I did a quick search here and in SE++ because I figured it would come up in SE a lot faster but I couldn't find anything.
Anyone seen
this?
As much as I would love to post the pics straight up in the thread I don't think it would be a good idea and I'm warning everyone now that the images and video clip in that news post are
EXTREMELY GRAPHIC.
So Julio Aparicio is one of Spain's most prominent bullfighters. During a bullfight that was taking place during a festival called the Festival of St. Isidro the guy was gored through his throat. Frankly I feel like he got a taste of his own medicine and I do not feel sorry for him in the slightest. However I wanted to know what D&D thought of bullfighting.
Bullfighting is considered a blood sport and considered by many to be incredibly cruel. The bulls are basically tortured leading up to the fight and then they die a slow painful death in front of 25,000 screaming people. Bullfighting is popular in Spain, Portugal, and some parts of France.
I think bullfighting is disgusting and is a representation of the lower parts of mankind. Yes there is a lot of culture attached especially in places like Spain but for me cultural relativity can only go so far. According to a Gallup poll in 2002 almost 70% of Spaniards claimed to have little to no interest in bullfighting. Good for you Spain so why not just do away with it?
So D&D what is your take on this brutal blood sport and how do you feel for Julio and his fellow matadors? Also someone told me that matador translated means killer or murderer but I don't think that's true. Anyone know for sure?
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I think bull-fighting is on the same ethical level as any sort of animal fighting: completely unacceptable. I find it ludicrous that we demonize dog fighting, but tolerate bull fighting. It is never ethical to torture another animal, especially not for sport.
It has been my experience that bull fighting defenders rely on the "culture" defense, but that's laughable. There is a long tradition of slavery in the West, to cite only one example. Tradition does not justify the continuation of a horrid practice.
Edit: As far as the matador who was gored through the throat goes, I wish he had been gored sooner.
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bullfighting is stupid.
it's hard to really criticize cruelty to a few bulls when we are mindbogglingly cruel to millions and millions of animals in our own nation, though.
I'd like to see fair bullfights, wherein the matador is naked and unarmed. I think the outcome would be different and more enjoyable.
edit: God damn, I just looked at the pictures. He's gonna be living off of jello for a while. But what bullshit is this? More matadors came in and killed the bull. Fuck that shit, it won fair and square. It should be set free to roam the streets.
I've seen plenty of supposedly liberal young Americans defend it as the sacrosanct tradition of another culture, which we have no right to criticize.
Fuck it. Let them have their culture then.
I'm still rooting for the bull.
fixed for ultimate justice.
See this for me is where cultural relativity goes out the window.
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I somehow rationalize eating meat, even though the amount of cruelty connected to my regular consumption of meat is probably magnitudes larger than the whole bullfighting thing; smaller crowds though. So yeah, if I lived in Spain, and thought it was cool to watch every so often, or was a traditionalist member of the culture, I'd probably be O.K. with it.
When people say they're rooting for the animal in these cases, I wonder how internally consistent that really is. Would these people, given the option to save one life, choose a cow over a meat eater, or is it something specific about the celebrity and the sport attached to the animal suffering? Even if that is the case, do they really believe the life of a bull is worth more than the life of a human?
Then again, I also feel that I would try to save a convicted man, just to have him executed. So these people probably aren't rooting for the animal so much as they're rooting for the man to die, I suppose. That's probably a different feeling.
apparently if the fight goes on long enough, they'll just bring out a gun and shoot the bull. It's really not supposed to win.
It's a little easier for vegetarians / vegans to criticize it, I suppose.
Besides, people eat those animals (or are healthier because of drugs tested on them, not sure which you're talking about here). And as far as I know, most meat-packing plants don't go out of their way to torture cattle for hours. Seems like a shot with the pressure gun and they're down and out.
What is bear baiting? I've never heard of this.
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He was probably referencing factory farming, which is rather cruel.
IIRC, something they did back in Shakespearean times. Catch a bear, chain it in a ring, chuck a pack of vicious dogs in the ring with it. Take bets on who wins, or how many dogs go down before the bear dies.
ed: there's also the dancing bear spectacle, where you chain a bear onto a metal platform and heat up the platform until it "dances."
Animal welfare groups had succeeded in passing laws against it in the 1800s.
Hell, the stupid sport isn't even that ingrained in the culture.
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I don't have sympathy for people who voluntarily participate in bullfighting. They are consciously choosing to:
1. Step into a ring with a bull
2. Torture and then kill it for no reason other than amusement
Which makes them both stupid and mean. Obviously, the bull has no choice in the matter. So yeah, I root for the bull.
But please spare me the "I'm rooting for the bulls" idiocy. It might feel good to say, but I watched a matador get hurt pretty badly out there in the plaza and there is no satisfaction to be found in it.
Fun story I used to work at a Steakhouse, that sells prime beef to rich fuckers (it's not that good though, compared to other places that spike into the 200 a plate area). They electrocute the cows via probe up anus, and it's painless. Reasons for doing this have something to do with anal tissue, none the less it made me look at beef dinner a bit odd when dining out.
The "cruel" to millions and millions mostly stems from a lot of really bad plants, and a lot of lunatics that then assume all plants are like this, not the case. Yeah, more are bad then good, but lets not slam the entire meat industry as being a bunch of monsters.
You can also find "safe meat", by which I mean locally grown and slaughtered animals. This isn't practical for most people, and I blame the entire food industry for it, but you can get a free range pig or cow, killed by the farmer and cut up for you as well, at a decent price. Same goes for hogs, hens, lamb, it's actually rather economical.
I can go in on a hog and get off cheap, and it's an animal I know was raise well and is doubly tasty to boot.
Meat is good for you, the vegan line is rather insane here. Soy protein has issues, at best you've got whey (which many people are allergic to) which has it's own problems. Nothing wrong with a correctly sized steak or chop, served up with a healthy portion of veg on the side. But there is a crap ton fucked about your generic prison grade fatty roast eaten with potatoes and cheese.
And yes dude had it coming, you fuck with animals and they react. Chalk my sympathy level on this one up to Timmothy Treadwell and his "I got ate by a bear" stupdity.
For those of you who have never actually seen a bullfight or know what actually happens during one, there are a few articles written by a columnist from ESPN a few years ago about being in Pamplona and the whole experience.
The bullfight itself
The running of the bulls
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I've thought about writing more in depth about it, to be perfectly honest, as my short description will definitely miss some of the details here. Basically it was just really instructive about the nature of cruelty, machismo, and the animal in man and all that. There's a reason Hemingway was so obsessed with it. To see those guys strut out there in their traje de luces, just oozing sexuality, carefully and artfully dominating a bull in a weird, animalistic dance really sucked me in more than one would expect just based on the superficial description. The experience of being in a crowd in an ancient stadium where there were butt grooves worked into the stone seating all over enhances it, and then feeling yourself being involuntarily pulled into the whole mob mentality of cheering for a bull's death is pretty much the only time I've ever been able to personally feel the sensation of losing your mind a bit in a crowd that is so frequently described.
They kill six bulls over the night, and I thought the first murder was one of the more horrific things I'd ever seen. What I didn't realize at the time, as explained to me by a tour guide afterwards, was that was one of the quickest deaths you'll ever see, but sitting up in the stands and seeing it felt like my whole chest was being seized and it took a real act of will to keep looking. The sword just thrust in between the shoulder blades, the bull bucked about two to three times, extremely violently, then just fell over and died. All the others got longer and more grotesque, including one that got thrust at twice with the sword (because the first bounced off the shoulder blades), before walking around coughing up blood with the sword lodged in it, finally falling over to the cheers of the crowd after what felt like an eternity, only to have the bull stand back up before someone came in with the small knife they use to stab it in the spinal cord and sever the brain from the nervous system in attempt to be "humane." What was perhaps even weirder, more chilling, was the quickness with which I inured myself to the violence. By the end, after just six bulls, I felt like a connosieur, carefully judging the matador's performance and admiring the bull's valor in the face of impossible odds. It seemed like some dark art by the end, and the killing strike was judged on style, not on its ability to evoke a reaction in me. That was already over.
There's lot more detail to fill in, but the point of it is this -- never before in my sheltered little life have I felt so tangibly in contact with the more primitive elements of humanity, and in fact it was a beautiful, beautiful performance, if also cruel.
I probably wouldn't go to a second bullfight, although I wouldn't preclude it on principle, but I definitely wouldn't deem to judge a cultural ritual that others enjoy. It is cruel, it is nasty, it is violent, but if you don't believe such things are commonplace, in fact ubiquitous, in the natural world, then you're being naive. As another poster said, simply participating in modern society probably does something to contribute to horrific suffering of an animal somewhere. It's a little tricky to be completely altruistic about this. It's man v. beast. It's a part of our history, it's a part of who we are. And to say you're rooting for the bull is to just be ignorant, if you ask me.
Soooo ... I dunno ... I can't necessarily defend it, like if it went away I wouldn't terribly miss it or anything, but I think those who are passing judgment without having actually seen one in person don't necessarily know what they're talking about in this instance.
It was a strangely enlightening experience.
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You guys would have loved the Colosseum.
It really did completely change the way I thought about Hemingway, too, reading Rising Sun shortly after I saw that fight, then going on to study his work in college.
Anyway, yeah -- there's a lot more to it than just killing a bull for public spectacle.
No one's saying they're okay, I don't even think that TGEM's entire post even alluded to the concept of it being okay. We are a violent, predatory species, and this type of thing has been part of our culture since literally the dawn of civilization. I think the point was that you should factor that in to your logic before passing judgement.
It takes a lot more than less than a hundred years of PETA activism to enlighten a species.
And loving the Colosseum would hardly make us unique or perverse. As a matter of fact, we'd be in that stone building, one of the great structures of Roman architecture, soaking it all up and loving the ritual along with everyone else, Emperor included. That's the point, it's part of who we are, and you're sarcastic response trying to paint me as perverse or backwards only makes you look like the ignorant one in my eyes.
The cruelty.
Hunters can be cruel, and I condemn those that are, but I recognize you can hunt without being unnecessarily cruel.
No bullfight exists that is not drawn out and cruel to the animal.
I'm not angry about your story though and I understand what you are saying.
Reminds me of the Radiolab story about the breeding of domestic foxes. Pretty interesting if you really look at it all, if you ask me.