Our sterilized misguided society cannot stand what is real. Animal activists cry against bullfights. They torture the animals, they claim. But has anyone seen the terrible conditions under which the animals we eat everyday are kept and then slaughtered? Isn’t that “torture”? Todays people really believe that their food grows into the form of chicken nuggets on some magic tree.

The bulls killed in a bullfight are then consumed for food. What bothers us then?

It is that we are hypocrites.

We do not want to actually see what is really happening.

If another superior species stacked humans in a 2×2 m cages (see CAFO or here) and then selected them one-by-one for slaughter, we would consider that harsh. But this is exactly what we do every passing minute to chickens, rabbits, cows, fish et cetera… The bull in the arena has at least the chance to fight against the one who wants to kill him. Putting your life at risk to kill an animal for food, is the most honorable way to do so! But we prefer killing facelessly. We do not like the view of blood. We only like the view of a good fillet. And no! We do not want to know where it comes from!

Our society has lost its contact with life and death. We read about them in encyclopedias but do not wish to come in contact with them. We kill thousands of people in videogames (or in Afghanistan, isn’t it the same?), but we react really intensely to the killing of one bull (which we will eat anyway afterwards). We see our loved ones die but then hush quickly away in order to “forget”.

We are consumer-animals and we thing that death is for the “others” – the children in Somalia or the zebras which are devoured by lions on the Discovery Channel.

But even the bull in the bloody arena is a better philosopher than we are.

Life and death are here.

And they are more real and “violent” than any ten minute bullfight.