The anti-bullfighting campaigner and author Jordi Casamitjana reviews Rachael Adam’s novel “Sangre de Toro”, a thriller set around the reality of the bullfighting mafia.
I know a lot about this subject.
For many years I was known as the anti-bullfighting man. I spent some time travelling to each of the nine bullfighting countries — that is, countries that have a bullfighting industry composed of professional bullfighters, bullfighting schools, permanent bullrings, bullfighting media, a substantial group of aficionados, and farms that breed bulls specifically for bullfighting. These are Spain, Portugal, France, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela and the US. I visited them all several times, trying to galvanise the international anti-bullfighting movement, meeting the local anti-bullfighting groups, discussing tactics and strategies, and coming back later to see how they’ve been applied.
It kind of worked. Colombia, for instance, banned bullfighting recently. I went there a few years back, first time in 2006, starting to help the local anti-bullfighting groups devise which methods they could use to lead to the abolition of bullfighting, and after all these years (and many attempts) it has finally happened. I was also involved in the banning of bullfighting in Catalonia (where I was born and grew up), as one of the expert witnesses before the Catalan Parliament and as the international spokesperson of PROU, the campaigning platform that was organised with the sole purpose of banning bullfighting there. There was another success when the ban was passed in 2010, and there have not been any traditional bullfights in Catalonia since (there are still some fiestas where bulls are abused in the streets, though). I have been interviewed by the media many times on bullfighting, quite recently in Britain, I was interviewed on this very subject with Peter Egan, a vegan actor known for his support of animal rights causes.
I therefore know this subject well, so when I was asked to review a book about bullfighting, I immediately thought, “Well, that is something I don’t need to research about.” The book was called Sangre de Toro (Bull’s Blood) and it was written by the British author Rachel Adam (self-published in 2024).
I was particularly interested in this book because it was recommended by CAS International, an organisation that was involved in supporting the production of this book. CAS International is a Dutch anti-bullfighting organisation with which I worked in the past. I was their Campaign Coordinator for a couple of years in 2008, and therefore I know them well. They play an important role in leading the international anti-bullfighting movement. So, I was quite glad that they had helped to produce a fiction book about bullfighting because sometimes fiction is the best way to get a campaigning message through.
Two Thrillers Intertwined
Sangre de Toro is not just a typical book that tells you about bullfighting; describes what happens in bullfights; or shows what people have been doing to ban it. No, this book is a novel and that particularly intrigued me.
This is the blurb about the story:
“When Pepelito dramatically escapes certain death in a bullfight, he enrages some and delights others. Taken pity on by Rita Silvera, a caring homicide detective, he soon begins to heal from the physical and psychological torture of the bullring. But Pepelito’s nightmare is not over. Javier Castella is the best matador in Spain — maybe the world. He would kill for a chance to finish his masterpiece — and he’s not the only one. Because, as Rita soon learns, a serial killer is on the loose. And her love of animals might make her the next target…”
This is a well-written novel, in the sense that it works like novels should work. It’s a thriller, and you constantly want to know what happens next. The sentences are written in such a way that they don’t give you too much information. You must figure out the stuff, you must connect the dots that have been scattered through the text so you can find out what happens, where the story is going, what the plot is about, how it’s developing, what happens to each character, etc.
I don’t like fiction books that spell everything out for you, that treat you as if you are stupid, that describe the events in a way that removes the mystery and deflates the reader’s interest. Novels, especially thrillers, must leave you hanging all the time. They must dose information without much explanation, like pieces of a puzzle that later on will form a coherent image, and things will then fall into place in due time. The fact that you don’t know what is going on straight away makes you feel good about yourself when you do understand it later, and that keeps you reading because you enjoy the fact that you’re actually figuring something out that was not quite clear at the beginning. From that point of view, Sangre de Toro is a well-written novel. It works well as a novel, and it carries you through a complex multilayered plot in a satisfactory way.
I think the novel mixes two thrillers into one. One is the story of a bull, what happens to a bull in a bullfighting world, and it’s done from the point of view of the bull. You see the bull not as the object that people normally see when they watch a bullfight, but as the sentient being who experiences the torture, the 20-minute torture in the arena, and everything that happens before (and in this case, after). For me, this is the most interesting part of the book, as the point of view of the bull is something rarely seen in literature.
I think that this is very educational because imagining how a bull might think when he is in the arena, before he enters the arena, when he is kept in a dark enclosure, or when he is transported, is an essential component of the anti-bullfighting message aimed to awaken empathy and compassion.
The book certainly does a good job of showing that Pepelito is not a creature “designed” to attack people automatically. He is somebody with feelings who has friends and enemies, who is sometimes scared, who has doubts, who does not understand some things but understands others.
The book shows the nature of a bull as a sentient being who should be respected as any other sentient being, the opposite of what the bullfighting industry wants people to believe. This industry tries to hammer the message that bulls are machines, aggressive machines designed to attack humans and horses, only bred to attack and die in a bullring, that don’t suffer because that’s how they have been “designed” by expert breeders. Anything that the bullfighting industry tells you about the bulls is a lie, and the book does a good job of exposing that deception.
Bulls are sentient beings who existed before humans began domesticating them. The bullfighting bull breed is not a different species of bull. It’s just a breed created by humans by artificially selective breeding, perhaps one where, on average, males are slightly more aggressive than the average bull, but certainly not a different species (as the bullfighting industry claims). They are the same species as any bull or any cow that is used and exploited for meat or milk in the West (Bos taurus taurus). The bulls in the bullfighting ring suffer exactly the same way the bulls anywhere else. If you force them to run, they will get exhausted quickly. If you stab them, they will feel the pain. If you pierce their organs with a sword, they will suffer and die in agony. The book does a very good job of debunking this false idea that the bullfighting industry has created and showing the bulls as just another sentient being, just another herd mammal, just another ruminant who likes to be in herds on fields, who have friends, who have a social life, who can judge others, and, especially, who suffers pain when tortured by a gang of armed bullfighters.
The other thriller of the book is the human-based thriller, a classical crime thriller. Without giving too much away, crimes have been committed, police are chasing the bad guys, the bad guys are doing more bad things, they seem to get away with it, the police get closer, etc. All of that happening in both Spain and Britain, which gives the novel an interesting international dimension.
As I said, I believe the novel is two thrillers intertwined. A bull escapes a bullfight (the trigger of the story) but rather than being caught as normally happens (as this has indeed happened in real life), he hides in somebody’s house who happened to be a Spanish policewoman (who is an animal rights vegan, which I love) involved in investigating some murders and chasing a serial killer. In addition to doing her normal job, she now has to look after that bull, and she starts to develop a positive emotional relationship with him. Gradually, the two stories, the murder cases and people trying to find the bull and return him to the “industry”, intersect.
I’m not going to give too many details so as not to spoil the story, because it’s a thriller after all, and the whole point of thrillers is that you don’t know what’s happening next. But I’m just going to say that these two stories end up mixed, climaxes develop, and there is a resolution that, if you are an anti-bullfighting person, will satisfy you.
The Bullfighting Mafia
The book also resonates with me because of how it aligns with my perception of bullfighting. As I said earlier, I know the subject well, I’ve seen bullfights, I’ve been undercover going into bullfighting pretending to be a bullfighting aficionado, recording what happens in the bullring, getting evidence to use for campaigns to ban bullfighting, so I know the details of that world. I must say, therefore, that the research Rachael has done is quite impressive. She’s captured many of the details that are known to be true, other details that are less likely to happen (but which have happened), and overall, she gives lots of information about bullfighting that the average person would have no idea about.
One of the elements that members of the anti-bullfighting movement like myself often say about the bullfighting world is that there is what we call a “bullfighting mafia.” Bullfighters are powerful people, supported by powerful people in powerful positions with lots of decision-making power, such as politicians, CEOs, priests, mayors, or even presidents, and they are often politically linked to the right. Generally speaking — like in hunting with dogs being linked to the right in the UK — bullfighting is linked to the right in most of the bullfighting countries. In such countries, you will see that the left-wing parties openly oppose bullfighting, the right-wing parties support bullfighting, and the more right-wing you are, the more likely you’re going to be a bullfighting aficionado. We see this in the book, which clearly shows the connection between being politically conservative, both in the UK and Spain, and being a “bloodsport” supporter — this is a real sociological phenomenon and not a fictional plot.
People on the far right in the UK and people on the far right in Spain might be linked to this so-called bullfighting mafia. Even though bullfighting is banned in the UK, British people are still involved in bullfighting in other countries (I even debated one myself on Al Jazeera TV a few years ago). This issue is the main subject the book explores, and it is firmly based on reality.
In my experience with bullfighting, I know of many cases of people being attacked by members of the bullfighting mafia for opposing bullfighting. Bullfighters or bullfighting supporters may get away with many crimes if they have the support of powerful people, and I have heard many stories that reflect this idea of some members of the bullfighting mafia being “above the law”.
That attitude might sound familiar to many British people when they think about fox hunting. Anti-hunting campaigners like myself have been saying that since the Hunting Act 2004 was passed, fox hunters, hare hunters, mink hunters, and stag hunters carried on hunting under the false alibi of trail hunting or the illegitimate exploitation of legal exemptions, basically assuming they are “different” than anybody else and don’t have to follow the law. They consider themselves above the law, and people around them help them to perpetuate that elitist master-servant relationship which is very present in both the psychology of the fox hunter and in the psychology of the bullfighter.
The bullfighting mafia, and, of course, the connection between the violence people perpetrate against nonhuman animals and violence against humans, are two key elements of the novel’s narrative. That connection between abusing nonhuman animals and abusing humans is well-established in academia, and any forensic investigator will know that if they find a suspect with a history of animal abuse, it’s quite likely that violence against other humans may follow.
Realism with a touch of magic
The novel is a good, educational, and interesting read. It will give you an insight into bullfighting while you will be entertained with the thriller story. However, there are elements in it I think are more “fantasy” in the sense that I found them unlikely to ever happen in real life. Most of it is quite feasible, most of it is based on the reality I know about bullfighting, but some of it I think crosses the line into fiction, perhaps moving the novel into the genre of “magical realism.” This is a genre I know well because I have written a novel called “The Demon’s Trial” that many people have said falls clearly in the magical realism genre (characteristic of authors such as Gabriel García Márquez). I think some of the elements of the story, such as the way the bull behaves, are perhaps a little bit on the anthropomorphic side in situations where I think an actual bull would not necessarily react in the way described —a dairy cow could perhaps have behaved in such a way, but a bullfighting bull bred on open fields with little human contact I think would have reacted differently. Another part I found that was landing on the fantasy side is how the bull recovers from the injuries sustained during a bullfight without the need for surgery (once the bulls have been stabbed with the lance and the banderillas they are unlikely to survive).
One of the things I like the most about this novel is its inclusive nature, going beyond the traditional gender roles, religion, ethnicity, pronouns, etc. However, a female inspector of the Spanish National Police from Valladolid being a vegan for animal rights reasons (had it been Catalonia would have been different) is something I hope becomes more likely over time, although I think that, right now, is still closer to fiction — I don’t know, I haven’t been there for a long time; perhaps they have already reached that demographic milestone.
However, these more “magical” elements (in the sense they would be unlikely in the real world) make the story work better from a narrative point of view. The whole point of magical realism is to use some unnatural and surreal elements to stretch reality to make a story more workable and to make a point more explicit. In the novel, the fact that the story moves into a clear realm of fiction by creating the ability to hear the point of view of the bull that otherwise you would not be able to hear, and into creating emotional relationships between the bull and other characters, serves the narrative well.
Many parts of the story could happen (and may actually have happened) so there are many components of the book that are reality-based. Some elements move into the magical realism to help the narrative, but altogether the experience of reading the book will educate you, and give you a new perspective about the world of bullfighting and the connection between that world and the world of violence toward humans.
Overall, this is an interesting novel and I enjoyed reading it. I recommend people to read it because they will learn a lot about bullfighting. They will learn details they had no previous concept of. They will learn about connections they never thought existed. They will learn about bullfighting outside bullfighting countries. They will learn about the bullfighting mafia and what a bull feels.
As someone who knows a lot about this subject, I can say that Sangre de Toro fictionalises very well a real world of torture and abuse that, sadly, still takes place in some countries.
Act Now to Ban Bullfighting in Galicia: https://drove.com/.2DVj
