Post 59. Horses and Bullfighting

In Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon, he describes the tragedy that is bullfighting. He describes it as not being a sport but rather "a tragedy; the death of the bull, which is played, more or less well, by the bull and the man involved and in which there is danger for the man but certain death for the animal." It's a rather interesting book, 358 pages solely on bull-fighting. Read it, and it may change the way you think of bullfighting.

There are 3 acts in bullfighting. The first act is known as the suerte de varas, the trial of lances, where the bull charges a man on a horse, the picardor, whose aim is to place the pic, a pike pole, into the bull's back to punish him and yet strengthen the bull's resolve at the same time by letting the bull charge successfully and clearing the ring. I will explain more further on.

The second act is the time of the banderillero, men who run the bull with capes to exhaust the bull, and place banderillas, pairs of sharpened sticks into the bull's withers to fatigue the neck muscles so that the matador can kill successfully without the bull being able to raise its head and horns to block the sword.

The final act is the death, where the matador, the only man allowed to kill the bull, dominates the bull with the muleta, a scarlet cape on a stick, and finally kills with the sword.

It takes a team of 5 to 6 men actually to prepare, exhaust the bull before the matador can do his work. But it is the matador alone who faces death.

But the point is not the talk about all that. It's to talk about the horses, the horses the picadors ride to punish the bull. And this is the way they do it.

They allow the bull to charge and impale the horse before sticking in the pic. This usually is fatal.

Sometimes, the bull doesn't kill the horse, and you will see the horse gallop off, trailing its intestines and viscera on the ground, blindly assured by the piacador's knees that all is well. Horses, as you may know, react based on how they are ridden. That is why novice riders and those lacking confidence are more likely to be thrown off, whereas a man who knows what he is doing may convince a gutted horse to continue galloping. And then, sometimes, you will see the same horse being used for the next bull (they kill 6 bulls per fight. 2 bulls per matador.)

How is this possible, you ask, when the horse has been gored before and verily, you saw its guts spill on the ground? Very simple. To reduce the cost of losing two horses where one will do, they stuff the inside of the horse with sawdust and bring it back again. And since each fight is allocated a time span of 15 mins, that is how long the horse can survive with missing organs.

So a horse can survive for a period of time, even though it's insides may be ripped out, gored, torn out and missing. And then it has to go out and perform again.

I think, I, am starting to know what the horses went through.