Bullfighting, animal individuality and human civilization. (vegan / vegans / veganism)

in the English language a dogfight
suggests one dog fighting another a cockfight suggests one [ __ ] a male chicken fighting another nobody would say that a cockfight means a human being stomping on a [ __ ] yeah but bullfighting is the exception when we talk about bullfighting we're generally not talking about one bullfighting another we're talking about a human being slaughtering a bowl in a public display yesterday twenty-nine-year-old bullfighter victor barrier was gored to death by a bull that he was slowly and agonizingly torturing and of course planning to kill the tragedy of the bullfighters death took place in a town in the east of spain called taro L I think that's how you pronounce it but that's not really important the astonishing thing is that that this bullfighters death or rather the bullfighting was being broadcast live on Spanish television nothing else that that's just incredibly shocking is that according to Spanish custom the mother of the bull who got this idiot to death had to be sent to the slaughterhouse and have a throat cut and she was killed in a horrible torturous painful agonizing way because Spanish custom says if a bull causes injury or death to all fighter then its mother has to be slaughtered this anecdote from mark raises a bunch of different memories for me first and foremost because I lived in the past on the border between France and Spain I could remember the surreal contrast because I did know vegans you know really serious vegan act is only a couple of course any really serious passionate vegan activist in that part of France none of them talk to me anymore um and you know you'd have these debates about these very fine points what about honey what about feeding you know what about cat food you know there is it naturally when you have a group of vegans sitting yeah everyone's already vegan you're not not debating most basic ideas and your topic with your day oh yeah on Saturday there's a there's a protest against the bullfighting anyway the contrast would just seem so hilarious it just seemed like oh yeah right you know in yeah here we are 21st century and this is a debate yeah it's we're still asking the question about you know torturing an animal to death in public as as a form of entertainment as a contrast to that when I was on the internet when I back then I had a blog talking about veganism within tumblr I remember there was a slogan that some people had as t-shirts and some people just had as a graphic say I support animals that kill their trainers I support freedom for animals that kill their their human captors this is being promoted as a political slogan like as a protest move within veganism and I know what they're talking about the talking about situations where you know a lion kills the lion lion tamer I think at that time an elephant had killed someone at the zoo and they were arguing no you know even if an elephant kills a human being the zoo that elephant should be set free that elephant didn't do anything wrong that elephant should be congratulated for towing to pick something heroic and something right and to me again mark obviously mark has none of these tendencies but he reminds me of that of that danger of vegans thinking that becoming ever more self-righteous ever more extreme ever more narrowly defined and ever more militant that we're going to become more more influential but the real question is how can we assemble this set of emotions and impulses we have into a really actionable program whether that's a program for public education or program for the pursuit of political change and you know we we have the saying in English that all legislation is based on animus it is a sad thing that when an elephant kills a human being people want to take revenge on that elephant and people want to want to kill that elephant but you know if we're ever going to move beyond being one percent of the population if we're ever going to motivate and reward people for getting on side with such simple and fundamental questions as refusing to wear leather refusing to eat meat the long-term pursuit of the end of the cycle of domestication exploitation of animals it's not going to be digging yourself in to defend the life of an elephant that's killed a human being even though I admit it appeals to me there's something grandiose you know this maybe that's the villain in me there's something villainous in not just wanting to rescue and free elephants from the circus but specifically wanting to rescue that elephant a picturesque you could reward the elephant that killed is human captors of wanting to rescue you know the bowl that killed the bullfighter um to be sure that's something that probably stirs many many many young and rebellious vegans but look the challenge ahead of us the next 20 years the next 200 years it's how to take those rebellious sediments and really do something useful with them two thousand years ago in ancient Rome the Romans used to torture and Massacre animals in the Colosseum or in amphitheaters all over the Roman world and yet in the year 2016 Spanish people are watching these animals being tortured and massacred in exactly the same way in what is effectively amphitheaters not much different to the ancient Romans I thought we had progressed I thought that Spain was decent sort of civilized country it appears I was wrong but I've also lived in several different parts of Asia where bullfighting exists in its own indigenous form and over here both fighting instead has the same meaning that you would expect it to have in parallel the cockfighting and dog fighting here where I am right now in kunming at least once a year they have bullfighting at the so-called stone forest stone forest is a local landmark I'm sure in the problems as a whole they have many other towns with that tradition where they get out two bulls and have one Bowl fight the other obviously to make it an event they have many many Bulls fight in the same day traditions of that kind are scattered around East Asia some of the outer islands of Japan still organize events of that kind with with bullfighting bowl and of course where I was in Laos just a short distance north of the capital city there was a major annual festival with bullfighting by that again by that definition not a human fighting a bull but having a series of bulls square off in a in a contest I was working inside the Lao government in a peculiar Department that's best known for publishing the government controlled newspaper but actually that department does a number of other interesting things different types of government communications and research there were a few other things aside from the newspaper that I learned a lot from about working inside that that department but our our intrepid reporters all of whom were government officials you understand all of them you know what we published there was one hundred percent a government-controlled message went out to report on on these bullfights and he did I mean I worked with the original draft obviously the final article that was published was was censored so I forget how much of the original description was in there but he wrote this this dramatic description of all the different elements of what was going on in the crowd among other things there you know the crowd really did feel afraid the Bulls would charge at one another but just as frequently they would get angry at the human surrounding them and charged into the crowd trying to either trying to escape or trying to you know knock over some of the people or both so the crowd was there they were not passively sitting on the ground watching this event they were standing and everyone in the crowd you could even see in the still photographs they were constantly ready to kind of sprint in fourth direction or another wanting to watch the spectacle but at the same time very much feeling that lives were in danger and you know the psychology of the crowd and the psychology the Bulls were all written up in this report it was handed to me to edit and prepare for for the press and one of the things the journalists or the government official you know observed he said you know many people were unprepared for how unique each of the animals was you know each of the animals really had his own psychology these are all bowls so they're all male so i can say he instead of it um you know that that sometimes there be a bull that was really massive had big shoulders and looked strong and people were expecting it to be aggressive but just its personality was was friendly one of the most anticipated matches the two bowls when put together just got along they were just friendly towards one another they sort of you know um nuzzle each other and you know had the equivalent of a conversation looking to there was no hostility and then on the other hand some of the smaller bowls turned out to be really tenacious and plucky and please the crowd with their bloodlust or what have you at one point I remember the article noted that the fans of the sport would record how deeply the horns of the Bulls had penetrated into the other bowls when they gorge one another which didn't happen all that often as you can imagine and the journalists turned to me and he said what I don't understand is how they actually measure the depth of the wound he was imagining these fans of the sport inserting a a ruler into the wound on the the suffering bull at the time I suggested to him that no no he had it the wrong way around what they would measure was how much blood was on the horn of the winning bolt you can see these were the distractions I had when I worked these sorts of jobs while at the same time doing research applying for humanitarian work teaching myself both pally and lotion in subways subways an intensely meaningless life I was leading I guess I learned a lot I learned a lot of that job if I stayed any longer I probably would have learned less and less of each passing day but for a short time at a job like that I learned a lot and I had access to a lot of government documents government research ngot United Nations documents rendered to the government in English and so on so on I learned a lot not just not just about bullfighting um you know the sense in which I have mixed feelings about this is that by contrast you know many people I spoke to connected to Japan including one amount professors who was Japanese one of my friends who's Japanese but living in Canada they all remark to me that Japan is now such an intensely urbanized culture that children grow up completely alienated from having any notion of what these animals are now i would add what these animals are like in the wild but these children are are alienated even from knowing what the domesticated animals are like and i've been told many times when you ask a Japanese child to draw a picture of fish or chicken they'll draw like a small red cube for fish or they'll draw something similar they'll draw you know a diced white cube for chicken and you know one Japanese person told me that you know in person and then I remember I mentioned it to my professor who's Japanese and conversation he said yes he said that was incredibly common incredibly widespread because there is just no sense of connection 22 what these animals are let alone who they are and that report on bullfighting and Laos you know as brutal and as terrible as it might be you could see that this event which is of course carried on for the sake of tradition and again it's a bullfighting another Bowl not not a human that the people participating and witnessing it even though that's not why they're there even though they may be there just out of bloodlust or what have you they really are forced to witness the unique personalities of these animals uh that the the animals have you told different characters and different different personality types let's leave it at that you know and they get to see some of the natural behaviors for these animals because of course in nature I'm you know domesticated bowl now now barely resembles well okay it resembles to some extent the Oryx it'sit's wild ancestor but these are these are animals that have been very much transformed by domestication but still you're getting to see some sort of a behavior that you know it shouldn't be for human entertainment but it is something that comes to them naturally so when I was in France living on the border between France and Spain in exactly that area French Catalonia where the different cattle and provinces all had to decide whether or not that we're going to ban this sport the different French provinces had to decide where the whether or not they were going to ban the sport or to what extent they were going to ban the support I mean it really is one of those moments where people have to look in the mirror and ask what is civilization anyway does amino mark here says repeatedly that this reminds him of the brutality of ancient Rome for most of Europe clinging to the Tattered Remnants of ancient Roman civilization defined civilization that that that was refinement that was high culture and genuinely in that part of France and Spain you literally walk past the remnants of the ancient Roman it's it's a very hard thing to look back at human history and say all of this was an error for centuries and centuries we thought tobacco was good for us we thought it was a medicine or we thought it was harmless and now we know that's an error we just have to limit about for centuries and centuries we thought that this sort of use of animals was precisely what differentiated us from barbarians this is what made us civilized this was our high culture and to look at all that and and shrug it off as only so many centuries of error it's very hard thing to do a lot of people in Spain a very upset and you know the the Prime Minister is paying tributes to the guy and saying what a wonderful man he was to be honest I couldn't give a [ __ ] that this bullfighter died in fact when I heard the news this morning I had a smile on my face I would applaud the bull for killing the guy I couldn't yeah I mean you know if you're going to spend your life torturing and massacring animals in this disgusting out of date sort of ancient Roman way then you know if the ball turns around and kills you did you get exactly what you deserve Victor barrio got exactly what he deserved