By Eva Dias Costa in Other Minds — 13 Jun 2025

La Corrida: Not a Metaphor:

I don’t usually listen to music like this – too clean, a bit too deliberate, too close to sentimentality. But Tidal knows me better than I care to admit, and one day it placed Francis Cabrel's La Corrida in my speakers. I did not expect to listen twice. I did not expect to be undone.

The voice in the song is not human. It is the bull’s.

Not a symbolic bull, stripped of his own being and recast for our dramas. Not an emblem of wounded pride or a cipher for political rage. The bull in the ring, uncomprehending. The world has turned cruel without explanation, and he is inside it.

The song’s force lies in its restraint. The bull is not made wise or tragic. His voice is just wide enough to hold confusion, defiance, pain. To say: I was led here. I charged because you called me to. I thought there was a way out. I did not know the rules of your theatre. I hoped to be spared.

What breaks the listener is the narrowness of that knowledge, set against a structure too vast and stylised to navigate.

We rarely speak of animals as themselves. They arrive as companions, projections, symbols, resources. We narrate them in our own grammar, clothe them in our emotions. We call this love, or stewardship, or culture. Yet something slips from reach – full otherness, neither diminished nor exalted, simply beyond. Minds without language as we know it. Desires without translation. Interests we fail to recognise.

Whether the bull in La Corrida could exist as sung is not the question. The song does not press for belief. It allows the voice to pass through, and leaves a disturbance behind.

This is what ethics demands: the discipline to recognise a mind we cannot enter, one that will never seek to speak on our terms. The animal does not speak. The animal has no need to. What remains is for us to learn to listen, without mistaking the echo for understanding.