Cruelty is cruelty and it cannot be justified under the guise of culture. Yes bull fighting is terrible.
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Don’t really want to open up a can of new worms, but I think a person would do well to read the segment on bullfighting in Michener’s “Iberia” before totally making up his mind about this. It’s not always so, but there can be a certain severe, almost philosophical beauty to it and, given the nature of fighting bulls, it may be less cruel than it seems.
When I was a kid, I always had dogs that could fight the feral animals with which the woods abaounded. And, of course, they kept the hill on which we lived clear of rivals, singular or plural. Two very vigorous dog lives sufficed to get me through babyhood through my teens. We normally had two at a time. Each one that died always died as a consequence of losing its “last fight” with some animal or other. Oncoming loss of prowess due to age no doubt being the reason they lost. A subtle slowness we humans could not detect, perhaps, hearing slightly dulled so the enemy was able to attack from the side. A 1/25 reduction in bite strength, maybe. Tragedy there was, but no shame in the death of Hektor “breaker of horses” at the hand of mighty Achilleus.
While I loved them and mourned their loss, it somehow always seemed fitting to me that they died in the manner in which they did. How very “dog like”, it seemed, and particularly for a proud dog. Like something out of the Iliad, it seemed.
The very first dog I knew of that was “put down” by its owner was my wife’s sister’s dog; a house poodle that had gotten so arthritic that it spent its last year or so terribly impaired and virtually toothless, seemingly kept relatively pain free with “doggie analgesics”. Its mild oncoming incontinence was kindly tolerated. But it was euthanized ultimately, and it was a kindness that it was.
And, of course, its sad last days and end of life reminded me of the proud deaths of my dogs. Notwithstanding that my dogs probably did not, in essaying their final antagonist or in their last moments, think of themselves as one of “the 300”, I had a certain pride in them and in the manner of their deaths. It seemed so worthy.
As Michener describes bullfighting done with “gracia” on the part both of the bull and the bullfighter, it can seem so too.
As one poster observed, the moral content of animals’ deaths is, we could say, as perceived by us, not as perceived by them. With humans, of course, it’s the other way around. And maybe there isn’t a great deal more to know about this.
