11

ANIMALS AS OBJECTS OF ENTERTAINMENT

The Will to Power

As we saw in chapter 1, “A Brief History of the Relations between Humans and Animals,” James Serpell, professor of animal ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, has shown that the relationship that humans created with animals when they began to domesticate them, a relationship based on contradictory forces of intimacy and slavery, engendered painful feelings of guilt. To get away from this uncomfortable feeling, humans created ideologies that allowed them to continue in their enslavement of animals without experiencing a guilty conscience.¹

Later on, the ability to subjugate animals and dominate nature began to appear as a measure of the success of human civilization. It even became a means of demonstrating personal, cultural, or national prestige. The kings of Babylon and Assyria had wild animals penned in fortified enclosures where they hunted them from chariots with the assistance of dog packs. They then had their feats immortalized in the bas-reliefs that adorned the walls of their palaces.²

The Greeks of antiquity were less inclined toward gratuitous cruelty to animals, but they were great lovers of spectacular parades that featured a large number of exotic animals. In the third century B.C.E, in Alexandria—which was then the cultural center of the Hellenic empire—every year a great multitude of people and animals paraded for a whole day past the stands of the city stadium. The spectacle included elephants, ostriches, and wild asses yoked to chariots, more than two thousand dogs of various exotic species, and 150 men carrying trees to which were bound various birds and arboreal mammals, followed by two dozen exotic animals including lions, leopards, cheetahs, lynxes, a giraffe, a rhinoceros, and sometimes a polar bear.3

While the ludi (state-sponsored games) of Roman antiquity consisted mainly of chariot races and athletic contests, the munera (games sponsored by wealthy individuals) featured fights between gladiators, usually prisoners of war reduced to slavery. But the Romans were also known for their barbarity toward animals. The emperors and the crowds at the games took delight in seeing countless animals put to death by the bestiari, gladiators specially trained to combat wild beasts. Hunting spectacles were also put on, in which the venatores (wild animal hunters) chased down game and killed it in reconstituted natural settings—groves, thickets, little cliffs—planted in the circus arena. Animals were also incited to fight each other in the Circus Maximus, the largest sports arena the world had ever known (it could hold 250,000 spectators),⁴ the Colosseum of Rome, and many other stadiums. Bears and bulls were chained to each other in order to get them to tear each other apart. Elephants, rhinos, hippopotamuses, lions, and leopards were given stimulants to work them up into a rage. The animals that survived were struck down from the seats by spectators transformed into archers who paid for the privilege.

During the inauguration of the Roman Colosseum, which lasted one hundred days in the year 81 C.E., 9,000 wild animals were exterminated. In the course of one festival in the year 240 C.E., not less than 2,000 gladiators, 70 lions, 40 wild horses, 30 elephants, 30 leopards, 20 wild asses, 19 giraffes, 10 antelopes, 10 hyenas, 10 tigers, as well as a rhinoceros and a hippopotamus were put to death. Nero authorized his bodyguards to massacre 400 bears and 300 lions with javelins. But it is the emperor Trajan who holds the record. To celebrate his victories in Dacia, he ordered the public butchery of 11,000 wild animals. As for the emperor Commodius, he shot ostriches with crescent-shaped arrows that decapitated them. Their headless bodies continued to run for a few moments, which was amusing to the public.⁵ The multiplication of these games—to up to a hundred per year—and the lucrative trade in wild animals needed to supply the circus brought about the disappearance of several species in the most plundered areas. This was the case, for example, for the hippopotamus in the valley of the Nile.

The collective madness of the mobs hungry for these bloody spectacles finally came to an end in the sixth century after the closure of the Circus Maximus, which gradually fell into ruin. But the violence toward animals continued to be an aspect of human entertainment down through the centuries. The historian Barbara Tuchman described two popular sports of fourteenth-century Europe: “Players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal’s claws. . . . Or a pig enclosed in a wide pen was chased by men with clubs to the laughter of spectators as he ran squealing from the blows until beaten lifeless.”6

In our own day, the corrida, the trained-animal acts (wild animals or elephants) that are still presented in many circuses (and which in the view of the trainers themselves are far from as harmless as they appear), the shows put on in many zoos with animals that are resigned to their fate or half mad—all these are no more than the relics of the massacres and parades of antiquity. Nonetheless, these entertainments preserve their dose of palpable cruelty, perhaps hidden or disguised by pleasant features. They consist in fact of exploiting animals or causing them to suffer or even, in the case of the corrida, killing them. These are animals that have done nothing to bring this on themselves, that have asked for nothing, that were doing much better in their natural circumstances. “It has been said that the Roman people were disgusted with the whole thing. But that is a mistake. The Romans always kept their taste for blood. And how many Romans there are in our Gaul of today!” exclaimed Georges Clemenceau speaking of the corrida.⁷

My purpose in this chapter is to raise awareness on this subject. Real changes can only be voluntary ones. Only putting ourselves in the place of another and ascribing intrinsic value to that other will make it possible for us to develop sufficient respect and consideration for it, him, or her. Altruism is what gradually leads to cultural transformations; when they have already happened, the only role of laws is to rubber-stamp them and give them a more formal status.

The Corrida, Festival of Death

The reason I have decided to give a place of priority to the problem of the corrida, despite the fact that the number of victims (12,000 bulls killed per year) is very small in comparison to the mass killing perpetrated by industrial breeding operations (60 billion animals per year) is first of all because the corrida constitutes the very archetype of morbid entertainment for humans that is deadly to animals. In addition, the corrida is the object of an energetic, even “erudite” defense. Eminent philosophers, such as Francis Wolff, as well as famous writers and artists have defended it in the past and still do now. Finally, the debate as to whether to perpetuate it or abolish it unleashes real passions—verbally at least as violent as the spectacle itself. The practice of the corrida thus becomes the very symbol of the anthropocentric prejudices that we harbor toward animals, and for this reason in particular, it deserves to be analyzed. Before getting into this debate, let us imagine for a moment the mental, subjective universe of our impassioned participants.

First let us put ourselves in the place of the aficionado. From his or her point of view, the corrida is a festival, an occasion to be shared with the local community. The setting is ideal; the twists and turns of the fight are exhilarating; the blare of the trumpets is uplifting. The spectators are human beings like you and me, who live normal lives like our own, punctuated with joy and suffering. Many of them are electrified by the high points of the confrontation between the man in his “garb of light” and the bull; others find that it is an art form that transports them. Thus the whole affair is a matter of point of view, subjective perception, of customs and traditions that cause some people to appreciate what horrifies others. The way in which the aficionado perceives the bullfight can be taken for granted.

If we have only a little respect—or perhaps none at all—for the other, the bull in this case, for its fate and its aspirations, then our oneway vision of things will remain our one and only point of view. If it is the case that the aficionado feels empathy for the bull, which many of them say they do, he still takes the position that the “beauty” of the spectacle is worth the suffering of the animal.

In the corrida, even though it is not in the least necessary for his personal survival, the human actor decides to inflict intense suffering on a being that has done him no wrong and to take its life. The philosopher Francis Wolff, a fervent defender of the corrida, has come up with fifty main points to justify its existence. We have chosen to bring to the reader’s attention only the most important of these and to examine them. “The corrida is not only a magnificent spectacle. It is not merely pardonable. It can be defended because it is morally good.”8 This is the main thesis defended by this philosopher, professor at the elite École Normale Supérieure of Paris and author of numerous works and articles on this subject.

But killing an innocent has never been considered to be a moral act. Forcing a being, human or animal, to fight without any necessary reason and undergo a death programmed for the pleasure of a number of actors and spectators cannot be considered morally good. Is not morality precisely a knowledge of good and evil that makes it possible to distinguish what is beneficial from what is harmful to others? It requires one being to attribute intrinsic value to other beings, to have respect for them, and to take into consideration the legitimate aspirations that are unique to them—of which the first and most fundamental must be to live.

The Corrida Is a Way to Cultivate Noble Virtues?

It has sometimes been maintained that the corrida is a school of virtue. That is what Pliny said with regard to the circus games. In his panegyric for the emperor Trajan,⁹ he put forward the view that violent entertainments help to forge moral values, which include courage (fortitudo), discipline (disciplina), firmness (constantia), endurance (patientia), disdain toward death (contemptus mortis), love of glory (amor laudis), and the will to win (cupido victoriae).¹⁰ In this way he dresses up mass massacres in a cloak of virtue.

We find the same justifications among the passionate advocates of the corrida. For Francis Wolff, to fight in the bullring “is to illustrate five or six non-temporal virtues that are today perhaps less glorified than some others, like compassion, which has tended progressively to replace justice.” To be a torero, this philosopher explains, requires courage and composure, panache and dignity, self-mastery, loyalty, and solidarity. He concludes: “It is also required that one kill this enemy, which is only justified if, in doing it, one places one’s own life in jeopardy. This presupposes complete loyalty toward this adversary and total sincerity in one’s own physical and moral commitment. . . . Is this not an example of what we would like to be able to do, a model of what we would like to be able to be?”11 Hearing such a declaration, we can only ask ourselves where it is that justice resides in an act that consists of putting to death an animal that has not harmed us in the least. Cultivating a virtue that consists in harming another is an ethical contradiction, unless wounding and killing the animal amounts to doing it good in some way. Moreover, these values like panache, dignity, self-mastery—do they not lose their entire sense if they are practiced at the expense of the life of another being who is not guilty of any crime? Doesn’t real courage or real panache consist instead in risking one’s own life to save another’s? Where is the dignity of the combatant if his “adversary” is an innocent who is not able to fight with equal arms?

The “Art” of Killing

“Esthetically, the thrust of the sword is the gesture that completes the act and gives birth to the work of art; the successful thrust of the sword, perfect, immediate, seems to give unity to the work that preceded it, to give totality and perfection to the entire opus.”¹² Certainly a spontaneous and perfect movement is what characterizes a master-work of calligraphy, but killing is not an art, and death is not a work of art or a spectacle, especially if it is imposed upon a living creature that has absolutely no wish to die. As a reader of Philosophie Magazine wrote in reacting to this type of argument: “What a flimsy justification for killing!”¹³ One thing we can say is for sure: the bull would certainly appreciate a less grisly form of art.

Nobody would think of sticking lances, banderillas, and a sword into the body of a human being and holding the event up as a work of art. The only way one can inflict such a fate on an animal is to devalue it to the level of an object, to the level of a plaything of our will. The bull is forced against any will of its own to be a player in a theatrical combat—a “ceremony” or a “ritual,” as the aficionados tell us it is. But the “ending is known in advance: the animal must die, the man must not die.”¹⁴ The whole design and setup of this drama is conceived of, evaluated, and philosophized about from a strictly antropocentric point of view.

The Fighting Bull Exists Only to Be Killed

The corrida is also sometimes justified by saying that the “bravo” bulls, the bulls bred for combat, have been especially created with this end in mind, and thus the fight is their only reason for being. “It is not immoral to kill them,” writes Wolff, “because this is the purpose they live for—as long as we properly respect the conditions of their life.”15 Our sole duty with regard to the bulls is to “preserve their ‘brava’ nature, to raise them with respect for this nature, and to kill them (since they live for that alone) with respect for this nature, and with all the regard that is due a respected animal.”¹⁶

But who is it who decided to select the most bellicose bulls with the purpose of fighting them and then finally killing them? Here again, we find ourselves firmly planted in the point of view that presumes the right of the holder of greater intelligence and power to dispose of the life of others. Taking into account all its aspects, this is just like the point of view behind forcing humans who have been reduced to slavery to procreate and then declaring, once they have, that it is the normal thing for their children also to be slaves, since they were brought into the world for this reason alone. Obviously, this comparison is not intended to dehumanize humans but to expose the mental processes that go into the bullfighting case.

On top of all this, the very existence of a distinct race of “bravo” bulls is doubtful, as the historian Éric Baratay explains:

The normal bovine nature of the bulls of the corrida is confirmed by the fact that their proportion among their peers, even though they are specially favored, is small and becoming smaller and smaller; and the bulls that are not selected for combat are sent off to the butchery just like ordinary meat cattle; and the feed is the same for all, there having been a partial replacement of grass with grain in the twentieth century; and for all the bulls the pastures have little by little been reduced to closed fields. The toreros have known for a long time that the bull of the corrida is just an ordinary bovine, just a herbivore, and that it is not aggressive by nature. The celebrated torero Belmonte acknowledged that it is very difficult to provoke a bull in the field. It must be fairly tired out in order to give up fleeing and become convinced that attack is the only alternative; and this result is almost impossible for one man alone to bring about. One can at most speak of a greater reactivity in these bulls that has been brought about through selection. But one can in no way defend the notion that the bullfighting bull is a creature that has left behind the camp of the herbivores, by nature timorous, and entered that of the predators, by nature carnivorous!17

The Dice Are Loaded

The writer Jean-Pierre Darracq tells us: “Even odds between man and beast . . . are the sole justification for the drama of the bullfight.”¹⁸ But this author would do well to review his arithmetic. In Europe between 1950 and 2003, just one single matador died, whereas 41,500 bulls were killed.¹⁹ There is little doubt that the very rare death of a torero has a greater chance of making page one of the newspapers than the deaths of tens of thousands of bulls.²⁰ Yet even the famous torero Luis Miguel Dominguin clearly stated that fighting in the bullring presents no greater risk of death than many other occupations.²¹

Francis Wolff does not speak of even odds between the torero and the bull, since for him, the corrida is “a fight with equal arms but with uneven odds.” We might suspect that if the respective chances of survival were really fifty-fifty, the toreros would have abandoned the arena long since. Nonetheless, Wolff develops his argument as follows:

It is a contest with equal arms, cunning versus force, like David versus Goliath. It is also a fight with unequal odds, since it illustrates the superiority of human intelligence over the brute force of the bull. But how would you have it? Would you want the odds for the man and beast to be even as in the games of the [Roman] arena? Sometimes one dies, sometimes the other dies—would that be more just? In any case it would be more barbarous! The corrida is not an athletic contest of which the outcome should remain uncertain. It is a ceremony, the result of which is known in advance. The animal must die, the man must not die (even though it can happen sometimes that a man dies accidentally and an exceptionally brave bull is pardoned). That is the moral framework of this combat. But uneven does not mean disloyal. That is just the point. The demonstration of the superiority of the man’s armament over that of the animal has no sense unless the animal’s weapons (body mass and horns) are powerful and have not been artificially reduced. That is the ethics of tauromachy. It is an uneven but loyal combat.22

So the bullfights are set up in such a way that one of the protagonists, the human, wins every time, and this is supposed to not be disloyal? How should we define “equal arms”? The man against the bull? The sword against the horns? If we were talking about the man with all his intelligence and cunning, just as he stands there, with his bare hands, against the bull, just as it stands there, with its own form of intelligence and its natural assets, the man would always be the loser.

If the man’s superiority is based on the sword, it is not the man who wins, but the man plus an implement to which he owes his nearly certain victory. So if all depends on the addition of this weapon, why the archaic sword? If it is the superiority of his weaponry and his technology that the man wishes to demonstrate, he could make use of a still more powerful arsenal. The fact is, this archaic sword lends this “unequal combat” false airs of nobility it would never have had if the torero used a bazooka instead, and the sword seems to do the job, because with that sword, the man is superior and wins, and without it, he is inferior and is the loser.

Approximately 12,000 bulls die every year in the arena.²³ It must be that the superiority of the man over the beast is a very fragile one, if he seems to feel the need to prove it twelve thousand times a year? As Michel Onfray writes, “The taste for the spectacle of death always reveals the desire for power by the impotent.”²⁴

Why the Bull?

Why, among all the animals encountered by humans in their history, should the bull be the chosen adversary? Once again, let us hear Francis Wolff: “The bull is the sole adversary that man considers worthy of him. It is the animal against which he can measure himself with pride, and which he consequently treats with the loyalty that an enemy of his measure deserves. Would one demonstrate one’s power against an enemy that one scorns and mistreats? Throughout the world of bull-fighting, the animal is fought with respect and never eliminated like vermin or dispatched in a hidden place like a mere meat-producing machine.”25

So it seems that the bull is indeed one of the only adversaries spectacular enough for the man to fight, the animal against which he can give the impression of being in danger without really running much of a risk. Nowadays, it is no longer good show business to display wild beasts devouring slaves or to make valiant warriors who have been captured in wars fight each other to the death. For a matador to confront a lion would be far too dangerous (unless the sword were replaced by a rifle).

Thus the bull has become the animal of choice, one that is combative enough to guarantee a good show, but not really too dangerous, for the torero has at least 9,999 chances out of 10,000 to be the one of the two adversaries who comes out of the contest alive. Imagine what would become of the “superiority” of the man, even armed with a sword, if the beast he was confronting was a tiger. So the bull is aggressive enough—with a sheep the aficionados wouldn’t get their money’s worth—but the victory of the man is pretty well assured.

Fight or Flight?

Francis Wolff tells us: “When you cause a mammal to suffer, it flees instinctively. But the ‘fighting bull,’ far from fleeing, redoubles its attacks. That is the proof that it feels its wounds, not as suffering, but as incitement to combat.”²⁶ In the first place, if the bull’s wounds did not cause it to suffer, why would it react at all? Then, we may ask, if a bull were burned by the flames of a prairie fire or injured by stones falling from a mountain slope, would it flee from the danger or would it attack? If it charges in the arena, it is because an individual is attacking and injuring it continuously. In this situation, attacking is the best strategy for survival, especially because all the exits are blocked.

What happens in nature when an animal perceives danger? It all depends on the immediacy of the danger or how far away it is. When there is enough time and room, animals, even the most powerful ones like elephants and lions, would rather put distance between themselves and the danger, since their best chance of surviving a threat is to get away from it. It is, therefore, the avoidance behavior that has been selected as the best guarantee of survival over millions of years of evolution.

If the danger is a little closer, most animals freeze on the spot and observe the threat attentively, remaining as inobtrusive as possible, particularly if they are potential prey. Then they decide what tack to take. If the danger is close and immediate, and still more if the animal is cornered, the dominant type—the big cat, the bull, or the mastiff—will decide to attack, because attack represents its best chance of coming out of the encounter whole. We know also that a wounded bear or tiger is much more aggressive or dangerous than an untouched animal. Some animals play dead, and others try to hide or flee, but quite often even an animal weaker than the predator it faces will put up a desperate fight at the last moment. Depending on the species involved and especially depending on the circumstances, we may observe flight, immobility, or attack.

The Aficionados Say They Have No Wish to See Harm Done

The aficionados are shocked and regard themselves as having been insulted if you suggest that they get sadistic pleasure out of watching the sufferings of the bull. Georges Courteline writes regarding them: “My abhorrence toward the bullfights has gradually been extended to those who frequent them. The idea that people can derive entertainment, some from attempting to render more ferocious an animal that was not ferocious to begin with, and others from seeing horses being disemboweled, then sewed up, then disemboweled a second time, causes me to pour upon the latter the same disgust that the latter arouse in me.”27

And Michel Onfray raises the language still another notch:

It takes a significant sadistic tendency to pay for a ticket into an arena where the show consists of torturing an animal, making it suffer, wounding it cruelly, seeking ever greater refinement in the acts of barbarity committed against it, having them codified (just the way an inquisitor or torture specialist knows just how far to go to keep the victim alive as long as possible even though they are going to kill it anyway); and to rejoice madly when the bull collapses because there is no other possible way out for him.28

“Absurd!” replies Francis Wolff: “It is difficult to believe and yet it is true: the aficionado gets no pleasure from the suffering of the animal. None of them could bear to cause to suffer, or even to see suffer, a cat, a dog, a horse, or any other animal.”²⁹ He adds, “I don’t know any of them who would be capable of beating his dog or even of voluntarily harming a cat or a rabbit.” They are so sweet to some, so pitiless to others, mental dissociation sadly being a common phenomenon these days. This psychological process is one of devaluing, dehumanizing—or in this case “de-animalizing”—the sentient being that a particular ideology has designated “the enemy,” the human or animal that is to be tortured and slain. No doubt the toreros and the aficionados do indeed pamper their pets. But once inside the arena, the torero and his audience have set up in themselves the mental dissociation necessary to no longer consider the bull a sentient being but to regard it now as the enemy to be destroyed. It is only by means of this kind of a psychological compartmentalization that the torero succeeds in desensitizing himself to the pain of the animal and the public succeeds in supporting his actions.

According to Francis Wolff, there is only one argument against bullfighting, and it is not a good one:

It is that which we call sensibility. One cannot bear seeing (or even imagining) an animal injured or dying. This feeling is more than merely respectable. . . . The feeling of compassion is one of the hallmarks of humanity and one of the sources of morality. But those who are against the corrida should know that the aficionados share this feeling with them. . . .³⁰

The aficionado should respect the sensibilities of all and not impose his tastes or his own sensibilities on others. Nevertheless, those who are against bullfighting should also acknowledge in their turn that the aficionado is as human, as lacking in cruelty, as capable of pity as they are themselves. . . . Should the sensibilities of some be enough to condemn the sensibilities of others?31

If the aficionados are full of compassion and “as human, as lacking in cruelty,” as anyone else, why don’t they express this compassion by protecting the animal rather than in tormenting it and then killing it? In the literary tradition, compassion is defined as “the feeling that tends to lament and share the misfortunes of others (Grand Robert Dictionary), but at the present time, psychologists and neuroscientists, as well as Buddhists, speak more precisely of the desire to remedy the suffering of others and to eliminate the causes of this suffering. From this point of view, compassion is the form that altruistic love takes when it is confronted with the suffering of others.³²

Can we compare the sensibility of someone who feels empathy toward an innocent animal that some people have decided to kill after having wounded it again and again, with the sensibility of someone who, while apparently feeling the same pity as the first person toward the animal, yet celebrates its demise as a great and grandiose spectacle, a festival, and an art? Where, in such a case, does the sensibility and empathy of the aficionado reside? It seems that, in contrast to the bull that is receiving the blows, the aficionado has been anesthetized. But it is not appropriate for us to focus our attention purely on the human spectators of the event. The question ultimately is not about the nature of their sensibility. Their actions are relatively minor to say the least, and their attitude possibly somewhat ambiguous. Instead of thinking about them, our main focus should be on the fate of the bull, the bull being the one who actually loses his life. Is it not the bull the main one concerned here?

“Nobody watches a bullfight to see an animal tortured, and still less to see it die,” stresses a blogger named Aliocha in the periodical Marianne.³³ So, if it is only for the pleasure of the festival atmosphere and the show, then the problem of suffering can be dropped: stop wounding the bull and killing it, and let the toreros perform their flourishes with the cape as much as they want. (This is, moreover, the way bull-fights are done in the United States—no banderillas, no wounds, no kill. Just a recreational confrontation between the torero and the bull, purely for the show.) Aliocha continues: “We praise the torero if he has killed his adversary without causing suffering.” The kill is made, but oh-so considerately. . . . As for the bull, who can honestly maintain that he dies of his dreadful wounds without having felt a thing?

If the spectators do not like to see the animals suffer, how can we explain the reactions to the decree enacted by Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1928 that made it mandatory for the picadors’ horses to wear protective padding (these horses were hitherto regularly disemboweled by the bulls)? This measure was not at all appreciated by the hard-core aficionados, who lamented that it brought about the disappearance of the “true corrida.” As Élisabeth Hardouin-Fugier reported in her Histoire de la Corrida en Europe du xviii^e au xxi^e Siècle (History of the Corrida in Europe from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries), one of those hard-core fans, Laurent Tailhade, said: “It is always satisfying for me to see five or six horses thoroughly eviscerated.”34 The historian of the corrida Auguste Laffont adds that, with the advent of the peto, which protects the horse from disembowelment, “the sacred emotion disappeared.” Picasso declared himself to be inconsolable, and others averred that the protection of the horses “denatured the most beautiful third of the combat.” In France, certain arenas, like the one at Dax, refused to protect the horses, thinking in this way to attract more spectators. Isn’t the only thing gained in this way, since the combat itself is not altered in any way, the opportunity to enjoy, in addition to the fate of the bull, the disembowelment and suffering of the horses?

The Bull Does Not Really Suffer

In any case, the aficionados say, the problem of suffering does not actually come up, because the bull feels no pain during the combat. They cite the studies carried out in the laboratory of Juan Carlos Illera del Portal, director of the Department of Animal Physiology in the veterinary college of the University of Madrid, according to which the bull, thanks to his “hormonal shield,” feels only very little pain, because his organism produces ten times more beta-endorphins (indogenous opiates that mitigate the effects of pain) than that of a human.³⁵ But Georges Chapouthier, director of Research Emeritus at the CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique) in Paris points out that the study by Juan Carlos Illera del Portal does not provide any indication of the methodology it used and makes no reference to scientific publications. Chapouthier calls “absurd” the idea that the secretion of endorphines signifies that the bull does not suffer. Other published studies indicate, to the contrary, that massive secretions of endorphines by the brain is the very sign that the animal is being subjected to intense pain and that its body is attempting to minimize the effects of it.36

José Enrique Zaldívar Laguía, a member of the Veterinary College of Madrid, also refutes the hypothesis that a heightened presence of beta-endorphins in the blood necessarily diminishes pain. The very high level of beta-endorphins found in the bull’s blood proves that it has undergone very intense physical and psychological attack and not the fact that it does not suffer.³⁷

According to the testimony of Zaldívar Laguía before the deputies of the Catalan Assembly on March 4, 2010, most of the studies carried out by the veterinarians affiliated with the arenas report that the thrusts of the picadors, whose weapons are the first used against the bull, provoke lesions in more than twenty of its muscles. This weapon, the puya, is “a sharp and cutting metallic weapon with a six centimeter shaft and a pyramidal point of 2.5 centimeters, each edge of which is as sharp as a scalpel. . . . Not only does it sever muscles, tendons, and ligaments, but also veins, arteries, and important nerves. The findings indicate that the average depth of these wounds is 20 centimeters, and wounds to the depth of 30 centimeters have been observed.” These thrusts bring about “fractures of spinal apophyses and perforations of the vertebrae, fractures of ribs and of linking cartilege. . . . Inevitable are lesions of the spinal marrow, hemorrhaging of the medullary ducts and very significant neural lesions. . . . The bull also loses between three and seven liters of blood.³⁸

Next come the banderillas, which are sharp as razor blades and have barbed ends. They are planted in the bull’s back to bleed him and prevent him from dying too quickly from an internal hemorrhage caused by the lances of the picadors. At the end the matador plunges a curved sword of eighty centimeters’ length into the withers of the exhausted animal. It is intended to hit the inferior vena cava and the posterior aorta, located in the thoracic cavity of the animal. But in point of fact, the weapon most often cuts into the nerve cords close to the spinal marrow, causing the bull to suffer intense respiratory difficulties. Often the blade causes an internal hemorrhage or tears a lung. In the latter case, the bull vomits blood and dies of asphyxia.39 If the bull does not die, the matador repeats the operation with a smaller sword, which he plants between the bull’s horns so as to cut into its brain. If that still fails to do the job, a peon delivers the coup de grâce with a puntilla, a short, double-edged, stabbing knife. But according to Zaldívar, the puntilla does not cause instant death but rather a death by a process of asphyxia resulting from a paralysis of the bull’s respiratory action that ends in hypoxia of the brain.⁴⁰

In brief, according to the deposition of Jean-François Courreau of the National Veterinary School of Alfort before the French parliament: “If the fighting bull possesses this kind of supernatural adaptation allowing it to bear pain, mistreatment, and suffering, I think this hypothesis would deserve considerable space in a scientific publication, but nothing of the sort has appeared so far.”⁴¹

So Many Great Thinkers and Artists Have Understood and Admired the Corrida

For those who imagine the aficionados to be a race of humans who lack humanity, we can only recall the names of all those artists and writers—like Mérimée, Lorca, Cocteau, Hemingway, Montherlant, Bataille, Leiris, Manet, or Picasso. Is it possible that they were no more than so many bloodthirsty perverts? Could it be that an uninitiate knows more than they do about what the corrida really is and about what they feel at the core of their sensibility and with all their art?⁴²

How could they all be mistaken on this point? asks Francis Wolff, author of the sentences above. But in what way could the literary or artistic talent that they all doubtless possessed possibly justify this or that opinion for or against the corrida? In the world of science, mistaking simple correlations for causal links is enough to invalidate the interpretation of the results of a study or a research project. But this is just the mistake that is made by people who use the idea of being in good company as an argument, and in this case, it is the mistake of those who say that if great writers and artists are in favor of the corrida, the corrida can only be legitimate. But truly, there is no causal link there. The fact that somebody excels in one area of expertise is no guarantee that they are a good human being. Céline, who is celebrated as one of the great writers of the twentieth century, was violently anti-Semitic. The great Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz was a Nazi sympathizer. Hitler prided himself on being a painter, Mao prided himself on being a poet, and Stalin was a good singer. If they had had the genius of a Rembrandt, a Baudelaire, or a Mozart, would that have lessened the horror of their crimes? Elegance of style does not make human kindness, and a bad writer might have a heart of gold.

Francis Wolff defends his use of the “fallacy of good company”:

Nobody is pretending that the tastes of respectable people are themselves also automatically respectable. What is in question here is if we can accept cataloging the corrida as a cruel and barbarous spectacle without heeding what has been transmitted to us concerning its sublime power by all these artists and poets who are at least as sensitive to suffering as any other human beings, including even jurists and philosophers.43

Okay. Let us hear what has been transmitted to us by these eminent personnages in question who are connoisseurs of the corrida. Ernest Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon, a novel devoted to the corrida, proclaims: “When a man is still in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes; that of giving it. This is one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing. These things are done in pride. . . . But it is pride which makes the bullfight and true enjoyment of killing which makes the great matador.”⁴⁴ Joy in killing . . . Can we admire and hold up as a model somebody who considers killing to be one of the great satisfactions of being human?

Hemingway added as well that, when compared to the tragedy of the death of the bull, that of the horse in the arena has a quality of comedy about it. Another author, Michel Leiris, expressed the view that the “the ignoble blood of the horses” symbolizes the female menses.45 At this moment, I have before my eyes two photographs. In one of them, you see a bull vigorously goring the belly of a big white horse, which seconds before had been ridden by a picador who had wounded the bull with his lance. In the next picture, you see the horse, which has risen again to its feet, ready to gallop away with its intestines hanging out of its belly and dragging on the ground. A harmless horse and a bull enraged to the point of madness by being lanced—both of them going to their deaths for the pleasure of human beings.

Let us examine in addition what has been transmitted to us by other writers, jurists, and philosophers who also felt they knew enough about the corrida to allow themselves to write about it. For example, Émile Zola wrote: “I am absolutely against bullfights, spectacles whose imbecilic cruelty is an education in blood and mud for the masses.” Does this make Zola an imbecile or a bad writer?

We could also make a list—of course without its having any greater validity than our opponents’ list, because it also makes use of the fallacy of good company—an equally impressive list of great writers, artists, and thinkers who have considered these spectacles in the arena deplorable. This, not at all exhaustive, list includes Jose Maria de Heredia, Georges Clemenceau, Georges Courteline, Léon Bloy, Jules Lemaître, Théodore Monod, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Brel (who sang “Mais l’épée a plongé et la foule est debout, c’est l’instant de triomphe où les épiciers se prennent pour Néron” [But the sword has plunged in and the crowd’s on its feet; it’s the moment of triumph when grocers take themselves for Nero]), Élisabeth Badinter, Jean-François Kahn, Hubert Montagner, and many others.

People are free to think what they want about the corrida. The bull, for his part, would certainly prefer not to be cut up by a whole arsenal of sharp weapons; he would surely rather end his days peacefully in the field where he was raised. He does not get a choice. We decide for him. This is where the abuse of power lies.

As for the “fallacy of bad company,” which consists in taking the example of tyrants and genocides who have defended the animal cause, it is also without foundation. The attempt has sometimes been made to blacken the name of defenders of animals by recalling that Hitler and the Nazis were infatuated with this cause at the same time as they were pursuing their monstrous behavior against humans. If such an argument had any validity, the facts that the commander of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Josef Kramer, was a great music lover and that other notorious torturers, once they returned home, were attentive family fathers would have the effect of denigrating classical music, on the one hand, and blackening the name of kindness toward children on the other. As the historian Élisabeth Hardouin-Fugier has shown, such sophistic arguments have been used to justify the instrumentalization of one the greatest atrocities in our history in order to cast scorn on animal protection.46 We must also remember that most animal advocates were and are fervent advocates of the rights of men and women, and have also fought against racism, torture, and all forms of injustice.

Outlawing Traditions Only Where They Don’t Exist

Francis Wolff denies that he is justifying the practice of bullfighting just because it is traditional and celebrates the fact that “most of the major progress in morality has been made by going against entrenched practices that are supposed to have been legitimized by tradition: slavery, the suicide of widows in India, or the circumcision of young girls.” But in his view the situation is different with regard to the corrida: “It is not because it is traditional that the corrida is authorized, but it is authorized only in those places where it is a tradition.” He adds: “That does not make the corrida ‘universally good,’ but rather locally legitimate. What may be seen as an act of cruelty in Stockholm or Strasbourg can be perceived in Dax or Nîmes as an act of loyal defiance and an act of ritual that is integral to the regional identity.”⁴⁷

A line of the French penal code does indeed authorize the corrida as well as cockfighting in those places where an “uninterrupted local tradition” can be attested.⁴⁸ Thus they are prohibited throughout French territory except where they take place. What sort of a meaningless law is that?! What is the point of prohibiting a tradition in a place where it does not exist? What need would there be of outlawing fights between dogs and bears in Nîmes, the corrida in Lapland, or human sacrifice in Belgium? How can we go about getting rid of a cruel tradition if we forbid it everywhere except where it is practiced? It is within the very domain of “cultural” tradition in question that we must wage the war against this practice. We must do away with the mystical aura that the corrida enjoys and remind its followers again and again of the level of cruelty involved in it.

Moreover, this “regional identity” of the corrida seems to concern only a minority of people. According to an Ipsos poll of July 2010, 71 percent of the inhabitants of Gard, a kind of capital of tauromachy, say that they are not attached to the corrida. On the national scale, 66 percent of the French people say they are in favor of abolishing the practice.49 Catalonia, where the culture of tauromachy has long been taken for granted, decided in 2010, in conformity with the wish of the majority of its citizens, to abolish it.⁵⁰

The Freedom to Kill

According to Alain Renaut, another philosopher and a professor at the Sorbonne, the corrida represents “the submission of brute nature (that is to say, violence) to human free will, a victory of freedom over nature.”⁵¹ But what “freedom” are we talking about here? The freedom to kill without need? Because the corrida in no way represents a situation of legitimate self-defense against animal aggression. In a democracy and in a law-abiding state, every citizen has the right to do what he or she wishes to the extent that his or her actions do not harm fellow citizens. The aim of the laws is to protect citizens against the violence of others. The laws are in a certain way “imposed,” because everyone is supposed to respect them, whether they like it or not. Transgression of the laws (such as those against murder, rape, or intentionally causing injury) has been judged unacceptable by society.

The establishment of a social contract is one of the characteristics of civilizations. So it is not a matter of “imposing” measures that outlaw the massacre of innocents, but a matter of protecting them from any such massacre. In fact, the first corrida, which took place in Bayonne, France, in 1853, was a direct infraction of the Grammont law, which punished mistreatment of animals. But the corrida benefited from the support of Empress Eugénie, and the prefects did not apply the law. The corrida thus continues to be an exception under the existing laws of France for the protection of animals, and an even greater exception under the laws of the European Union.

It Would Be a Good Thing to Teach Children to Appreciate the Ritual of the Kill

The corrida allows free entry for children under the age of ten. In the bullfighting schools of several countries (notably Spain, France, and Portugal), children and adolescents train with calves using a bladed weapon. For Francis Wolff, this is no problem:

The child can learn and come to understand in the same way as an adult. He or she can quickly learn to distinguish the human from the animal, and especially the admired and feared bull from loved and cherished animals, such as a pet cats or dogs. And the corrida can provide an occasion for parents to explain the key points of ritual (to which children are particularly sensitive), to talk with their children about life and death, or to offer commentary on the behavior of the animal and the art of the human.52

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child does not seem to share this opinion. It recently made a ruling that “participation of children and adolescents (male and female) in activities connected with tauromachy constitutes a serious violation of the articles of the Convention regarding the rights of the child.”⁵³ During the committee’s deliberations, Sergio Caetano, a representative of the Franz Weber Foundation of Portugal, made the following statement: “In the course of lessons or actual events of tauromachy in which they participate, children must violently wound bulls using sharp and cutting instruments; they must also hold onto the animal without any protection in order to gain control over it and are regularly subject to accidents. Moreover, children who witness such happenings are witnesses of major violence.”

The Committee therefore recommended to member states to take legislative measures to definitively prohibit the participation of children in tauromachy.

It Is Better to Live the Life of a Fighting Bull and Die in the Arena Than to Live in an Industrial Breeding Facility and Die in the Slaughterhouse

Some people think it is better to die nobly and quickly in the arena than in a miserable way in an abattoir. In truth, as much in one case as the other, it is better to remain alive.

Francis Wolff asks animal advocates to “choose the more desirable fate: that of a work ox, of a bull or calf headed for the slaughterhouse (bred and raised en masse for the most part), or that of the fighting bull. The last enjoys four years of free life and then faces a quarter of an hour of death in the ring.”54

But it is not a question of choosing between bad and worse, because in two of the cases we are imposing death on an animal that surely has no wish to die. Ideally, a bull should not be sent either to the ring or to the slaughterhouse. The logical alternative to the bullring is not the slaughterhouse but a peaceful life in a meadow where the animal can die a good death.

When there is a forced choice among a limited number of possibilities, any reasonable person will choose the one that involves the least suffering. But neither the corrida nor the slaughterhouse is a forced choice. The best choice is to spare the animal both.

This argument has recourse to both the “fallacy of the worst” and the “fallacy of consolation.” Should we say to someone we are torturing for an hour before executing him or her: “Be happy, we could have tortured you for six months without stopping”? We could excuse ourselves for regularly raping a child by saying: “But it is suffering less than if it were in a concentration camp.” Claiming that one bad treatment is better than another that would be even worse does not confer legitimacy on the first. So the question is not if there is something worse than the corrida but whether the corrida itself is acceptable.

It is obvious that the number of victims of the corrida is nowhere near the order of the billions of land animals slaughtered every year so their flesh can be eaten. Still, suffering is an experience felt by each individual who undergoes it, and the cruelty is always the same. What changes are the sphere in which it occurs, the number of its victims, and the different disguises it is dressed up in, which range from the art of gastronomy to sport (in the case of hunting for sport, where the kill is not necessary for the survival of the hunter). As the Spanish writer Antonio Zozaya tells us, there is only one cruelty, no matter what its object is: “Making an animal suffer is causing suffering. Whoever or whatever is the victim of this useless cruelty, it is still cruelty. . . . The important thing is not knowing who one is tormenting; the essential point is not to torment. . . . There is only one cruelty in the world, the same one for humans and for animals, for ideas and for things, for gods and for earthworms. So let us shun this barbarity that so demeans us.”55

Circus Animals—The Pain behind the Glitter

Isn’t it entertaining to watch the elephants make the round of the ring, each one holding in its trunk the tail of the one in front of it? Don’t we admire the lion tamer who has the courage to put his head in the gaping maw of the roaring beast? But these feats are only the end point of a long accumulation of brutalities inflicted on the trained animals. The wand prettily decorated with flowers with which the trainer seems to caress the ear of the elephant to guide it through its movements hides a sharp iron hook that will quickly come jabbing into the pachyderm’s ear at the least sign of disobedience. Let us listen to the remarks of an American elephant trainer caught live by a hidden camera as he was training an apprentice:

Hurt him! Make him scream! If you’re afraid of hurting him . . . don’t set foot in this hall. If I tell you “crack his head,” “crush his damned foot,” what does that mean, huh? Because it’s very important to do it, eh? When he starts to fidget, bam! Right under the chin! . . . Stick that hook in, as far as it goes . . . and when it’s all the way in, keep pushing, yeah, yeah, yeah. He’ll start screaming. When you hear him screaming, you’ll know that you’ve succeeded in getting his damned attention a little bit. . . . Okay, let’s go.⁵⁶

“That’s the way it is in all the circuses in the world,” Vladimir Deriabkine, a famous bear tamer, tells us. He got his bears to play the roles of bartender, car mechanic, sailor, astronaut, and lover. During the show, they became almost human. For ten years, Deriabkine has not entered a circus ring. He gave up animal training. Why? “Because,” he says, “it’s a barbaric activity. Trainers have always hidden the underbelly of their work from the spectators. But I’m going to tell you what none of them will ever say. If they knew the truth about the training, it would only turn the spectators away from the circus acts.” He told his story at length to the journalist Vladimir Kojemiakine:

I loved my work. . . . My only regret for a long time in those days was not being recognized as a great circus performer. But today I realize that you can never get an award for animal-training work. A medal for cruelty is out of the question. The cruelty does not happen in the ring, but behind the scenes. I put on, among others, an act that always brought the house down: one of the bears fell on its knees in front of Liouda, my partner, squeezing in its paws a heart made of papier-mâché. Seen from the stands, the effect was spectacular and very touching. But during the rehearsals, it was a different matter altogether!

I saw a bear killed for refusing to perform its number. The trainer’s nerves snapped, he blew up, and he struck. That is an image I will never forget—the image of the trainer’s boots dripping with the bear’s blood, he had gone after the poor animal that hard.

A bear tamer from St. Petersburg told me that his bears, they were his kids. He felt for them and he educated them. His children, my ass! You just make money on the backs of those children. You eat well, you dress fancy, you sleep in clean sheets while they sleep in cages. And still today in Russia, bears are treated like criminals. They still have to travel in these tiny cages—it’s disgusting. Because for a trainer, the animals are nothing but living accessories.

I remember a number that was called “Joined Hands.” An elephant held out its paw, a tiger put its paw on top of that, and at the end, the trainer added his hand on top of both. It presented a kind of symbolic vision of the friendship between the animals and the trainer. In fact, behind this poetic image, there is nothing but violence. Go ahead and try shaking hands with a sworn enemy: they won’t do it unless you threaten them with death. They will refuse. And the moment you remove the threat, they will go for your throat.

When I decided to quit the profession, I had six bears left. Now bears—circuses always have a surplus of them. There’s no solution for it. One morning, early, my assistants took them away. The following day, my bears were dead. And they were artists, they were applauded, they gave the audience a lot of pleasure! They’re all doomed to end up like that.57

To the question, “Are there any nice trainers?” Deriabkine replied, “Nice executioners—do you know any of those? Let’s be clear: cruelty is part of being a trainer. The moment you take a bear cub and put it in a cage so you get it to perform in the ring, it’s a catastrophe for the animal. And for the man also, if he has a heart.”

Dick Gregory, a comedian and civil rights activist who was close to Martin Luther King, said: “When I look at animals held captive in circuses, that makes me think of slavery. Animals in circuses represent the domination and oppression we have fought for so long. They wear the same chains and the same fetters.”

According to the French League for the Defense of the Rights of Animals (LFDA), two hundred traveling circuses still crisscross France and put on shows that include wild animals. In Finland and Denmark, such shows are already prohibited, except in the case of seals in Finland, and Asian elephants, camels, and llamas in Denmark. We can gauge the evolution of our sensibilities over the time from the Roman circuses to the time of the Cirque du Soleil, which is doubtless the most popular one in the world today. It does not have a single trained-animal act in its program.⁵⁸

Zoos: Show Prisons or Noah’s Arks?

In colonial times, not only rare animals but also “exotic” humans were exhibited in zoos and at the famous World Fairs and Colonial Fairs. They were an amusement for children and a curiosity for their parents. Behind the animal exhibits, which attracted sizable crowds, lay the completely illegal animal trade that operated between the European capitals and their respective colonies. In Belles Captives: Une Histoire des Zoos du Côté des Bêtes (Splendid Prisoners: A History of Zoos from the Point of View of the Animals), Éric Baratay presents an exposé of the cruel methods used in these animal captures and their cost in animal lives. These hunts were still going on as late as the period between the World Wars. “Repentant animal traders,” he tells us, “estimated the losses [animals that died in the course of the take] between 15 and 30 percent in general, but the percentages could in some cases be quite a bit higher—80 percent for the gibbons of Laos.”59 The historian has tracked the losses during transport and those connected with the difficult period of adaptation, and altogether they come to 50 percent on average. You have to count ten deaths for every animal that is finally exhibited.

In his day, Philippe Diolé, who worked with Jacques-Yves Cousteau and was a cofounder of the LFDA, decried the miserable conditions in zoos in a series of op-ed pieces in the Le Figaro. According to him, “70 percent of the zoological parks should be closed down.”⁶⁰ Although they appeared in 1974, these articles remain sadly accurate for most of the countries of the world today. In Kathmandu, where I live, the zoo is no more than a bleak location where the animals wait to die. In an article entitled “Prisons dans un Jardin” (Prisons in a Garden), Philippe Diolé calls for the closing of the menagerie in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. For him it was no more than a scene of animal degradation, a leftover from a former age:

The humiliation of animals is no more bearable than that of people. As has been the case for a century and longer, the servals, pumas and tigers exhibited there are like the walking dead.

They suffer from despair, but more than anything else, they are dispossessed. They have lost the green richness of leaves and grasses and even the earth where they flourished. The big paws of the cats, with their sensitive pads, are injured by the tough cement. Raptors hop about on their own droppings. The pink flamingos move about in sewer water. . . . In prison, a man loses his liberty, but in a cage, an animal loses the space where his complex life was organized: its behavior is thrown off, its state of mind is shaken. There is no other outcome for it than madness, which is sometimes a mercy. That is why the bear goes on and on with its dizzy back-and-forth along the wall that its muzzle just brushes. The elephant rocks from side to side without a break. A young wolf pulls out its claws. The zoo captives, with few exceptions are mentally ill, obsessed by their incarceration, frustrated, full of anxiety and aggression.

This psychiatric hospital that exploits animal suffering is not worthy either of our time or especially of the eminent personalities affiliated with the museum. The menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes, right in the middle of Paris, is an anachronistic and scandalous enclave, where for three francs one can see miserable animals, shaky buildings, and broken tiles.

So let’s get rid of all that and plant some flowers.61

By now, according to Norin Chai, researcher and head of the veterinary service of the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes, significant progress has been made: “The zoos are ultimately only the reflection of those who administer them. Some remain just places for the animals to die, while others have evolved in the direction of more humanity, either as a result of public opinion or because of genuine conviction.”⁶² Starting in the 2000s, many legislatures have brought about a change in the conditions of life in the zoos of the developed countries.⁶³ The well-being of animals, their preservation, and relevant scientific research have now become mandatory activities. In Europe the Balai Directive governs all the zoological parks worthy of the name and obliges institutions to provide a high level of veterinary care.⁶⁴

In 1992 the conference of the United Nations in Rio recognized the preservative function of zoos. Thus these establishments will continue to prosper—let us not forget that they are commercial enterprises—and can henceforth take on an ecological legitimacy that brings them the sympathy as well as the visits of large numbers of the public. The zoo is often no longer purely a place of mortal captivity but a place for the reproduction and safeguarding of endangered species. In certain cases the animals are eventually released into their original habitat. Nowadays, lots of scientists working in zoos see them functioning as a kind of Noah’s Ark that preserves numerous species that are on the verge of disappearing. We must acknowledge that there have been successes. The Arabian oryx (Oryx leucoryx), a species that had pretty well disappeared a few decades ago, is once again seen on the sands and in the oases of Oman and Israel. The celebrated Przewalski’s horse (Equus przewalskii) gallops once more across the Mongolian steppes. The Micronesian kingfisher (Todiramphus cinnamominus), the condor of California (Gymnogyps californianus), and the scimitar oryx (Oryx dammah) have been saved as a result of having been bred in captivity; soon that might well be the case for the addax (Addax nasomaculatus) also.

Certain associations, like the Zoological Society of Frankfurt and the Zoological Society of London, which work for the preservation of wildlife, carry on preservation projects in situ. At these sites zoo veterinarians join wildlife veterinarians in working for the protection of endangered species.65 They do research work on the diseases that endanger the survival of various species and have notably played an essential role in aviary medicine in the Galápagos Islands.⁶⁶ Some of the avian diseases are the result of pollution. Vultures, for example, are on the verge of extinction in South Asia because they eat the corpses of domestically bred animals to which farmers have administered the drug diclofenac. This anti-inflammatory, which was frequently used by veterinarians until it was recently banned, turned out to be a virulent poison for scavengers, in which even in weak doses it brings on terminal renal failure.⁶⁷

Professor Jean-Claude Nouët, cofounder of the LFDA, tempers the enthusiasm of the zoo directors: “The successful re-introductions [of animals into the wild] can be counted on the fingers of one hand.” Éric Baratay has a more optimistic view: “The fingers of both hands, at the most.” Indeed, since the 1990s, it has become obvious that the number of species approaching extinction has gone far beyond the resources that zoos can offer to preserve them in captivity.

Creating Genuine Reserves and Teaching Animals to Live in the Wild Again

Jean-Claude Nouët, while recognizing the undeniable successes there have been in reintroducing species into their original habitats, remains cautious: “The zoos don’t preserve species, they conserve them, which is not the same thing.” Élisabeth Hardouin-Fugier expresses the following opinion: “Rather than salvaging a Noah’s Ark that is as expensive and cramped as a spacecraft, the thing to do is curb the flood.”68

In other words, it is better to protect the natural habitat of animals in situ (with the benefit of preserving the habitats themselves) than to establish and maintain institutions intended to save the animals from extinction at the risk of serious physical and mental damage to species whose members are, at the end of the day, no more than involuntary exiles from their savannah, forest, or native jungle. The creation of reserves and national parks is a much better solution.⁶⁹

If zoos were not primarily commercial enterprises, there would be no reason for this scenario of caging lions and giraffes and then killing them when they are no longer needed. As for the project of preserving species on the brink of extinction, this could be carried out in a scientific manner in protected reserves in the heart of the species’s natural habitat.

Another worthy project is saving young animals that have been captured by traffickers and whose mothers have been killed. On the Internet, there is a video that shows an orphan chimpanzee regaining its health after having been taken in by Jane Goodall and her team when it was close to death. When the moment came for it to be liberated into the wild by those who had saved it and cared for it, it took the time to give Jane Goodall a long hug before disappearing into the forest.⁷⁰

Similarly, in China and Vietnam, Jill Robinson frees bears from farms where they are kept in extremely painful conditions so their bile can be milked.⁷¹ (See chapter 10, “Illegal Trade in Wildlife.”) The organization One Voice does as much for bears that were mistreated by trainers of hunting dogs. You see, in Russia, in order to assess the ferocity of their dogs, their trainers let them loose on young bears that are tied up. Wounded in many places, very few of these bears survive this torture.

Reintroducing an animal into its wild habitat is a very delicate enterprise that takes a lot of time, resources, and care, especially when the animal comes to the point of relearning to hunt or integrating into a group that it did not grow up with. So after having taken care of the animals, it is necessary to accompany them into the wild during their apprenticeship in a life of freedom.

At this point we come to the fundamental question: Is it moral to capture an animal and imprison it? The claim is made that zoos make it possible for children to have a “living” relationship with wild animals and thus develop a sense of empathy for them. But is putting wild animals on show for them as though captivity was their normal situation a good way to teach children empathy for them? We might well doubt it when we look at these haggard big cats that pace back and forth all day long along the bars of their enclosures in perpetual search of a way out. And if children do feel empathy for these animals, won’t they find themselves wishing they could be set free? Nowadays, they can get to know animals much better by watching the extraordinary documentaries being shown on television and also available over the Internet. These documentaries take them into the real world of the wild species. They can also study the natural behavior of the animals in their natural environment. As an amateur ornithologist in my teenage years, I spent much of my leisure time observing birds in nature, while I found the spectacle of zoos very upsetting.

Some zoological parks and zoos allow their inmates to live in larger spaces where the public can enter into contact with life in the wild. The Thoiry Park in the Yvelines district of the Île-de-France occupies 445 acres. The Vincennes Zoo reopened its doors on April 12, 2014, after six years of renewal work that allowed them to considerably improve the life of the animals. Gone are the cages and narrow enclosures, the glass showcases, the ditches and the bars. They have been replaced by open spaces, open air, and plants. Is that enough to justify the captivity of the animals? According to the writer Armand Farrachi, zoos are by definition artificial places, devised for the captivity of exotic animals. “So much the better if the zoological park of Paris, like other “bio-parks,” prioritize “bio-conservation” through the “management” of animals living their lives in “semi-freedom.” But the principal remains: Giving your slaves a longer chain is not setting them free.”72

As Farrachi reminds us, the notion of “good treatment” obliterates all connotations of freedom and reinforces the human in the position of master and possessor of nature, “doing whatever he likes with inferior species, if possible as an enlightened master rather than an executioner. His indulgence will go no further than that.”

And When We Don’t Need You Anymore . . .

When the animals are no longer needed or there are too many of them, what do we do? We kill them. The Copenhagen Zoo has recently distinguished itself by “euthanizing” a baby giraffe that it did not know what to do with, then four lions, then two lion cubs—at the very moment that giraffes are disappearing from West Africa and the number of lions is in freefall all over Africa.

As was reported widely in the media,73 Marius, a giraffe one and a half years old, in perfect health, was “euthanized” on February 10, 2014, at the Copenhagen Zoo. The term “euthanize” is the one the zoo used, even though this act has nothing whatever in common with the killing of an animal suffering from intolerable pain. The zoo management had no idea what to do with the animal and had concluded that Marius did not have “a genetically interesting heritage.” So the animal, in perfect health, was executed in public with a slaughtering pistol and was cut into pieces in front of the television cameras. The pieces of its body were then thrown out into a field to feed the big cats. All of this was done in front of an audience of stunned children. This execution was supported by the European Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AEZA), despite having what they call a “conservation committee” and boasting of possessing an “ethical charter.”⁷⁴

Solutions other than “euthanasia” were ruled out. The zoo defended itself by saying that castration is more cruel and would have “undesirable effects.” As to reintroducing no longer needed animals into nature, according to the zoo, that is a process that “has little chance of success and which, in the case of giraffes, is not desired by the African countries.”

The Copenhagen Zoo recidivated in March 2014 by killing four lions, of which two were cubs less than ten months old. It justified itself as follows: “They would have been killed by the new male the first chance he got.”⁷⁵ And “in any case, the two lion cubs were not big enough to get along on their own.”⁷⁶ The zoo would not have had enough room to house them separately and would not have succeeded in placing them elsewhere. The world shrinks cruelly when nobody wants to spend a penny to save some surplus lions!

One consolation: “All our animals are not cut to pieces in front of visitors,” the zoo director declared, adding that “this establishment is recognized throughout the world for its work with lions.” And he concluded, “I am proud that one of them [the so-called ‘new male’] will be the progenitor of a new genetic line.” Really good work. . . .

Amusement Parks That Massacre Dolphins

Every year dozens of dolphins are captured and then sold to trainers on the payroll of aquatic parks. Taken out of their natural habitat, they are doomed to survive in environments to which they are not suited, where the rate of mortality is high and births are rare. It is in these terms that the association One Voice describes dolphinariums, lucrative enterprises that put on shows of trained dolphins and, sometimes in luxury settings, offer sessions publicized as “dolphin therapy.”

A dolphin in its element swims up to sixty miles per day to hunt, for pleasure, and to cultivate social relations with its peers. Thus the conditions in which they are held do not allow them to pursue their normal behavior. They are deprived not only of their freedom but also of the richness of their social relations and their normal modes of communication. The water of the pools in which they are kept, often chlorinated, causes many ailments.

Orcas, another species that is a victim of these aquatic parks, survive no longer than seven years in them. In their natural habitat, the females live about 50 years (with a maximum of 80 to 90 years) and the males 30 years (with a maximum of 50 to 60 years). As has been revealed in the documentary Blackfish,77 as well as in other investigative pieces, the owners of these amusement parks, such as Seaworld in San Diego, California, carefully conceal from the public and from newly hired trainers the dangers that trainers face, which range from serious injury to death. The facts are that orcas taken from different schools are confined in small basins, despite the fact that in the sea they usually swim ninety miles per day. They are separated from their young and forced to execute a variety of acrobatic feats. This treatment causes them to suffer from stress and despair, which they sometimes take out on their trainers.

Every year, during the six months of the fishing season, the villages of Taiji and Futo in Japan are the scene of a mass dolphin kill. The fishermen intercept the cetaceans on their migratory route, then chase them until they are exhausted or else drive them using a wall of sound created by striking metallic rods immersed beneath the surface of the water. Next they bunch them together in the shallow waters of a cove whose entry they block afterward with nets in order to prevent the dolphins from escaping. At that point the fishermen only have to harpoon the dolphins, which are swimming in a sea of blood, then hoist them aboard their boats or pull them up on the shore. Sometimes they even drag them alive along the asphalt with their little trucks. Every season, around 23,000 dolphins and other small cetaceans are massacred in this fashion in the name of a 400-year-old tradition.

The best specimens are captured alive so they can be sold to dolphinariums for prices as high as $150,000. The others are sold for $600 to $800 apiece to restaurants. Without the trade with the dolphinariums, the market in dolphin meat would no longer be viable, since the demand for the meat is decreasing constantly.

Richard O’Barry was a dolphin trainer in the 1960s. One day, one of his dolphins apparently committed suicide in front of him by ceasing breathing (in dolphins, breathing is not automatic as in humans, but results from a voluntary effort). O’Barry was so upset that he gave up the training profession to devote himself to the protection of this species. In particular, he served as a consultant for the One Voice organization, whose team filmed a poignant series of documentaries at Taiji. These images of a bloody sea full of dolphins in their death agony were shown around the world and shocked public opinion. In addition to showing the dolphin massacre, this footage proved for the first time the connection between the fishermen and the amusement parks, which until then had been denied. It showed the trainers rejecting animals that were too small or had been injured in favor of the most “beautiful” specimens—the ones that conformed to the criteria of the dolphinariums from all over the world that order their animals from there.78

O’Barry also served as a consultant for the film entitled The Cove, which won the Oscar for best documentary in 2010. This film confirmed the existence of the business connection between the trade in dolphins to be kept in captivity and the fishermen who massacre the rest of them, especially at Taiji.⁷⁹ Produced in 2007 by Louie Psihoyos, a former photographer at National Geographic, this film was made in secret, using underwater microphones and cameras hidden in rocks. Although water parks and dolphinariums are starting to have a bad reputation in North America and Europe, unfortunately their number is increasing significantly in China, continuing to fuel demand for dolphins and other such creatures.

In order to put an end to this traffic, it is important, for one thing, to oppose the creation of new dolphinariums, and then to demand the release of all cetaceans utilized as objects of entertainment in the aquatic parks. One Voice suggests that the fishermen, who are highly qualified by their ancestral experience, should from now on be employed as eco-guards or guides for eco-tourists to help them enjoy one of the greatest spectacles that exists: the sight of dolphins at liberty.

Hunting and Fishing for Pleasure: Killing for Sport or for Entertainment

Hunting and fishing are practiced by many peoples for their survival. When this is not the case, these pursuits are classified under the rubric of “recreational sports.” Europeans who hunt for pleasure are certainly not in the same position as Eskimos who kill to ensure their survival or to prevent a polar bear from devouring them. The hunters of wealthy nations may eat most of what they kill, but they rarely need this dietary element in order to survive. Moreover, the motivations put forward by the hunters themselves do not mention the need for food, but rather cite contact with nature (99 percent), companionship (93 percent), and the maintenance of property (89 percent).80 These are all laudable goals in themselves, but not ones that in any way necessitate the use of a rifle.

Regarding fishing, Théophile Gautier wrote with refined insight, “Nothing calms the passions like this philosophical diversion that fools reduce to a mockery like all the other things they don’t understand.”⁸¹ Such a pity that the fish can’t really grasp the extent to which this philosophy can be entertaining. . . .

Winston Churchill declared very high-mindedly: “You come back from fishing washed clean, purified . . . completely filled with a great happiness.” The fish are surely charmed to hear about it. The famous aviator Pierre Clostermann had the kindness to release the fish he caught “so they could grow up to be more prudent in the future.” A form of tough-love education, to be sure. I share with this war pilot the feeling that “nothing compares to the beatific solitude of a pond awakening in a windless dawn or the happiness of gently rowing through the faint mist of daybreak.” But why associate this serenity with an activity that draws its pleasure from inflicting death on other beings?

Some go the extent of depicting hunting as an act of love, as does shotgun writer a Michael McIntosh: “In hunting, man fulfills the demands of his own nature. It is a restorative act by which he demonstrates his elemental bond with the universe. And, it is prompted by love.”82

Human beings often exhibit the kind of lopsided vision elegantly summed up by George Bernard Shaw: “When a man kills a tiger, he’s a hero; when a tiger kills a man, it’s a ferocious beast.” The rare cases of bathers attacked by sharks make headlines in the media, which come up with titles like “Killer Sharks on the Loose!” On the average, annually, around thirty people perish in the world as a result of having inopportunely found themselves in the path of these sharks. (Mosquitoes are incomparably more dangerous, for they kill between 1.5 million and 2 million people in the world every year by transmitting malaria, dengue fever, or yellow fever.) As for the humans, they kill an average of 100 million sharks per year.

Hunters as Protectors of Nature?

Hunting organizations claim to be fervent protectors of nature and pride themselves on playing a more informed and effective role in regulating wildlife than the ecologists. In the United States, the NRA claims that “Hunters and other gun owners are among the foremost supporters of sound wildlife management and conservation practices in the United States.”⁸³ In the same vein, Benoît Petit, president of the St. Hubert Club of Belgium, an association for defense and promotion of hunting (St. Hubert is the patron saint of hunting) states: “The hunter, the person who is the steward of a hunting domain, observes his animals, and manages and husbands his territory all through the year. The act of culling an animal only represents a few seconds in the ongoing effort that he is continually making.”84

According to this view, hunting is “a necessity for the ecology.” However, as the association One Voice points out, the impact of hunters on the environment and their way of managing the wildlife is more than questionable.⁸⁵ They claim that their mission is to make sure, by means of their “culling” (once again a term that deliberately gives an impression of harmlessness but masks a predatory human reality), that stable and healthy animal populations are maintained. In this way, they replace the effect of natural predators such as wolves, bears, and lynx. They make much of the point, for example, that over the past thirty years the populations of wild boars have spread geographically and multiplied in numbers by a factor of five. The deer population has also increased. Therefore, they say, it is crucial to regulate this growth by means of the hunt. However, many other, less violent means of intervention can be envisaged, such as sterilization of the dominant males, who account for the greatest proportion of reproduction. Moreover, in a truly natural environment, rich in biodiversity, the balance between prey and predators would stabilize at optimal levels of density, and intervention would not be necessary.

Natural predation limits the populations and eliminates the weakest individuals, but that is far from the privileged choice of the hunters, who prefer to kill the “most beautiful” beasts. In view of the complexity of biological balances, it is somewhat pretentious to try to play the role of substitute for nature. In Yellowstone National Park in the United States, a significant diminution in the number of trees was observed. The ecologists who took on this problem showed that authorization of the hunting of wolves—which the hunters asserted had become too numerous—had resulted in an increase in the number of deer, and the deer were the ones who had eaten the shoots of the trees. Since wolf hunting was prohibited again, the number of deer has decreased, and the trees are growing again.

In other cases, as the American philosopher Brian Luke tells us, “the population of deer is elevated because men like to kill deer. Wildlife managers manipulate plant life, exterminate natural predators, regulate hunting licenses, and sometimes even raise deer and release them in nature.”⁸⁶ In other words, hunting is not done because it is necessary to regulate overly numerous populations of animals; rather, the size of these populations is artificially increased in order to provide a reason to hunt. On top of this, hunters, far from being content with shooting wild animals or trapping animals who have been declared “nuisances,” increase certain wild populations by introducing domestically raised animals (rabbits and pheasants) for the pleasure of killing them. For the most part, these animals have grown used to the hitherto harmless company of humans; they do not fear them and do not run from their guns.

Questioned one day about his view of hunting, the naturalist and explorer Théodore Monod replied as follows: “It is obvious that prehistoric humans needed to kill animals. Currently, Eskimos kill seals and Bushmen kill giraffes—it is necessary for them. They don’t have a choice. But apart from cases like these, it’s a total anachronism. We do not hunt here either in self-defense or for food. We hunt for entertainment.”87 Théodore Monod spent his life fighting against poverty, racism, torture, and all sorts of other injustices, as well as against destruction of the environment. He was inspired in his commitment to the cause of humans and animals by Albert Schweitzer and by his own father, the Protestant pastor Wilfred Monod.

Hunting with Hounds, a Bloody Amusement for the Elite

Even though it is done only by a very small part of the population in the countries where it still goes on, this kind of hunting is a deeply cruel leftover from the past. It “consists of pursuit on horseback and with dogs of a wild animal, usually a stag, to the point of exhaustion, then stabbing it, drowning it, or breaking its legs (if it has not been torn apart by the hounds) before ‘serving’ it, that is, cutting its throat,” as writer Armand Farrachi explains.⁸⁸

As Alexandrine Civard-Racinais tells us in her Dictionnaire horrifié de la Souffrance animale (Horrified Dictionary of Animal Suffering): “We’ll have to believe that Armand Farrachi and the numerous opponents of hunting (73 percent of the French people according to a poll carried out by Sofres in March 2005) have understood nothing about this ‘school of refinement, perseverance, and well-informed respect for nature,’ as the Société de la Vénerie (Society of the Hunt) would have it.”⁸⁹ As a fine example of this perseverance and respect, on November 2, 2007, in the township of Larroque in the Tarn, a stag pursued by forty dogs smashed to bits the bay window of the living room of the Family B. The stag was stabbed to death with a dagger in the family kitchen by one of the members of the Grésigny Hunt, the organizers of this particular hunt.90

This kind of hunting is thousands of years old, according to the historians of this particular style of the sport. It only acquired real importance in France during the reign of Francis I, when it became an “art de vivre” that attracted the nobility. This king himself was known as “the great hunter of France.” In fact, hunting with hounds remained until the twentieth century the prerogative of a nobility clad in red- or black-tailed riding coats and boots, with caps in the colors of their particular hunt club.

Just as in the case of ordinary hunting with a rifle, the advocates of this sport boast of contributing to the balance of the ecosystem. They base their legitimacy on ancestral aristocratic traditions and tout the virtues of this “amusement” as one that increases endurance and the skill of the hunter and his packs of dogs. Today, its proponents minimize its elitist aspect and present it in more democratic terms as a “sport.” They create nonprofit associations where each member pays dues, just as in other sports clubs.⁹¹

Let us imagine a forest in springtime, serene and fresh, where you might expect to hear only the twittering of birds, the breeze in the trees, the furtive sound of a rodent or a deer rustling in the soft litter of dried leaves from the previous autumn. All at once, you hear the clamor of riders in red jerseys on galloping horses, the furious belling of hounds (which are sometimes deliberately kept hungry), and the blast of horns marking the high points of the hunt. For a brief moment, the stag stands immobile, trying to decide in which direction to flee. It darts forward and leaps over some brush, desperately seeking a stream where it can drown its scent and scatter the dog pack at its heels. If it is lucky, it will find water. If the dogs catch it, it will be pitilessly torn to pieces, disemboweled, and then stabbed—excuse me, “served.” The hunters will be able to rejoice in a great day of hunting as they stand before the cadaver of the magnificent stag that has just lost its life . . .

In a similar vein, the nineteenth-century English hunter Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming tells us in his memoirs of his pride in killing an African elephant. After the beaters had driven the pachyderm into shooting range, Gordon-Cumming decides to “devote a little time to contemplating this noble elephant before shooting it down.” He has a coffee made for himself and, while sipping it, contemplates “one of the finest of African elephants which stands awaiting my pleasure next to a tree. . . . I was master of these immense forests that now provided me with this highly noble and uplifting sport.” After having admired his victim for a good while, he decides to fire. Not without having “made several attempts trying to find the vulnerable points,” he finally succeeds in mortally wounding the elephant and watches its death throes. “Great tears rolled from its eyes, which slowly closed, then re-opened. Its colossal body trembled convulsively. It fell down onto its side and expired. Its tusks, beautifully curved, were the heaviest ones I had ever seen.”92

To come back to hunting with hounds, the decorum, the special vocabulary, and the introduction of music seem to have as their goal to make everyone forget the macabre ending of this diversion.

In France there was a legislative proposal to outlaw this anachronistic custom of hunting with hounds in May 2013. It was outlawed in 2004 in England (where the practice was particularly prized), abolished in Germany in 1952, and in Belgium in 1995. It survives, however, in the United States (where it was exported by British colonials who introduced hunting the red fox with hounds), in Canada, and in other countries. We cannot but identify with the words of Albert Schweitzer, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize: “The time will come when public opinion will no longer tolerate amusements in which animals are mistreated or killed. When will we reach the moment when the hunt, the pleasure of killing animals for ‘sport,’ will be considered a mental aberration?”⁹³

The Golden Rule Applies to All Beings

Consider the golden rule, which is common to almost all religions and cultures: “Do not do to others what you would not wish them to do to you.” If we extend that to all sentient beings, how could we imagine that an animal would choose to be incarcerated in a zoo, to undergo the torments inflicted on it by a neurotic circus trainer, or be stabbed in the back by sharp banderillas and, shortly after, executed with a sword? Without even going so far as to imagine what we humans might feel in those situations, we can at least recognize that animals themselves are completely capable of making their own choices: a wild sow chooses carefully the lair in which she will give birth to her litter; if you open the cage of a wild animal, it will immediately dash away into the forest. Any animal in good health will choose life over death.

Those who nevertheless persist in justifying the torments we inflict on animals should begin by explaining why the golden rule applies only to human beings and by what right they consider themselves authorized in so limiting it.