Bullfighting Articles

Chris Matthews on Bullfighting

Chris Matthews is the host of Hardball (MSNBC) and The Chris Matthew Show (NBC). He was a presidential speechwriter for the Carter administration and a top aide to former Speaker of the House, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neil.

In his 2001 book, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, Chris Matthews exposes the horrors of bullfighting.

At Barcelona’s Corida de Toros – which he appropriately calls a “death walk” – Matthews “witnessed a series of gang attacks on a half-dozen extremely confused animals.”

Bloody spectacle now disappearing

by Charles Adams, columnist

The Reading Eagle
December 9, 2006

The United States has its ballparks. Spain has its bullrings. Here, major league cities sport stadiums that seat tens of thousands of baseball fans, while minor league cities have their own, smaller ball yards.

Go to a city like Seville and you'll see a 10,000-seat bullring. Head south into the heart of Andalusia and you'll reach Ronda, with its 5,000-seat plaza de toros.

Ronda is recognized as the birthplace of bullfighting in Spain, and its elegant showplace opened in 1785. It drew the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles, who found fascination in what Spaniards call the “equestrian art” of bullfighting.

Letter Written Regarding a Catholic High School's Field Trip to a Bullfight.

To All:

When I read that your Catholic (that is still a Christian faith isn't it?) High School students' trip to Spain included their seeing and supporting a bullfight I was outraged! The Catholic Church has worked hard to shed its scandals of late, but then your staff members use such gross judgment in allowing impressionable teenagers to view the cruel "blood sport" of bullfighting on their trip. How does a person of faith actually justify that in their mind? What are you thinking? Are you telling me that they actually have to physically support this event to understand this ugly/dark part of the Spanish culture? Couldn't you have just shown them some SHARK (animal rights group protecting livestock) videos that are very graphic in its proof of the cruelties inflicted on livestock, particularly those used for entertainment by the greedy and barbaric?

No Bull: Pius V and Bullfighting

November 1997
By Jean Thaler

On November 1, 1567, Pope Pius V (1566-1572), issued a papal bull entitled "An injunction forbidding bullfights and other similar sports with wild animals and the annulment of vows and oaths previously made." Jean Thaler explains the background to the bull and the extremely mixed record of this particular pope.

He excommunicated Queen Elizabeth the First of England. He burnt heretics in the piazza. He terminated the Turks. But... he saved the bulls!

The Case Against Bullfighting

by Michael A. Ogorzaly
Author House (1663 Liberty Drive, Suite 200, Bloomington, IN 47403), 2006
248 pages, paperback. $14.95.

Animal People

January/February 2007

Michael Ogorzaly, who died at age 58 on October 14, 2006, suffered a broken neck as a college student, when a car in which he was a passenger was involved in an accident. Confined to a wheelchair thereafter, Ogorzaly completed his education and went on to teach Spanish and Latin American history at Chicago State University. When Bulls Cry was his second book, addressing a topic which had become one of his focal concerns.

De-romanticising the bullfight spectacle with a dose of anguishing realism in chapter one, Ogorzaly goes into the history behind it. Chapter two discusses thegeneology of bullfighting, revealing that the present day corrida, which originated in the 18th century, has very little connection with Spanish tradition.