In a city that sells violence as heritage, the one being with no choice becomes the main attraction — and the final measure of our humanity
At eight in the morning, Pamplona looks like a city that has swapped its alarm clock for a rocket. People dressed in white, red scarves around their necks, pack into the narrow streets of the old town. Then a shot cuts through the air and six bulls set off toward the arena. When someone falls, the camera moves in close. Especially when a horn finds flesh. Everything is organized down to the last wooden fence, except for one small detail — the consent of the animal that is the main character of this cruel spectacle.
The most uncomfortable, and perhaps paradoxically the most humane, part of the whole scene is that many people secretly root for the bull. Not because they want to watch a man die, but because in a matter of seconds they’re able to recognize the moral architecture of the event. The runner came of his own free will. The audience paid for a balcony seat, the organizer set up the barriers, and television claimed the best shot. The bull chose neither the street nor his opponent, and certainly not the afternoon slot of his own death. When he strikes back, it doesn’t look like an attack. It looks like a brief malfunction in a system that was rigged against him from the start.
The encierro is held every morning from July 7th to July 14th. At eight o’clock, six fighting bulls, guided by tame steers, run just under 900 meters from the corral at Santo Domingo to the arena. The whole thing usually lasts about two minutes. Tourist footage most often ends there, as if the bulls simply went off to breakfast afterward. They didn’t. The same animals enter the corrida later that day, where the matadors kill them. The morning run isn’t some playful folkloric add-on to the festival — it’s a procession toward execution.
Defenders of custom like to reach for the word “tradition,” that elegant soundproofing that so often muffles someone else’s pain. The encierro does indeed have a long history. It grew out of the practical business of driving cattle toward town, and Pamplona’s city authorities note that as far back as the 16th century, local young men and butchers would dart in front of the bulls, defying bans on doing so. But history explains how we arrived somewhere. It doesn’t prove we should stay there. The age of a custom can give it patina, but not moral immunity.
Pamplona owes much of its worldwide fame to Ernest Hemingway, the American writer who turned the festival into one of the stages of his mythology of masculinity. His novel The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926, so this year marks its hundredth anniversary. The book didn’t just describe Pamplona — it kept bringing it new participants for decades. American literature professor and Hemingway scholar Bill Hillmann read it at 19, decided to become a writer and a bull runner, and went on to take part in hundreds of similar runs despite once nearly losing his life to a horn. Literature did something here beyond creating atmosphere. It recruited bodies.
Hemingway’s contribution wasn’t inventing the violence, but helping give it style. White clothing and red scarves, stone façades, bells and the invocation of a saint turn an animal’s suffering into a cultural product. If the same scene played out behind some warehouse, without music and city flags, hardly anyone would defend it as heritage. But place it in a historic old town, add a few centuries and enough tourist revenue, and cruelty gets a logo. Civilization is, among other things, exceptionally gifted at designing packaging for its own vices.
Back in 1789, Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher and one of the founders of utilitarianism, reduced the question of how we treat animals to a few words. What matters isn’t whether they can speak or think as we do. What matters is: “Can they suffer?” Pamplona puts enormous effort into never asking that question. Instead it talks about the runners’ courage, the matador’s skill, and the ritual’s “dignity.” The moral spotlight follows the man in the red scarf, while the animal with no way out remains scenery.
The danger to people, meanwhile, is real. Since official record-keeping began in 1910, 16 runners have died, the last in 2009. In the fifth run of this year’s festival, on July 11th, a man was gored in the face, and 12 others sought medical attention. Terrible — but human pain doesn’t turn an event into a noble act. It only shows how badly the spectacle is designed. The runner’s risk is voluntary and temporary. The bull’s risk is imposed and ends in death.
That’s why quietly rooting for the bull doesn’t have to be an expression of sadism. More often it’s an intuitive rejection of a script that asks the audience to sympathize only with the one who had a choice. In this year’s run it was striking how often the bulls, instead of going after people, tried simply to push through the crowd. Some runners they simply shoved aside before continuing toward the arena. The animal we’ve branded violent often looks like the only participant who just wants to find a way out of this hell.
Of course, it’s possible to pity the man gored by a horn while also understanding why moral sympathy shifts toward the bull. Maturity doesn’t mean picking a single victim whose pain we’ll care about. It begins with acknowledging that the runner shouldn’t have been injured, but that the bull shouldn’t have been brought into the street, turned into a prop, and then killed either. The difference is that only one of those two forms of suffering is built into the program.
Defenders of bullfighting like to speak in the name of all of Spain, as if a country of tens of millions shared a single red scarf. But the latest survey by Spain’s Ministry of Culture, covering 2024 and 2025, shows that around 8% of the population attended some such event during the year. That doesn’t mean the custom lacks deep local roots. It just means the word “national” is often used as a megaphone for a minority taste. A tradition can be authentic and still be wrong. Authenticity was never a synonym for innocence.
So the most humane reform of San Fermín isn’t a taller fence, a better medical team, or another safety leaflet for tourists. It’s an empty route. The music can stay, along with the processions and the fireworks. What doesn’t have to stay is the animal whose endangerment gives the festivities their necessary thrill. But you’ll quickly notice that a tradition which falls apart the moment we remove the cruelty from it was perhaps never much more than cruelty with a dress code.
So it isn’t hard to root for the bulls. What’s harder is admitting that their only real victory wouldn’t be a man on the ground, but a July morning on which no one drives them toward the arena.
About the Author
Mario Hoffmann is an independent analyst and writer covering global economics, geopolitics, and international affairs. With a background in history and politics, he writes for EconoPuls to provide in-depth context on the stories shaping our world.
