Bullfighting

[Enrique]

Hello: certainly Nordic peoples despise bullfighting. It's proper of underdeveloped countries. What have they to say about two human beings on a ring striking each other, an English invention. Most of boxers reach their fifties, if the do at all, with a deformed face or half idiots. I said human beings. Are we to worry about animals in the ruedo in the face of such events as those?

I'm fond of cats, small and big (felines), fond of birds, fond of horses. Yes. But we live in a era that has made a religion of animal care, thanks first to biologists, then to commerce. Can animals be put above man? In the 19th we were antropocentric, man at the center of all things. The equation has now reversed sign. We are no longer masters of anything, least of all, of animals. As in so many things, this is only the valley after the summit, one extreme after the opposite one. Beginning with the cinema, children are taught to love animals, a habit as old as civilization, but now exaggerated above all bounds. Do not kill sharks, preserve the crocodiles! Both of them notorious plagues, occasionally making their prey in humans. It is Plutarch who says:

On seeing certain wealthy foreigners in Rome carrying puppies and young monkeys about in their bosoms and fondling them, Caesar asked, we are told, if the women in their country did not bear children, thus in right princely fashion rebuking those who squander on animals that proneness to love and loving affection which is ours by nature, and which is due only to our fellow-men.

[Peter]

Sorry Enrique I don't agree with you on this. It is right that we should love and respect all life. If two human beings choose to beat each other to a pulp in the name of sport (but in reality to satisfy their hugely inflated egos and materialistic greed) they are as mad as each other, but an animal does not choose to be tortured and tormented and we should know better.

[Enrique]

My two cents: it's the system speaking, not you. Yours is a conditioned response. One human life is worth a thousand animals, and boxers choose nothing. They are very humble people that see no other way out but this one. I pity poor human beings more than irrational beasts. A human being is the most perfect work of nature and the worst of them is infinitely nobler than the animal.

[Peter]

My two cents: it's the system speaking, not you. Yours is a conditioned response. One human life is worth a thousand animals, and boxers choose nothing. They are very humble people that see no other way out but this one. I pity poor human beings more than irrational beasts. A human being is the most perfect work of nature and the worst of them is infinitely nobler than the animal.

No it is me speaking - I am not as easily conditioned as you suppose. You excuse human behaviour, I do not. We all have a choice and you only have to look at the history of the 20th century, soaked in bloodshed to see how foul that choice can be - no animal has killed and tortured on such a bestial scale. All life has value and is worthy of respect - it is in denying that, that we have opened the doors to all the evils of this world.

[Enrique]

I must tell you: man has to abide to common law once and for all. During the three famous dictatorships of the first half of the 20th century, man was still, as in the 19th, the center of the Universe. We still are! When are we going to sincerely admit we are in an equality position with the rest of the creation. We are nothing special. Why has man to want to be a saint? He is but an animal. To pretend that certain "moral" values are attached to us, is to place ourselves above what we really are: just a coincidence of nature: the right distance to the Sun, a special position within the Galaxy, a very large moon, and many, many other coincidences. What a pretensious being man is! He has built up religions, and even moral systems.

Animal do kill with purposes other than food. We do not know enough about them. During the African night, groups of chimpanzees organize war parties and go around to chase and kill other chimpanzees. "Let us all be animals" is what I am saying? No. Let us free us from hypocresy. We must begin by accepting what we are. A super developed product of the Universe (= nature = evolution). Nothing more. Imagine somebody tells me my cat speaks with God. I would laugh. And yet we are a chosen race that speaks to the divinity. Once the plain fact of human life has been accepted, that we are just an animal species who knows how to handle the knife and the fork, we will be able to talk about moral and try some ethical systems. But free from the chains of religion. Moral is a convention, a socially necessary one of course. I postulate the need for a new table of values, based upon the conviction that man is but peripheral to the Creation.

Then, and only then, when we see men killing men, we won't be as horrified as we pretend to be. Rats kill rats. Just reduce the size of their habitat. Our habitat does not shrink, but the population does increase. It amounts to the same thing. The many wars being fight today, are just the product of us being to many, and the resources being limited. And like rats, we begin to predate on the others. Europe was always at war, even when it numbered but a few millions. It was the natural order of things. During the 20th century those numbers have risen, enabling the growth of markets and the means of producing weapons. But more important, anger has augmented, just like rats put in a box and left to themselves. From Medieval Europe to 20th century Europe, war has gone from a natural state of affairs to a machine of destruction. The machine is awful. It has no conscience (beware, the animal has conscience, otherwise he would not satisfy the nutrition functions). To destroy the machine, we must do one thing: through away hypocrisy. She is at the root of all evils.