Many years ago, this writer as a stripling in the garden of life, worked at an abattoir. He was 17. He needed money for a surfboard. (This also necessitated him joining the Army Reserve for the longest two weeks of his life. The money was tax free.)
At the slaughterhouse, nothing prepares you for that first walk onto the killing floor. The smell, nauseous and thick, doesn't so much rise up to meet you. It smashes you in the nostrils. The cows were herded up a ramp to a sort of mezzanine level where they were zapped to death, then their bodies began the mechanical dismemberment, which ends at the supermarket and butcher.
My job was to wash the grass, which the cows presumably until the herding had been happily munching, from out of their mouths and off their faces. The heads were separated from the body. Armed with a high-pressure hose, this callow 17-year-old met what seemed an unrelenting conveyor belt of freshly decapitated heads. I stood in my gum boots trying to blast the heads clean. Once a supervisor came up to me brandishing a head he had picked up further down the line. He thrust it towards my innocent eyes and barked, "You call this clean?'' No sir. He walked off in disgust. Thus for a short time I was a very small cog in the means of national food production. The next time I saw a freshly decapitated head was in Pamplona during the festival of the running of the bulls. After a bull fight in the town, I saw two young Spaniards running through the streets holding by the horns a bull's head. They were celebrating.
I had been at the bullfight that afternoon, among as it happened, other Australians. They were appalled, obnoxious, (perhaps drunk), and enraged at the spectacle, but to them it wasn't a spectacle, nor could it be seen by them as part of national tradition. It was barbaric. There was no sport to it. For the bull is a dumb animal. Man is not. The first cannot read, write, do maths, build or tweet. It cannot build cities or construct sentences. Nor can it control its fate. As much as it has free will it is dictated by man.
The bull can be looked after well, if it suits man's purpose, and then it is led to the outdoor theatre of death for amusement and entertainment. Many say it is a honourable death, artistic in its tortured throes. The bull cannot say what it feels. If it did I'm sure it would say it would rather not live and die at the mercy, or lack of it, of others.
For it lives and dies in a culture of blood. Or so you might reasonably think, but the Spanish Government has decreed that bullfighting is now an ''artistic discipline''. It has moved responsibility for bullfighting from the Interior Ministry to the Ministry of Culture. The Guardian, of London, reports that the Culture Ministry said: ''As it is understood that bullfighting is an artistic discipline and a cultural product, it was considered that the Ministry of Culture was the correct place for its development and protection.''The bull may be surprised to know, if it could use such a level of reasoning, that its torture and dying is now performance art.
There's no argument that bullfighting is a fundamental plank of Spanish culture; the tradition stretches back centuries. There is an argument, however, that perhaps some planks of a country's tradition should be smashed. I'm not being anti-Spanish, just pro-bull, and it's not just outsiders who think this way. From next year bullfighting in Catalonia, which takes in Barcelona, will be banned, following a decision by the regional government last year.
In 1955, John Stanton in Sports Illustrated wrote that Spanish historian Don Jose Maria de Cossio had said that ''the festival of bullfighting is not merely a pastime, debatable from moral, pedagogical, esthetic and sentimental points of view but [is] a fact of profound meaning in the Spanish way of life and possessing roots so deep and extensive that there is no social or artistic activity, from the language to industry or commerce, where traces of it cannot be found''.
''Anyone who has ever watched a Spanish businessman flourish his pen like a sword over a contract that puts his whole fortune at stake, or had his speeding automobile breathtakingly 'passed across the chest' by a small boy with a bit of a rag, will understand exactly what Don Jos Maria means. Wherever the Spanish writ once ran there are people, not the majority of people but many people, who passionately want to see bulls killed beautifully in the classic 'thirds' of the ring — the Third of the Pics, the Third of the Banderillas and the Third of Death.''
Most famously, Ernest Hemingway wrote of bullfighting in Death in the Afternoon as an exquisite example of manhood in the face of death. ''Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honour.'' How noble for our manhood is such an enterprise. How ignoble for our humankind is such an enterprise. How elegant the ritual and the ecstasy that its brilliance is measured in the executioner's honour. How insightful of you Hemingway. The men who become matadors, certainly do face maiming and death, but they had a choice in all this.
This grand struggle of life, death and art is but slavery. Let's ask the bull what he thinks. Oh sorry, he's dropped to the ground. And if the artiste has performed well enough we're sorry bull but we'll just take your ear off, or two maybe if the art was exceptional enough. The bull, if it fights for its life sufficiently honourably, can on rare occasions be permitted to go back to whence it came. That would be its natural environment, a field.
The Spanish Bullfighters Union says bullfighting shapes the national identity. But to call it an artistic discipline, thus casting it in the same sphere of human endeavour as say ballet, painting or writing, is a perversion of art. Are we so dumb to not acknowledge that?
CODA: Last weekend, a 50-year-old man was gored to death at a ''bulls in the street'' festival near Valencia after waving a pink umbrella at a charging bull. Early last month, an Australian man was gored in the leg at the running of the bullls in Pamplona after he had waved his arms at a bull, then slipped and fell. The bull pinned him to the ground and pierced his leg.