I just spent a morning reacquainting myself with a few aspects of Spain that had slipped my memory. This included a visit to the rather magnificent bullring of Seville. Whatever you think of bullfighting – I don’t like it – this is an impressive and extraordinary place. It also reminded me that there are a few things to do with bullfighting that people rarely appreciate.

Here are a few…

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<ul>
	<li>The matador actually appears twice. He’s first out there with a pink cape toying with the bull at the beginning of the fight. He then hands off and gives the show over to…</li>
	<li>The picador who enters on the back of a heavily-protected and blindfolded horse who stabs the bull behind the back of the neck, hoping to weaken it.</li>
	<li>Second, the three banderillos who stab sharp, decorated sticks into its shoulders.</li>
	<li>Then the matador comes back on with a red cape this time and despatches the bull (or at least that’s the plan).</li>
	<li>Sometimes he doesn’t manage to kill the beast. The death strike of the matador is meant to go between the bull’s shoulder blades and pierce down into the heart. If the animal hunches its shoulder together it’s impossible for the matador to finish it this way. In this case someone comes on and severs the spinal cord with a knife. The matador does not get a good reception in these circumstances.</li>
	<li>The bull’s dead the moment he enters the ring, destined for the local restaurants. Technically an incredibly brave bull may be spared by the president of the corrida. In reality this rarely happens. Last time it occurred in Seville was 1965.</li>
	<li>If a bull kills a bullfighter (and this has happened only three times in Seville’s history) not only is the bull killed immediately but, by tradition, the mother of the killer bull is slaughtered too if it’s still alive. The museum inside the Seville bullring hosts the head of the mother of the bull that killed the famous Manolete in Jaen in 1948.</li>
	<li>Until the 1920s the horses in the ring were blindfolded but went unprotected. Today they’re still blindfolded so they’re not terrified by the bulls but bear heavy protection, as do those riding them. However their vocal chords are cut so that they can’t make any sound during the fight.</li>
	<li>The corrida will normally involve three matadors and six bulls, two each.</li>
	<li>A top flight matador can earn up to a quarter of a million euros in a single afternoon. A front row ticket in the sombra (shady section) of the Seville ring will cost you close to 140 euros.</li>
	<li>The last thing a matador does before entering the ring is enter the small chapel in the bullring and pray.</li>
	<li>From time to time members of the crowd will leap into the ring and try to fight the bull themselves. These nutters are known as spontaneos and do it out of bravado or an attempt to prove they’re matador material too.</li>
</ul>
There uses to be a bar in Seville with lots of photos of spontaneos on the wall, somewhere near Sierpes. But I can’t find it any more sadly.

Back when I was writing travel I went to a couple of bullfights. That was enough for me though I’m not going to get on my high horse and start shouting for it to be banned. That would be futile for one thing. And perhaps hypocritical too. Bullfighting is a visceral, bloody experience, but so is slaughtering animals out of sight, in unseen abattoirs, and serving them up for food in tidy sanitised supermarket packs. Humane food production is a lot less cruel than shoving a bull into a ring and watching it die. But it’s still cruel, and largely ignored by western populations that want to eat meat more and more (and, no, I'm not a vegetarian).

There’s also the small matter of fox hunting, currently banned in the UK though it looks likely the next government will open the door to its return. Bullfighting is an ancient, stylised ritual, a conflict in which a bullfighter comes to symbolise the perpetual struggle between life and death. The matador puts his own existence in peril as part of a strange, bloody dance into the jaws of oblivion, hoping to pull himself free at the last possible moment. It’s not that far from the trick lots of authors try to pull with popular fiction, be it Harry Potter or the latest thriller. There’s no hypocritical attempt to rationalise or defend bullfighting. It is what it is.

Fox hunting, on the other hand, is constantly held up as an example of a grand countryside tradition and marvellous for farming. This is tosh. I well remember Max Hastings, a hunt supporter himself, saying this vocally on TV. Fox hunts are there for fun, for the sport of taking hounds across the countryside in pursuit of a wild animal and then watching as dogs rip it apart.

I don’t regard either the corrida or fox hunting as civilised forms of behaviour. But at least bullfighting has a kind of archaic grandeur, a meaning for those who watch that brief, bloody ritual in the ring and requires an awful lot of courage. Difficult to say the same about chasing wild animals with dogs.