Bull running is a traditional practice in Spain. After having been popularised abroad by Hemingway, it is also a magnet for tourism. So you may be surprised to read that I am completely unacquainted with it, have never been around it being done, etc. This is not just a consequence–perhaps it even is the cause!–of me thinking that running before bulls that weigh more than 500kg is, putting it euphemisticly, less than the best idea humanity has ever come up with.
The bull runnings started out from the custom of moving the bulls from the place where they were kept to the place where bullfights occurred. Youths decided that while the bulls were being conducted it would be cool to prove their courage by exposing themselves to them. Eventually this, instead of being stopped on the grounds of being very dangerous and a public order programme, became a hallowed custom. This is why you know we’re talking about Spain 
Bulls during the bull-runnings in Pamplona, for the feast of San Fermín, go at an average of 24km/h–6.6…m/s. They weigh upwards of 500kg, for instance the one which recently killed a runner last week weighed 575kg. So they embody a kinetic energy of about 12500 joules. If you think exposing yourself to 12500j directed over a surface of only a few squared mm–the tips of two horns, at most–is a fun idea, then you, too, can become a bull runner!
Before you make your mind, though, I would advice you to watch the following. Or you could simply take my word for it: being gored by bulls is not fun.
Another matter is bullfighting, something with which I’m not well acquainted either. For whatever reason, Galicia is not a region given to these passtimes. Nonetheless, while bull-running is plainly stupid–res ipsa loquitur–I’m not quite so sure about bullfights. There is a point to be made that they are a cruel and anachronistic celebration, a festival of death and torture, but I think that may well be selling them short. I think there may well be a non-trivial artistic component in them, something that has cultural value even today. Much of the opposition against them comes from a sensibility towards animal rights that is foreign to us and, why not say it, seems like Anglo-Saxon prejudice to a great extent. I’m unconvinced we should import this way of thinking about animals, sentimentalised and certainly divorced from the cycle of life and death on which we all, with or without our will, depend. It is the same way of thinking that recoils from considering the slaughtering of animals for food, or their presentation in recognisably animal forms, yet does not recoil from eating the same animals if they have been chopped and disguised so that they do not remind of a living being anymore. Given that, I prefer a conscious understanding that our life requires other living beings–animals, plants, fungi, bacteria–to die. At least, on this understanding respect and insight can grow when regarding that sacrifice. So I suppose my conclusion is that, being completely ignorant of what cultural value bullfighting has, I am, nonetheless, unsympathetic to similarly ignorant attempts to forbid it, on the basis of foreign and particularist values of dubious worth.
Tags: animal rights, bull-running, bullfighting, bulls, cruelty, culture, pamplona, san fermin, spain, tradition
