeling that spooks many people.
I confess to having been thrilled by a good "bullfight". I also confess that as I have gotten older I would just as soon pet deer and talk to birds.
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