The bull as an aesthetic resource: theoretical notes for an environmental animal story.

Abstract

The environment being defined as the point of interaction between the natural non-anthropic and the anthropo-social, the conflicts about bullfighting would not only be part of the environmental history, but could also reveal ethical problems which are common to other environmental conflicts and, therefore, they could synergize with other studies pertinent to this kind of history.This text attempts to create a taxonomy of the various ethics around the bullfighting and anti-bullfighting movements, ethics that imply attitudes which trascend time and place limits.Therefore, this work focuses on the concern about the conflictive relation between man and nature, concerns which move from anthropocentrism to the universal consideration of life, covering zoocentrism and biocentrism.Epistemologic conclusions will arise with the aim of showing that bullfighting has, as well as epistemological and ethical origins, the valorization of non- human animals as resources. That is, it contains a dual logic that the social scientists and the environmental historians will have to identify, even on themselves, since it makes a contrast between epistemology and sistemic environmental ethics.