Pain takes over your body. Sticky, warm blood covers your skin, heavy drops of sweat make your vision sting, incessant, ringing laughter echoes in your ears. You are lost, you are scared. You gather your last strength and raise your eyes to look before you - there, a man stands, mocking your pain as if to entertain the crowd. Anger fills you. You charge. At that moment, your life ends. This is the reality underlying Bullfighting, a practice with cruelty at its core, where crowds overjoy over the pain of another. Bullfighting is a cultural spectacle where a man confronts an innocent beast. The animal is humiliated, tortured and then has its body hacked to death in front of an audience. It would appear that a barbaric practice as such would’ve disappeared in today’s “civilised” age, but the massacre and bloodshed continues to flourish in several countries, with no ounce of…show more content… Tauromachia can trace its origins to legends and cultural traditions across the world, showing particular prominence in ancient Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean region. One can even trace glorified retellings of bullfighting to the oldest written epic in human history, The Epic of Gilgamesh, where the epic’s titular hero fights and kills The Bull of Heaven along his best friend, Enkidu, "The Bull seemed indestructible, for hours they fought, till Gilgamesh dancing in front of the Bull, lured it with his tunic and bright weapons, and Enkidu thrust his sword, deep into the Bull's neck, and killed it" But this only marks the start of thousands of tales of bravery and skill as men stood against the heinous beasts. The practice spread across the land, through Greece and Rome, Africa and Asia; and so, the rich and noble sport was established and practiced in ancient and medieval times, with the seed having been sown, humankind would continue to reap the fruits of