El Torero, You Are So Cruel

Oh, the romanticism in bull fighting! It's a sport! It's entertainment! It's an artistic display of death! In most Spanish speaking countries, it is a great event drawing stadiums full of specators. And for many people world-wide, there is a great parallel drawn between Georges Bizet's Opera Carmen and bull fighting, for obvious reasons. Perhaps this helps to romanticize bull-fighting.

Maybe it's just me and maybe I'm being ethnocentric, but living in America, growing up as a semi-privileged middle class white kid, I can't quite grasp the concept of bull fighting as romantic. In fact, as far as I understand it, bull fighting is the rough and violent equivalent to playing with your food. It's a cruel sport. It's inhumane. Where is the entertainment in watching a poor animal, in this case, a bull, being tortured and injured until it is so weak and defenseless that it cowers before the Torero waiting for him to finally ease its pain with his shining sword? How is this considered romantic? How is this ethical?

I understand that these bulls are raised for the slaughter, but don't they deserve a humane death with as little pain and suffering as possible? Don't they deserve compassion? How can anyone justify putting a bull in a ring, teasing it, stabbing it multiple times in the neck, and making it suffer before finally killing it in the name of human entertainment? Maybe it's just because I don't understand the culture, but I can't wrap my head around bull fighting. Everything about bull fighting goes against the nature of the event. People cheer, throw roses at the Torero, clap and laugh. The Toreros are adorned with brightly colored outfits and red capes. The Picadors spear the bull in the neck with spears of vivid celebratory colors. If a person weren't paying attention to this event closely, it could be mistaken for a party, a celebration, a happy occassion. Rather, this event is the massacre of a bull.

Watching a bull bleeding, hurting, heaving its last breath as it falls to the ground is horrible. However, watching a crowd cheer and the Torero strut around celebrating his victory over the bull is worse.

I say in opposition to bull fighting, "El Torero, please stop! Grant the bulls a quick death with little suffering. El Torero, you are so cruel. Where is your compassion?"