THE FIGHTING BULL

The fighting bull is a special breed very different from the domestic bull. Hemingway described clearly technical details of the physiology and behavior of fighting bulls . Once again he demonstrates his broad and deep knowledge of bullfighting. His book “Death In The Afternoon” is highly recommended for those who are going to attend a bullfight for the first time, but also for anyone who has already attended some of them, in order to deepen and better understand the world of bullfighting. Few writers have so thoroughly written about bullfights as Hemingway wrote
“The fighting bull is to the domestic bull as the wolf is to the dog. A domestic bull may be evil tempered and vicious as a dog may be mean and dangerous, but he will never have the speed, the quality of muscle and sinew and the peculiar build of the fighting bull any more than the dog will have the sinews of the wolf, his cunning and his width of jaw. Bulls for the ring are wild animals. They are bred from strain that comes down in direct descent from the wild bulls that ranged over the Peninsula and they are bred on ranches with thousands of acres of range where they live as free ranging animals. The contacts with men of the bulls that are to appear in the ring are held to the absolute minimum.
The physical characteristics of the fighting bull are its thick and very strong hide with glossy pelt, small head, but wide forehead; strength and shape of horns, which curve forward; short, thick neck with the great hump of muscle which erects when the bull is angry; wide shoulders, very small hooves and length and slenderness of tail. The female of the fighting bull is not as heavily built as the male; has a smaller head; shorter and thinner horns; a longer neck, a less pronounced dewlap under the jaw; is not as wide through the chest, and has no visible udder. I have frequently seen these cows in the ring in the amateur fights in Pamplona charging like bulls, tossing the amateurs about and they were invariably spoken of by the visiting foreigners as steers, since they showed no visible signs of their cowhood and gave no evidence of femininity. It is in the female of the fighting bull that you see most plainly the difference between the savage and domestic animal.
One of the things one hears oftenest about bullfighting is the statement that a cow is much more dangerous when charging than a bull as the bull shuts his eyes while a cow keeps hers open. I do not know who started this, but there is no truth in it. The females that are used in amateur fights almost invariably make for the man rather than the cape, cut in on him rather than charge straight and will often single out one particular man or boy and pursue him through a crowd of half a hundred, but they do this not because of any innate superior intelligence in the female, as Virginia Woolf might suppose, but because female calves, since they are never to appear in the ring in normal fights and since there is no objection to their becoming completely educated in all the phases of bullfighting, are used exclusively for the bullfighters to train on with cape and muleta. Either a bull calf or a cow calf, if passed a few times with cape or muleta, learns all about it, remembers, and, if it is a bull, becomes consequently useless for a formal bullfight where everything is built on the basis of this being the bull’s first encounter with a dismounted man. If the bull is unfamiliar with cape or muleta and charges straight, the man can create the danger himself by working as close to the bull’s charge as possible and will be able to attempt a variety of passes, selecting them himself and arranging them in an emotional sequence rather than being forced into them as defensive measures. If the bull has been fought before, he will cut in constantly on the man, will chop with his horns into the cloth looking for the man, and will create all the danger himself, putting the man constantly in retreat and on the defensive and making any clarity of passes or brilliance of fight impossible.
The bullfight has been so developed and organized that the bull has just time enough, coming into the ring completely unfamiliar with dismounted men, to learn to distrust all their artifices and reach the summit of his danger at the moment of killing. The bull learns so rapidly in the ring that if the bullfight drags, is badly done, or is prolonged an extra ten minutes he becomes almost unkillable by the means prescribed in the rules of the spectacle. It is for this reason that bullfighters always practice and train with female calves which, after a few sessions, become so educated, the fighters say, that they can talk Greek and Latin. After this education, they are released in the ring for the amateurs; sometimes with naked horns, sometimes with the points covered with a leather ball, they come in as fast and lithe as deer to practice on the amateur capemen and aspirant bullfighters of all sorts in the capeas; to toss, rip, gore, pursue and inspire with terror these amateurs until, when the vacas tire, steers are let into the ring to take them out to rest in the corrals until their next appearance. The fighting cows, or vaquillas, seem to enjoy these appearances. They are not goaded, no divisa is placed in their shoulders, they are not irritated to make them charge and they seem to enjoy charging and tossing as much as a fighting cock does fighting. Of course they receive no punishment while the bull’s bravery is judged by the manner in which he behaves under punishment.
The manoeuvring of fighting bulls is made possible by the operation of the herd instinct which makes it possible to drive bulls in groups of six or more where one bull, if detached from the herd, will charge instantly and repeatedly anything, man, horse, or any moving object, vehicle or otherwise, until he is killed; and by the use of trained steers or cabestros to herd and decoy the fighting bulls as wild elephants are caught and herded by elephants which have been tamed. It is one of the most interesting of all phases of bullfighting to see the steers work in the operations of loading, separating, putting the bulls into the runways that lead to the shipping cages and in all the many operations connected with the raising, transporting and unloading of fighting bulls.”
Ernst Hemingway, “Death In The Afternoon”