We set off along a rough track around the back of the finca, across a tiny stream and out into the fields. The Miuras employ between 15 and 20 people on their 1,500 acres to look after about 600 cattle and breeding horses and mules. A few of the men are sitting with their backs to a wall, sheltering from the wind, eating their mid-morning bait, as we bump past.
There is little difference between the way the Miuras manage their cattle and the management of an extensively grazed beef herd anywhere else in the world. The sexes and year groups and pregnant and nursing mothers are reared separately. But the crucial difference, I learn almost immediately, is that these cattle are mental. We stop in a field of two-year-old bulls (erales) so I can get a photograph. I go to open the door to step outside for a good shot of an animal that is standing on a little hillock about 150 yards away. Clods of turf hang from his horns and he is languidly pawing the ground and flicking up soil with his front hooves onto his back. Don Eduardo grips my forearm, ‘Don’t get out!’ He shakes his head and wags his finger. ‘It’s not safe.’
Bearing in mind that the biggest thing about the rather scrawny beast is its horns, and it is quite a long way off, I judge that I could open the door and get a shot or two before the little bugger could reach us. I persist. ‘I only want to get out for a moment. I won’t move from the vehicle. It’s just to rest on the open door to get a better picture.’
He wags his forefinger at me, shakes his head and says emphatically ‘No! Muy peligroso!’
That is when I notice that the beast has stopped pawing the earth and is staring at us like a thug looking for trouble on a Saturday night out. It starts to move towards us, slowly at first, gradually gathering speed. Don Eduardo puts the Suzuki into gear and accelerates away, bouncing over the rutted ground with the little bull gamely following until it seems to lose interest, content that it has seen us off and satisfied some atavistic sense of honour.
‘What would it have done?’
‘Probably attacked the vehicle and tried to turn it over with its, er … cuerna.’
‘Horns,’ my son helpfully interjects.
I didn’t know then that it is forbidden for a fighting bull to see a man on foot (as opposed to mounted) before it goes into the ring. If it were to gain early familiarity with its two-legged enemy, it would be a cleverer and much more dangerous opponent when it enters the arena for the fight of its life. In fact, it would probably be unfightable. That is why a bull is only allowed to fight once. Afterwards, it is usually killed; in rare cases, its life is spared with an indulgence (indulto) granted by the president of the corrida on a petition from the crowd. It is then treated for its wounds and goes back to its native ranch to live out its days as a stock bull – often for 20 years or more.
We bounce along from field to field, with me hopping out to open the gates, affecting nonchalance and keeping a weather eye out for cattle. The toro bravo is not, as I expected, uniformly dark-coloured, but ranges across most bovine colours from creamy white through red, brown, blue-roan, speckled, to glossy black. The horns in both sexes are massive, dark-tipped and very sharp. On the younger cattle they are out of proportion because they grow faster (about 1 cm a month) than the slower-developing body.
The females are, in their way, more dangerous than the bulls because they are more unpredictable, quicker in their movements and changes of direction, and no less fierce. A half-ton bull that can accelerate from standing to 25 mph in a few seconds finds it hard to change direction once it has committed itself to charging at an object. That is why the safest bulls are those that, in Hemingway’s words, run ‘as if they were on rails’. The ganaderos (bull breeders) say, ‘Bulls get their size and build from their fathers, but their hearts come from their mothers.’ They gauge the likely ferocity and courage of their bulls by testing in an arena the two- to three-year-old females (vaquillas) that are going to be their mothers. This process is called the tentadero. It also maintains the rule that the bull must not see a man on foot before he fights. All the work with the bulls is done by mounted stockmen.
The toro bravo has two psychological states. He is relatively placid as part of a herd, but once separated and alone, the beast within is released. He tends not to show aggression unless threatened directly, but when upset, either with or without the herd, the instinct of both sexes is to attack. They will not back off. I saw a calf, less than 24 hours old, attack and see off a big dog. And I was told about a young woman whose thigh was broken when a calf attacked her. Alexander Fiske-Harrison describes his first encounter with a fighting bull, the pardoned Idilico, who was living out his days on the ranch of the Núñez del Cuvillo family between Seville and Cadiz. He describes what happened when the bull was put in a pen on his own. It ‘was not a change of temperament, but of character itself. His head came up and a vast surge of testosterone-enhanced adrenaline seemed to course through him. He literally began to dance, as a boxer dances, his 1,212 lb bulk skittering on his hooves over the mud-slick stones.’ When Fiske-Harrison climbed onto one of the six-foot-high walls surrounding the pen to look down, the bull caught sight of him and became an ‘explosive paranoia of horn and muscle’. As he grasped the safety rail, Fiske-Harrison moved the little finger of his left hand and the bull flicked his head towards it, then his attention shot towards the little finger of his right hand when he moved that.
The bull does not react to pain in the normal way, by flight, but by attack. When wounded by the picador’s lance, he redoubles his assault. In this, the type is unique among bovines. A bull will attack his fellows to gain supremacy in the herd or to defend his territory, and he never loses his predisposition to combat until the day he dies. A vaquilla behaves similarly when she is challenged. Fear turns into terrifying aggression. She will attack anything, even her own shadow, and will not stop until she has killed the thing that threatens her. This temperament has been bred into Spanish fighting cattle over many centuries, matching the bravest and most ferocious females with bulls that have shown extraordinary fearless aggression and indifference to pain in the arena.
Is it that these cattle have some special attribute of extreme aggression under pressure, something different from other breeds of cattle? Or would all cattle be like this if they had been refined and enhanced by domestic selection? Most domestic breeds have had the fight bred out of them because docility is needed to get the best from them. Whether or not Spanish cattle are descended from the aurochs (and no link has been proved), they have been selected for ferocity through countless generations (on average 20 every century) since Roman times – and probably a long way further back than that – so it is hardly surprising that the latest incarnation of these bovines should be such desperadoes. In fact, given that the bloodlines of the toro bravo are some of the oldest in Europe, it is more surprising that they are not completely unmanageable. They seem to have reached a plateau of ferocity and not to be any more dangerous now than they were 200 years ago.
Once a toro bravo has determined to charge, it will do so without deviation. That is why it can be fought with a cape. The Spanish call this tendency la nobleza: its nobility in not resorting to trickery such as stopping in mid charge or hooking or chopping with its horns; the bull is open, straightforward and honest. In other words, it plays by the rules and accepts its destiny as a player in the drama being enacted in the ring. This is, of course, pure anthropomorphism. The bull has no choice but to act in character. The rite of which he is part is a human construct that is supposed to mirror the ultimate and only reality: death in a tragic spectacle culminating in his ritual sacrifice.
There are many people (mainly in what could broadly be called the Protestant countries of the world) who deplore bullfighting and would readily see it banned. Ernest Hemingway thought they were that part of humanity that instinctively sides with the bull against the man and dislikes their fellow humans. I am not sure this analysis is right. You don’t have to dislike mankind to have fellow feeling with animals and deplore wanton cruelty towards them. Y
ou can have empathy for both the bull and the man.
According to the Christian teaching upon which our European moral attitude to animals has been based for the last two millennia, we were given dominion over animals and the rest of the natural world. We are entitled to use them for our own purposes, including putting them to death for our food, even if it is simply to gain pleasure from eating them. But we degrade and brutalize our own nature and risk transferring the cruelty to humankind if we take pleasure directly in inflicting pain on animals. Animal suffering is repugnant to us to the extent that it reminds us of, or resembles, human suffering and therefore ordinary human kindness towards animals must be inspired by empathetic anthropomorphism.
Loving an animal cannot exclude killing it. If a dog is suffering, we would consider it a kindness to have it put down. That does not mean we do not love it; rather it means the opposite. A responsible owner will look after his dog and give it an opportunity to express its nature, as a companion or working dog, and then, in the proper exercise of owner’s responsibility, will if necessary kill it at the end of its life. It is the same with farm animals. We keep cattle for a purpose: to give us milk, meat and other by-products. And it is the essence of their nature and existence that to fulfil their purpose, they have to die. That is not incompatible with loving them. And if we didn’t keep them, there would be nothing to love anyway. A cattle breeder is not immune to sadness at having to send his animals to be slaughtered for meat. He is not a monster who gets pleasure from killing them.
When I was growing up, there was an old woman who lived alone in our village and kept a couple of pigs on the swill from the kitchens of a hotel she worked in. When killing day came round, she insisted on being present at the slaughter, as she had been for every pig she had ever reared. She never failed to weep over the death of a pig that had become almost a friend. But she didn’t stop keeping them. She loved bacon and ham, black pudding and brawn and pig-foot pie – and she loved her pigs, both for what they were and in gratitude for what their lives and their deaths gave her.
Rearing fighting bulls for killing in the arena seems to me no different from rearing a pig for bacon or cattle for beef. Those who do it almost certainly do not hate the animals they nurture so carefully, otherwise they would not make such a good job of looking after them. That their lives end in death says nothing about the feelings of the people who cause it. The great bullfighter Cayetano Ordóñez tells Fiske-Harrison about his sadness at killing, and the emotion a great bull can inspire in him: ‘It is like a friend at that point [the point of death]. You do not want to kill it, but you have to, and that is your tragedy, your sadness. But it is your bull, only you can deliver death to it, for only you have risked your life to face it. And then, that, the moment of the kill, is the most important moment of all. For fifteen minutes the bull has been charging you, and now you must charge it with the sword. This is the only moment the matador himself charges the bull.’ This is the hora de verdad, the moment of truth.
The toro bravo pays for his five years running free on the ranch with twenty minutes in the ring, just as the beef beast does with its eighteen months in the feedlot. ‘The argument that killing for food is not the same as killing for entertainment is bogus,’ says Fiske-Harrison. ‘We eat meat because we like the taste to entertain our palates.’
The Miura ganadería is a haven for wildlife. There were flocks of birds, too far off across the fields to tell what they were, rising and wheeling in great clouds like swarms of bees and settling further away to work the soil for something they were eating. Across from the farm, a flock of partridge rose from the margin of one of the tarns that store water for the long dry season. I remarked on the wildlife and Don Eduardo ran through a list of species that their cattle rearing encourages, comparing this with the sparse fauna of the monoculture on the winter-brown arable lands we had travelled through.
The Miuras’ wild pastures are part of the dehesa (montado in Portuguese). This covers about a quarter of the five to six million acres of the western and south-western parts of the Iberian peninsula. It describes an ancient integrated land use that gives the greatest productivity from arid marginal land in a Mediterranean climate. The soil is managed primarily for animals, both grazing and browsing: cattle, goats and sheep eat the natural mixture of native herbage. Black Iberian pigs feed on the acorns from the cork and holm oak trees that stud the land and go to make jamón ibérico de bellota (the famous dry-cured Spanish ham). They have a cultivating function, rooting up the ground and keeping it open and free from the scrub and oak saplings that would otherwise take over. The bark from the cork oaks is harvested every nine to twelve years, and the trees are spaced at just the right distance to balance the herb-age’s need for sunlight with maximizing the number of trees to make best use of groundwater and to yield the most acorns to feed the pigs and game. Although the herbage withers and dies in the heat of summer, it is resurrected from its dry roots by the rain that returns after the drought, and the land becomes carpeted once again with a billion wild flowers and viridescent foliage. The shade and roots of the oaks encourage fungi, bees make honey from the flora, and the branches shelter the Iberian lynx and the Spanish imperial eagle.
This ancient system involves the widest possible range of species, living in symbiosis, maintains soil fertility and gives considerable production from unpromising soils. Every species has a place in the tapestry; even the myriad flies that plague the cattle during the hot, dry summer sustain flocks of cattle egrets that patrol the herds as they lie cudding in the shade and peck the insects from their unconcerned hides. The manure from the cattle creates a living soil teeming with microbes; it sustains insects that feed ever-larger creatures, up to the dung beetles at the top of the insect pyramid, which do the heavy work of processing it. Each species lives according to its own cycle of life and interlocks with and supports the others. The oaks have the longest life cycle – about 250 years – and the tiny microbes the shortest. Every creature has a part to play in sustaining the whole.
This kind of extensive land use, which has evolved over thousands of years, provides a good enough living from poor soils to maintain and feed a surprisingly large population. The biggest cash income has traditionally been the sale of cork, but with the increasing use of plastic corks it is not as lucrative as it once was. High-quality dried hams also bring in a significant income. But it is those who rear fighting bulls who make the most from the dehesa. The best bulls will sell for over €20,000. One and a quarter million acres are used for rearing the 25,000 or so fighting bulls that are killed in the ring every year. As a significant proportion of the bull calves are not deemed courageous enough for la corrida, and half the calves are heifers, by far the greatest proportion of the offspring of the hundreds of thousands of cows kept to supply the bullfight are killed for their meat. This is a superior type of beef, lean and fed slowly on natural grazing. Not only are the wide lands of southern Spain maintained in their natural state by the income from toros bravos, but in the existence of the huge herds of semi-wild cattle that roam there, and in the bullfight, Spain’s national pride and unique identity are preserved.
The bulls do not usually fight before they are four years old, and some are five, nearing six, when they enter the ring. Up to that age they live as naturally as it is possible for a domestic animal to live on extensive grazings. They are deeply attached to the place where they were born, where they are entirely unconfined as they grow towards their inevitable 20 minutes in the ring. Each bull is given a name and his life is dedicated by the matador to a saint, to the crowd in general or to someone important to the matador.
The origins of bullfighting go back into prehistoric bull worship and sacrifice. There are Palaeolithic bull paintings in numerous caves in western Europe and beyond. The first recorded bullfight is in the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Gilgamesh and Enkidu fight and kill the Bull of Heaven: ‘The Bull seemed indestructible, for hours they fought, until Gilgamesh dancing in front of the
Bull, lured it with his tunic and bright weapons and Enkidu thrust his sword deep into the Bull’s neck and killed it.’ Like a matador, Gilgamesh drove his own sword into the bull’s spine ‘between nape and horns’. The oldest representation of what seems to be a man facing a bull is on a Celtic-Iberian tombstone from Clunia, near Burgos, in northern Spain. In Anatolia, excavations of a site dating from 6700 to 5650 BC have uncovered temples adorned with bull’s heads and furniture and pillars made of stylized horns. Human-headed bulls were commonly carved into porticoes of important buildings in Sumer and Assyria. The bull god Apis was worshipped in ancient Egypt at Memphis, and Nandi the bull was revered in Hindu art and architecture. Theseus slew the Minotaur, and the central act in the cult of Mithras involves the slaying of a bull. The bull was a surrogate for the sacred king, sacrificed for the sake of his people.
The Spanish bullfight (where the matador almost always kills the bull) is a very ancient rite, maybe Thracian in origin. The Thracians were an early Indo-European tribe whose lands lay between the Black Sea in the east and the Aegean in the west. Greek and Roman accounts have them as especially warlike barbarians, ferocious and bloodthirsty. Plato said they were ‘extravagant and high-spirited’, but in this they were not much different from the Greeks’ other warlike neighbours: Celts, Persians, Scythians, Iberians and Carthaginians.
There is some evidence that it was from the Thracians that the Emperor Claudius took bullfighting to Rome, and that he introduced it into Spain when he instituted a short-lived ban on gladiatorial combat. Robert Graves, in The White Goddess, suggests more plausibly that there may have been an earlier introduction into Spain, in the third millennium BC, by Iberian settlers who had cultural and racial connections with Thrace.
Till the Cows Come Home Page 29