Bulls in Navarra are about bred out due to inbreeding of the original Navarrese strain and the selling of their best cows to France a number of years ago for use in the Course Landaise, a French form of bull fête, and the inability of the Andalucian and Castillian strains to retain their type and bravery on the northern ranges although many costly experiments have been made to develop a new and brave Navarrese strain. The best fighting bulls come from Andalucia, Colmenar, Salamanca, and, exceptionally, Portugal. The most typical bulls are those of Andalucia. The Andalucian breeds have been taken to Salamanca and perverted by breeding them down in size and in length of horn in order to please the bullfighters.
Salamanca is an ideal province for bull breeding. The pastures and water are good and the bulls from there are sold at under four years and often, to make them appear larger and older, are fed on grain for a time which gives them a false size, covering the natural muscle with fat, giving them a false well-being, causing them to tire quickly and to be short of wind. Many bulls from Salamanca, if fought at four and one-half to five years, hence having their natural size and not needing to be fed up on grain to reach the government-required poundage, with a year more on the range and the consequent added maturity, would be the ideal fighting bulls except for a tendency that they have to lose frankness and bravery when they have passed their fourth year.
Occasionally you will see such a corrida in Madrid, but on the publicity they receive from such a splendid lot of bulls and with the aid and connivances of the bullfighters the same breeders that send such an ideal corrida to the capital will sell fifteen or twenty other corridas throughout the provinces in a season which will be composed of bulls under the minimum age, stuffed on grain to make them seem big, giving the minimum of danger because of their lack of experience in using their horns, and helping in every way, by depriving the spectacle of that which makes it, the true fighting bull, to contribute to the decadence of bullfighting.
For the third factor in the making of a bull, after breeding and condition, is age. With any one of these three factors lacking you cannot have a complete fighting bull. A bull is not mature until after his fourth year. It is true that after his third year he looks mature, but he is not. Maturity brings strength, resistance, but above all, knowledge. Now the knowledge of a bull consists principally in his memory of experience, he forgets nothing, and in his knowledge of, and ability to use, his horns.
It is the horn that makes bullfighting and the ideal bull is one whose memory is as clean as possible from any experience of bullfighting so that he will learn everything that he is to learn in the ring; being dominated if the bullfighter works him properly, and dominating the bullfighter if his work is deficient or cowardly; and for this bull to provide the most real danger and put the bullfighter to the necessary test of knowledge of how to handle a bull properly he must know how to use his horns. At four years a bull has this knowledge, he has acquired it by fighting on the range, the only way he can acquire it. To see two bulls fight is a beautiful sight.
They use their horns as a fencer does his weapon. They strike, parry, feint, block, and have an exactitude of aim that is amazing. When they both know how to use the horn the combat usually ends as does a fight between two really skillful boxers, with all dangerous blows stopped, without bloodshed and with mutual respect. They do not have to kill each other for a decision. The bull that loses is the first one that breaks and turns acknowledging the other’s superiority. I have seen them fight again and again for small causes that I was not able to make out; coming head on, feinting with their master horn, the horns clattering as they knocked together, the blows being parried and countered, then, suddenly one bull would wheel and turn and gallop off.
Once though, in the corrals after a fight in which one bull turned away admitting he was beaten, the other followed him and charged, getting the horn in the defeated bull’s flank and throwing him over. Before the bull that was down could get to his feet the other was on him, driving the horn in with chopping thrusts of his neck and head; driving in all the time. The defeated bull got to his feet once, wheeled to face head-on, but in the first horn exchange he was caught in the eye, then went down under another charge.
The bull killed him without letting him get to his feet again. Before the fight, two days later, that same bull killed another in the corrals, but when he came into the ring he was one of the best animals, both for bullfighters and public, that I have ever seen. His horn knowledge had been acquired as it should be. He had no vices with the horn, he simply knew how to use it, and the matador, Felix Rodriguez, dominated him, did splendid work with the cape and muleta and killed him perfectly.
A three-year-old bull may know how to use his horns, but it is exceptional. He has not had enough experience. Bulls over five years know too well how to use their armament. They have had so much experience and become so skilled with the horn that the necessity for overcoming and watching out for this makes it almost impossible for the bullfighter to do anything brilliant. They make an interesting fight, but you need a thorough knowledge of bullfighting to appreciate the matadors’ work. Nearly every bull has one horn that he prefers to use more than the other and this horn is called the master horn. They are often almost as right or left horned as people are right or left handed, but there is no such preponderance in favor of the right horn. One is as liable to be the master as the other. You may see which horn is the master when the banderilleros run the bull with the cape at the start of the fight, but there is another way you can often tell. A bull when he is about to charge, or when he is angry, twitches one or, occasionally, both ears. The ear that he twitches is usually on the side of the horn that he uses for preference.
Bulls vary greatly in the way they use their horns; some are called assassins from the way in which, attacking the picadors, they will not give a single chop until they are sure of their range; then when they are close, driving the horn into the vulnerable part of the horse with the surety of a dagger stroke. Such bulls have usually attacked a herder or killed a horse previously at some time on the range, and they remember how it is done. They do not charge from a distance and try to overthrow horse and man, but only to get in under the picador in some way, often chopping at the shaft of the pole with their horns, so they can place their horn stroke. For this reason the number of horses killed by a bull may not be an indication of his bravery nor of his power, for a bull with a deadly horn will kill horses where a braver, more powerful bull will, perhaps, only overthrow horse and rider, and, in his violence, aim scarcely at all with the horn.
A bull that has gored a man becomes much more liable to gore again. A great part of the matadors who have been gored and killed in the ring have been caught and tossed previously by the bull that finally killed them. Of course many times this repetition of the goring in the course of the same fight is due to the man being shocked into grogginess or deprived of his agility or judgment of distance by the first tossing, but it is also true that a bull which has found the man under the lure or after the placing of a pair of banderillas, will repeat the process by which he caught him. He will give a sudden chop with his head as he passes the man while following the cape or muleta, or a braking with his feet in the centre of the charge, or a swerving from the cloth toward the man with his horn or whatever act it was which caught the man the first time. Similarly there are certain strains even of bulls in which the ability to learn rapidly in the ring is highly developed. These bulls must be fought and killed as rapidly as possible with the minimum of exposure by the man, for they learn more rapidly than the fight ordinarily progresses and become exaggeratedly difficult to work with and kill.
Bulls of this sort are the old caste of fighting bulls raised by the sons
