Comparing English to Spanish Attitudes Towards Bullfighting

I despise the lily-livered, fussy-stomached, hypocritical English attitude toward bullfighting; aside from Flamenco I think bullfighting is the most beautiful of Spanish idioms. A wonderful tradition criticized ignorantly (don't understand-don't like). I find the audacity that allows the English to lobby the European Union from their cold, gray isle for the banishment of the practice, odious.

Bullfighting is a big part of Spanish culture & image (we watch bullfighting on television the way Brits watch grown men chasing a ball, I mean really! English men at the peak of physical form rolling around on the ground holding their knees with blubbering lips compared to Spanish men refusing to be carried from the arena while their life's blood pours from their wounds). I have faced mere one year olds with a cape & it was downright scary, when do the English face their fears like that? Oh, I forgot- the English do kill tiny foxes from horseback...

The beauty of the noble beast (if they weren't bred on gorgeous oak strewn farms free to wander until their dates in the ring, the species would be extinct) following his instincts in mortal combat is a far better way to live & die than being penned until fat & dying of a retractable bullet in the brain. The brave bull (toro bravo is the name of the species) by the way, is eaten after the match like any other bovine.

But it isn't a fair fight! Cries the Englishman, well, it isn't a fight at all- it is a ritual killing where the killer takes grave risks to show he is a man & not someone who will only eat meat killed by someone else & packaged in bloodless plastic.

Do you think the English attitude stems from empathy for the beast? No it does not, it comes from their wanting to avoid being reminded of their own blood, gristle & eventual death. If this were not true all Englishmen would be vegetarians.

The English man-animal is only allowed to be sexy by accident (Hugh Grant) any wilful display of sexual vigour (like any other male animal in nature) is berated by your confused society. Imagine you are in a ring of swept albero in front of 2000 jealous men & 2000 wet women, eight thousand eyes on you- the very symbol of sexuality. You strut; you flaunt your cock through your tight trousers. You look the four thousand pound mass of rippling muscle topped with murderous horn in the eye- you want to run for your life but you stand firm & say: Come on motherfucker, you can kill me but you can't scare me...

Here's a line from a rare Alpujarrenean poem (oral tradition, few of them could read or write until well into the 20th century). In springtime piglets are bought by each household & left to live on the ground floor of the stone house along with a donkey, dog & chickens, in the fall- the matanza (killing) that provides protein through the long cold winters. The matanzas are very dramatic in an elemental sense, before sunrise as many as 8 men will wrestle the outraged beast onto its back on a table & then kill it with a long knife cut to his throat. The several litres of blood collected in a large wooden vat make our breakfast along with fresh bread & anisette (to warm the blood) as the sun rises & the pig's dying screams still echo through the mountain range...

The poem asks- If you don't go to the matanza how can you expect to love? If you can understand this you will have risen above England's sanitised sophistication to a primitive aristocracy of the soul that will let you grasp the true barbarity of British refinement. Life, death, love, death, sex, death, procreation... death... the eternal cycle.