Perhaps the most intriguing depiction of interaction between humans and bulls is in the famous bull leaping fresco at Knossos. Sir Arthur Evans interpreted the activity as young people disporting themselves in a kind of ritual dance, vaulting and leaping over a bull. But there is another interpretation put forward by a German geologist and author, Hans Georg Wunderlich, who examined the structure of the palace at Knossos and published his findings in English in 1975 in The Secret of Crete. He concluded that the building could never have been a palace for the living and was more likely a charnel house, a huge necropolis, containing an arena where human sacrifices took place. The ‘bull vaulting game’ was in fact a ferocious form of human sacrifice, which involved young men and women being gored and trampled to death as a ceremonial offering to a sacred bull, and was the origin of the legend of the Minotaur. Since then, Wunderlich’s findings have found support from other scholars.
Although bullfighting is often linked back to Rome, where human contests against animals were commonly held for entertainment, it has deeper pagan roots. It is not a coincidence that some of the oldest bullrings in Spain are built on or near the sites of Mithraic temples. The early Church’s foremost rival in faith was the mysterious and powerful cult of Mithras, the pagan god of Persian mythology, widely worshipped in ancient Rome, especially by soldiers. The killing of the sacred bull (tauroctony) is the central symbolic act of the cult, and was commemorated in the Mithraeum wherever the Roman army was stationed. The ceremony of bull killing was depicted in art and stone throughout the Roman Empire, even as far north as Hadrian’s Wall, where a cave-like temple to the cult of Mithras was found in 1949 at Brocolitia, near the Roman fort and important crossing point on the North Tyne at Chesters. The early Church was not sympathetic to the bull, likening it to the devil. At the Council of Toledo in 447, the devil was described as ‘a large black monstrous apparition with horns on his head, cloven hoofs, hair, ass’s ears, claws, fiery eyes, gnashing teeth, a huge phallus and sulphurous smell’. This could have described any of the bulls depicted in representations of the Mithraic sacrifice.
As early as the third century BC, Iberian cattle were known to be different from other domestic cattle. They were ferocious, with an instinct to attack without provocation, and would try to kill their adversary. The Iberians used these wild cattle in warfare. In 228 BC, the defenders of a town besieged by Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barca, gathered a herd of the wild cattle, harnessed them to wagons loaded with resinous wood lit with torches and drove the ensemble at the enemy. Barca was killed and his army destroyed. Even at this date in Baetica (Andalusia), games were being held in which men showed bravery and skill with bulls before killing them with a lance or axe.
This continued after the Visigoths conquered Spain in AD 415, with spectacles and games involving men pitting their strength against fierce bulls. After the Muslim invasion and annexation of Andalusia in 711, these evolved into mounted bullfighting contests between Moorish chieftains and Christian knights, either in arenas, the city square or open fields outside the towns. By the end of the eleventh century, these fiestas of bullfighting were well established, particularly in the south of Spain, and have continued into present times. The running of the bulls (encierro) during the Fiesta de San Fermín in Pamplona is probably the best known. Numerous people are trampled and gored, and yet its popularity only seems to increase. People (mostly men) come from all over the world to dress up in white shirt and trousers, tie a red sash around their waist and take their chance against a herd of bulls stampeding through the narrow streets towards the arena where they are going to be fought in the afternoon.
Religious festivals and royal weddings were celebrated by fights in the local plaza, where noblemen would compete for royal favour while the common people enjoyed the spectacle. Until the eighteenth century, bullfighting in Spain was reserved for the nobility. A single mounted knight armed with a lance fought a bull in a closed arena. This goes back at least to the time of Charlemagne (ninth century). The first Castilian to lance a bull from horseback is supposed to have been El Cid (1043–99). There is a record in a chronicle from 1128 that there were bullfights at Saldañato to celebrate the marriage of Alfonso VII of León and Castile to Berengaria, daughter of Ramon Berenguer III, Count of Barcelona. By the time of the Austrian accession in 1516, bullfighting had become a necessary part of every court occasion. Charles V endeared himself to his subjects by celebrating his son Philip II’s birthday with the lancing of a bull.
For over 600 years the fight was the preserve of mounted noblemen with a lance, later a short spear, fighting a bull that had been manoeuvred into position in the ring by men on foot luring it with capes. The House of Bourbon disapproved of bullfighting, so when Philip V succeeded to the Spanish throne in 1700, the aristocracy gradually abandoned their part in the mounted spectacle. The Crown’s disapproval had little effect on the wider public enthusiasm, and in a reversal of roles, the mounted matador became the supporting player (the picador), and the man on foot took the leading role as the matador. In Portugal, the mounted spectacle continues, with the bull being lanced from horseback and then wrestled into submission by a team of ‘bull-grabbers’.
There is a spiritual aspect to the ceremony, which fuses ancient pagan superstition, myth and ritual with Christianity. It is possible to see in it a symbol of the tension between nature and nurture, unredeemed barbarism and Christian revelation, concern for God’s creation and human salvation. But the medieval Church did not see it as anything of the kind. In 1567, Pope Pius V banned bullfighting, excommunicating Christian noblemen who participated in or facilitated it and refusing Christian burial to anyone killed in the ring. This had little effect on popular Spanish passion for the corrida, and eventually the Church was forced to relent. Bullfights became part of the fabric of Spanish social and community life, inserted into the Christian calendar and held on feast days and saints’ days; indeed, in many places, the opening day of the bullfighting season is Easter Sunday. And every bullring has a chapel, where the matador goes to pray and can receive the sacraments (including extreme unction) before he goes into the ring.
Spain’s oldest stone bullring, at Ronda, was built in 1785 in a surprisingly intimate neoclassical style on a spectacular site almost on the cliff edge on which the town perches. The sandy sienna floor rises gently from the sides into the centre, and standing there you realize how terrifyingly far away you are from any refuge. Even when the stalls are empty and there are no bulls, it is an eerie and unnerving experience and gives an idea of the raw courage needed to face an animal determined to kill you. The size of the arena floor is the same in every bullring, whatever the number of seats for spectators; the only exceptions are those at high altitudes, which are slightly smaller to compensate for altitude fatigue.
Hemingway said the bullfight is the only art form in which the artist risks death every time he practises it. He might be on to something here about the Spanish fascination with death and its nearness. The Caballeros, my daughter-in-law’s family, own a hacienda near Seville where they grow oranges, almonds and olives. It is part of a tract of land given to one of their ancestors by the Spanish king, along with the title of marqués, for trouncing the Portuguese in some conflict or other a few hundred years ago. The hacienda is built in the Andalusian style in a square courtyard just like the Miuras’. At one time they kept a large herd of cattle. The main difference between this place and a similarly sized English estate (1,200 acres) is that the family’s ancestors are still here, not in a nearby village church, but interred in the walls of the courtyard. They lie in the mortuary of a little chapel in what look like pizza ovens, a constant reminder of the inevitability and closeness of death.
1 Ferruccio Lamborghini, the car manufacturer (who incidentally was born under the sign of Taurus), was so enthralled by the bullfight that he adopted the fighting bull as his marque in 1963 after visiting the Miuras’ ganadería the year before. The names given to his cars are nearly all bullfighti
ng related: Miura, Espada (the matador’s curved steel sword and a synonym for the matador himself), Islero, Jarama, Jalpa, Diabolo, Murcielago, Gallardo, Aventador, Veneno, Huracan, Reventon, Urus, Asterion.
CHAPTER 19
Sacred Cows
‘O Mary, go and call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
Across the sands of Dee.’
The western wind was wild and dank with foam,
And all alone went she.
Charles Kingsley, ‘The Sands of Dee’
THERE IS A pervasive modern Western view that if only humans would leave the natural world alone, it would balance itself out in perfect harmony. In fact, it would be better if humans did not exist at all, but seeing as they do, their numbers should be limited and their activities confined to as little of the natural world as possible. This is the main justification for the so-called rewilding movement. The people who support it are usually vociferous opponents of bullfighting. They cite cruelty, barbarism, causing suffering to an animal in an unnecessary rite and failing to respect its dignity – which is more or less what was done to the animals in a Dutch experiment of ‘rewilding’.
The Oostvaardersplassen is a unique Dutch ‘nature reserve’, 25 miles east of Amsterdam, on 22 square miles (about 15,000 acres) of almost completely flat, fenced-in polder, reclaimed in the 1950s and 60s, much of it well below sea level and only kept relatively dry by sophisticated drainage and pumping systems. It forms part of the recently created twelfth Dutch province of Flevoland, more or less in the centre of the country. Since the end of the last Ice Age, the area had lain at the bottom of the Zuiderzee until a huge network of dykes was dug in the 1930s to keep out the sea and transform it into a freshwater lake. Later it was drained to create Flevoland from the rich silt of the lake bed.
Despite being some of the most fertile soil in Europe, where almost anything would grow, while the soil was drying out the Dutch government was persuaded by a group of conservationists and ecologists to turn part of the reclaimed province into a ‘Paleolithic’ landscape in a grand experiment to return it to the state in which they believed it would have been at some point in pre-history – had it not, of course, been under water. They introduced creatures they believed would have naturally populated the northern European landmass before mankind dispossessed them. And they left them alone in their enclosure to see what would happen. There was no management or feeding; the animals were to take care of themselves in a ‘natural’ existence.
Where some of the species had become extinct they had to settle for the next best thing. And in the case of cattle, as they had no aurochs, they brought in some Heck cattle. These multiplied, as did the red deer, which had been captured in Scotland, and the horses, imported from Poland, and the foxes and the wolves. In fact, all the large mammals reproduced so prolifically that they formed what could, with a certain amount of rose-tinted licence, be said to resemble the great migratory herds of the African plains. The German magazine Der Spiegel called the Oostvaardersplassen ‘the Serengeti behind the dykes’. Visitors paid up to €40 each to take tours of the reserve.
As the animals proliferated, they began to starve. The founders refused to do anything about it, insisting that nature must be allowed to run its course, because nature knows best. Many animals collapsed from exhaustion, or drowned in the wetlands, too weak to clamber out. The birds survived because they could fly away when the food ran out and seek sustenance elsewhere. During the harsh winter of 2005, commuters travelling into Amsterdam were greeted by the spectacle of emaciated cattle, deer and horses crowding against the perimeter fence, desperate for food, while foxes and corvids harried and preyed on them. They died in droves like inmates in an extermination camp, unable to escape, their carcases picked clean by the predators with which they were forced to share their miserable captivity.
This caused a public outcry and forced the State Forestry Service, which is nominally in charge, to introduce the culling of animals that the wardens judge to be too weak to survive the winter. Between 30 and 50 per cent of the large herbivores are now shot before they can starve to death. But all the land that can be grazed is still eaten back to the sod, with only a few unpalatable species, like dandelions, showing above the ground. And to try to satisfy their hunger, the wild horses and deer have killed hundreds of thousands of trees by stripping the bark off them. The trees’ rotting remains are spread over huge areas, which look as if a hurricane has swept over and flattened them. The loss of shelter that the trees gave the hungry grazing animals has resulted in even more cruelty during the winter, when they have nothing to eat anyway and are trying to survive off their accumulated fat. There is no chance of regeneration of the trees, because every seedling is eaten almost before it pokes through the soil. This is an ideologue’s paradise. Any criticism of the mess and cruelty that is being perpetrated is condemned as ‘middle-class aestheticism’. Why should a landscape have to conform to any particular canon of beauty? Leaving land ‘natural’ is its ideal state and any human intervention illegitimate.
‘Rewilding’ is meaningless, based on ideology rather than reality or historical accuracy. The assumption is that at some time in the past, northern Europe (and by implication the rest of the world) supported a range of wild animals that lived in a kind of ecological harmony and that it would be a good thing if such an arcadia could be recreated. But nobody knows how things were in the Paleolithic era, and in any event, many of the species that might have existed then no longer do. ‘Wilding’ would be a more accurate way to describe it. But even then, its supporters ignore the fact that the whole ‘reserve’ is just that, a reserve, fenced round and kept dry artificially by electric or diesel-powered pumps.
The ecologists and conservationists seem blind to the truth that nature left unmanaged produces anarchy, deserts, lingering cruel deaths and misery. They seem to believe that nature is benevolent and wise, and don’t recognize or even care that allowing it to run unchecked inevitably leads to horrific results. Nothing as extreme as Oostvaardersplassen is being proposed (yet) by ecologists in Britain, but that is perhaps because a radical application of wilding would tend to put people off. It is better to approach such things by degrees so that people don’t notice. Although in typically provocative fashion, environmental activist George Monbiot has praised the Oostvaardersplassen experiment and published a manifesto to ‘rewild the world’. Of course, Monbiot and his urban ideologues will not be the ones to suffer when all the farmers and country people have been cleansed from the land. One farmer I was talking to about Oostvaardersplassen pointed out that if he kept cattle in these conditions in winter and allowed them to starve to death with no shelter, he would be prosecuted and probably banned from keeping animals again. Why should these rewilding ideologues be treated differently?
This Dutch experiment inspired a new movement – Rewilding Europe – with the belief that what they call ‘new nature’ can be created. As a result, every year for the last few decades, encouraged and paid for by the EU, tens of thousands of acres of marginal farmland in Europe have been abandoned to ‘nature’ to achieve something that generations of people in the past would have thought ridiculous: replacing wilderness that we have apparently lost. The same thing is proposed for the depopulating expanses of the American Midwest. And it looks as if the British government intends to try something similar with tracts of British countryside that are deemed not to be needed to produce food or accommodate the people who live there. This seems to me a denial of our sacred trust to care for creation, to manage the natural world by culling over-populous predatory species and encouraging the weaker endangered ones.
The Oostvaardersplassen reserve is by no means the first effort to enclose cattle and leave them to it, although it was the first where the enclosers watched the cattle starve to death. Land has long been enclosed for game reserves and pleasure parks by landowners who can afford to keep animals or just arrange the landscape t
o suit their fancy. Enclosing land around a gentleman’s seat to give him privacy, or a place for his family to disport themselves, or to contain a herd of deer or other game, became very popular in England after the Crown relaxed the forest laws. At one time there were nearly 2,000 such private parks, most of which have not survived changing fashions or financial stringency.
In 1225, Henry III enacted the Charta Forestae, which removed many of the restrictions on land imposed by William the Conqueror. Over the century and a half following the Conquest, about a third of the land had become concentrated under Crown control. The Crown had the dominant right to use the land to preserve wildlife and for hunting. The prospect of penalties such as death, blinding and mutilation discouraged people from breaking the forest law – mainly taking game – though it was hard to catch miscreants. As William I had taken England by conquest, in feudal law it became his absolute possession and he was entitled to dispose of it as he saw fit. He declared large areas to be ‘forest’, which meant that the occupants of the villages and towns that lay within these areas found themselves subject to a set of rules that overrode the rights they had enjoyed under the common law. This limited their freedom to use the land they occupied for their own benefit and incidentally discouraged improvement. A present-day analogy, although it cannot be taken too far, are the rules in the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, which curtail many of the rights that occupiers of land had previously enjoyed, for the apparent purpose of preserving wild flora and fauna. The statute overrides any common-law rules that conflict with it and that previously obtained.
One of the effects (probably unintended) of releasing land from direct Crown control was to free certain larger landowners to enclose private parks, some of which they stocked with cattle for the sport of hunting the ‘wild’ bulls. Herds of cattle were established in many places, particularly at Blair Atholl, Cumbernauld, Drumlanrig and Cadzow in Scotland, and Barnard Castle, Chartley, Hoghton, Chillingham and Lyme Park in England. Even Windsor Forest had a herd of white cattle established in 1277.
Till the Cows Come Home Page 30