Crisp: Bullfighting and butchers

Let's talk about meat. I was thinking about the subject a few days ago over a fine plate of rabo de toro in a restaurant in the city of Cordoba in southern Spain. Rabo de toro is nothing fancy, just a segment of the tail of a bull that has been stewed in spices and served with potatoes and bread.

Because, I suppose, the tail's main purpose is to swish flies gently off the bull's hindquarters, its meat is tender and fatty -- and delicious. It comes to the diner clinging lightly to several of the vertebrae that made up the bull's tail when he was alive. The vertebrae, which look a lot like our own, are a poignant reminder that rabo de toro was once a part of an actual living animal.

This is something that our modern way of eating makes easy to forget. Our meat is nestled in Styrofoam, wrapped in cellophane, in sizes and shapes -- patties, round steaks, filet mignon -- that often bear little resemblance to the animals that it came from. Sometimes chicken looks like a chicken but sometimes it looks like a salad. Sometimes it even looks like a "nugget." It wasn't always this way. Only a generation or so ago Americans were much more closely connected to the killing and butchering of the meat that they ate. My grandmother would regularly snare a chicken from her yard, pin it struggling against a block of wood, wait until its head settled, and then chop it off with a hatchet.

And when I was a kid, several times my father tried to economize by raising, killing, and butchering large flocks of chickens. This experiment didn't last long. A farm boy who became a letter carrier, he had a soft heart. It was too much for him to move systematically along a long line of chickens suspended by their feet from a wire, slitting throat after throat as blood splattered everywhere.

It would probably be too much for most of us. But let's face it: our meat eating depends on a vast background of misery, pain, and bloodletting, from which we've happily and obliviously separated ourselves.

Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. I doubt if most of us would suddenly become better human beings if we had to kill and butcher our own meat. Still, I appreciate the premise that candid, forthright honesty and transparency are preferable to self-deception.

I'm not a vegetarian and you probably aren't either, and neither of us likely has plans to become one anytime soon. But our reluctance to acknowledge the direct connection between meat eating and killing encourages other ethical shortcomings when it comes to animals.

Of course we kill in order to eat, but our blindness to the bloodletting and the economics of meat eating encourage the wretched conditions under which many of our meat-producing animals are raised and slaughtered. Killing animals on an enormous scale makes it easy to ignore the brutalities of horse and dog racing, the cruelty of marine mammal confinement, the miseries of animal experimentation, or the mass exploitations of the American pet industry.

Back to Spain: Cordoba is in the heart of Andalusia, which is the center of the Spanish tradition of the corrida de toros, the bullfight. Although many have tried to defend the bullfight philosophically, it remains a deplorable spectacle that's inconsistent with some of the civilizing progress that we've made in the last few centuries.

Nevertheless, Spaniards deserve some credit for the philosophical consistency in their willingness to demonstrate publicly that dishes like rabo de toro require the suffering, blood, and death of the toro.

And as long as we're willing to tolerate and ignore modern methods of meat production, circuses, horse racing, marine mammal confinement, and animal experimentation, our moral superiority over the dreadful practice of bullfighting achieves a moral high ground with the approximate elevation of a pitcher's mound.

Writer John M. Crisp teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas. E-mail him at jcrisp@delmar.edu.