Paper short abstract:

Healthcare across species lines often involves risk. In the world of the Spanish fighting bull the ferocity of the bulls shapes veterinary practice. This paper looks at veterinary strategies and infrastructure when it comes to caring for animal subjects who are understood to be unwilling by nature.

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes as its starting point the idea that particular kinds of animality shape practices of care, including routine veterinary treatment and extraordinary surgical interventions. I explore how the fierce nature of the fighting bull (toro de lidia), as understood from within the bullfighting world, is reflected in not only the kind of care they receive, but also in the infrastructure that facilitates that care.

The estates where fighting bulls are bred are built around the animals. They both manage and reproduce the belligerent nature of fighting stock. Care in this context is care oriented towards the ultimate destiny of the bulls: the bullfighting arena. Here, a good care outcome is a healthily robust animal arriving at the arena having grown up as free from human interference as possible. However, bulls are also considered livestock, which means they are subject to regional, national and Europe-wide biopolitical regimes of care, which involve tagging and regular disease screening. Veterinary intervention is inevitable, but has to be carefully structured so as to minimise both the interruption in the lives of the animals and the risk to all parties involved.

Drawing on my fieldwork on an Andalusian bull-breeding estate, I argue for an attention to veterinary infrastructure - in my case the corrals, chutes, crushes, and stocks that allow vets to come into contact with their bovine charges - and suggest that veterinary anthropology could benefit from an interdisciplinary approach to the historical, geographical, and cultural aspects that shape such infrastructure.