Bull 1
Humans 0
It was the sound of ten thousand people screaming with the pain of the same wound—ten thousand people who, when they had recovered from the shock, found themselves completely unharmed. But that was the end of that bullfight, and indeed of all bullfighting, for the news spread rapidly.
–Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End
My dear wife n I honeymooned in Green Spain. Wonderful. But we pulled into Madrid? mb Salamanca? and while settling in to the hotel or parador room, we noticed a TV. So we open some wine and click it on, a bit of news, some soaps or something and o look a bullfight! Cool let’s watch that! After a few minutes (it must have been a highlight reel, bull victories interleaved with bull defeats) we were truly shaken. Shut off the TV, left the wine and went for a walk. Not what we were expecting!
Thinking back on it now, I am reminded of Iain M Banks Player of Games, where he goes to the opponent’s home systems or something and the TV/media thing in his room has what can only be described as The Torture Channel (and worse).
How do you figure when you post this under “delightful creatures”?
A panicked, doomed bull is delightful?
Wish I could say that never happened to me… pre-teen kids playing video games of assassination and torture right in front of their pareints, adults calmly watching stuff like the torture episode of Firefly or Mel Gibson’s Jesus-torture movie without showing a shred of empathy… happens all the time.
My sympathies have always been with the bull.
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Bro, do you even symbolism?
Exactly what came to mind for me.
well, the bull getting some sweet sweet revenge is pretty delightful. and what an incredible leap that was!
“Made them uncomfortable”
… thanks, I just had a Sauvignon Blanc/keyboard intersection event. 
Go Team Taurus!!111!1!elebenty!!!
I sure hope the meat eaters expressing shock and outrage at the spectacle of bullfights consider the slow, utterly unspectacular lives and deaths that their gruesome, factory-farmed meals experience.
It’s all well and good to feel moralistic about someone else’s barbarism but it’s a lot more difficult to think about your own when taste and convenience shatter even the flimsiest of ethical concerns.
Is it a bird? Is it a 'plane? …
Probably one of the reasons hunting is experiencing a renaissance. Also, more and more people are ensuring the meat they eat is farmed and slaughtered ethically, so it’s certainly not always the case that people criticising the protracted and deliberate torture of an animal are being indefensibly hypocritical.
I think you are already aware of this though.
And whilst I don’t like to see humans killed by animals, or y’know - at all, the unspoken contract these spectators have entered into with the bull sort of does include the possibility of it maiming or killing some of them. Up close and personal as they have chosen to be with it.
Like, if you get killed by a bull at a bullfight, I feel bad for you son. But, well… duh.
Superfluous entertainment is the same thing as food. Got it.
They are comparable insofar as they are unnecessary indulgences in greed and speciesism. If one can get nutrition without causing unnecessary harm to a thinking, feeling creature, then there is a moral obligation to try doing so, and yet all but a vanishingly small percentage of the food supply in the US and many other developed countries comes from a rather brutal factory farming system.
You’re really minimizing the overwhelming extent to which factory farming dominates the food supply:
The above quotes figures specific to the US, but they are similar to most developed countries.
It’s also a bit of an oxymoron to use a phrase like “ethically slaughtered,” particularly in a context where meat-eating is simply a convenience, and not a necessity. When one considers the health problems that afflict the US, and weighs them against the profound benefits of vegan and vegetarian diets, it is difficult to justify eating meat on any basis except stubborn speciesism.
The same kind of hypocrisy flared up recently with regards to the dog/cat eating festival in China. When people compartmentalize their concern for animals, yes, that is extremely hypocritical, particularly when farm animals and traditional pets are comparably intelligent and emotive. The positive angle, from a psychoanalytical perspective, is that on some level these meat eaters see something wrong with abusing animals for the sake of convenience (which includes merely enjoying the taste of their flesh), but they project their misgivings onto some easily identifiable Other, hence the popularity of expressing outrage at foreign, but hardly ever domestic, contexts.
Agreed - so find me a way. I already looked into vegetarianism and it ends the lives of more thinking, feeling creatures [trigger warning, .PDF link] than feeding on large mammals does. Particularly when you count insect life, which I personally do.
Best thing I have found so far is growing my own garden and hunting large game on my own land using illegally primitive methods. Sadly, I am not very successful at either of these things.
Yeah, I bet you do.
Are you sure your common rebuttal isn’t already covered by this?
You’re really minimizing the overwhelming extent to which factory farming dominates the food supply:
Maybe “industrial farming” is a better term there, since it includes the kind of Agribiz I think you’re talking about.
