abidewithme:
Bullfighters claim that bulls bred for bullfights are aggressive and fearsome animals. This is also untrue. They fight because they are fighting for their lives.
Take a look at the International Movement Against Bullfights website.
We suggest you read the “ongoing campaigns” section.
Your post is well expressed. Sorry I had to shorten it to fit this in.
I would, however, very much disagree with the following part of it:
“Bullfighters claim that bulls bred for bullfights are aggressive and fearsome animals. This is also untrue. They fight because they are fighting for their lives.”
As a cattleman of many years, I can say for absolute certain that some animals, male or female, some young, some in their prime, some old, can attack, whether threatened or not. Some are primed to attack pretty much all the time. Those, one eliminates from the herd lest their tendencies be passed on to their offspring or imitated by others, thus ruining a herd. I have seen groups of cattle that have been so ruined by this that nobody could possibly work with them. I even saw one aspiring but inexperienced would-be cattleman forced to shoot his smallish herd because they were so ferocious nobody could approach them. He did try to sell them in the field, but nobody would buy them. They were like that because he was injudicious in purchasing them and because he didn’t work them intensively from the very beginning. Left to themselves, they get as wild as any wild animal. Any cattleman in open brush country will readily tell you that an animal that has lived out in the wild very long becomes dangerous and may attack, unprovoked, out of nowhere. And when cattle are specifically bred and raised to enhance those tendencies???
We see in circuses, “lion tamers” who, by patient effort, train a wild animal to do certain things and not to do certain other things. Even so, now and then one of the “tamers” gets mauled or killed. Cattle are really not entirely different, just less ferocious than lions or tigers and, being herd animals, can be more easily handled if kept in groups.
Just about any of them will attack given the right circumstance, and the “right circumstance” is not only fear. It can be a movement, including a movement of another herd member, or something in the corner of its eye. It can be something the animal has not encountered before. I once saw a cow attack a woman who was simply picking up bale net, perhaps 40 yards away. And this was a cow of a breed known for gentleness that had never before made a hostile move toward a person. Some attacks are for dominance, which is why they’re much more likely to attack a child than an adult. Some attacks are more in the nature of simply getting someone out of the chosen pathway; an ever-present danger while working with cattle in a corral. The only real “defense” to this is rigorous selection and working with them in close quarters very frequently so they get used to it and trained to it.
To know what they can and will do, all one has to do is notice what they do to each other in a field. There is daily “pecking-order” fighting; not every one, of course, but perhaps several times/day in any given herd. Even a perfunctory attack would kill a human.
I say all of that, having worked with cattle all my life, and as a person who truly likes them. I am very careful about removing violent animals from the herd at the first sign of that inclination (usually when about half grown). In fact, my veterinarian sometimes complains that they’re “too gentle” and are therefore difficult to move around in the chutes, which slows the work down. It’s easier to move them if they’re a bit more wild.
And even so, I never trust them. I have had to dodge many a charge, as every cattleman does. Fortunately, they are usually just perfunctory and they give it up if they miss once and one “trains them otherwise” by (usually) cracking a whip in front of their eyes, then making them move in a particular way they were not otherwise inclined to do. On the other hand, I once saw a Santa Gertrudis cow attack a man on horseback in an open field and knock down man, horse and all. (Some breeds I would never own, and Santa Gertrudis are at the top of that list.) And it wasn’t a small horse, either. Why it did that, I don’t know. I only know that it did.
I was once challenged by a neighbor’s bull while I was operating a large bobcat with a grapple on the front. The bull threatened a charge several times, though it would have been torn to pieces on the grapple had it actually done it. (I held the grapple open, just in case it did attack) I was no threat to it at all. Likely it saw this strange piece of equipment and decided it needed to “dominate” it physically.
One may say what one will about bullfighting. From the viewpoint of some, it’s the glorification of an animal that would never otherwise exist. From the viewpoint of others, it’s needless cruelty. But whichever view one has, cattle are what they are by their nature, and we should be very slow to attribute human motivations to them.
I’ll take the horse, and it doesn’t even have to be the most magestic or awe inspiring one either. And you can take the lowest, most worthless, depraved, drug addicted prostitute, mass murdering, rapist, death-row inmate 