The rope goes through the bull’s nose first. That’s where it starts – a length of cord called a salko, threaded through a ring of pierced cartilage, handed to a man who will use it to yank the animal’s head toward the animal it is about to fight. The crowd is already seated. The bets are already placed. All that remains is the collision. This perverse scene plays out hundreds of times a year across South Korea in a tradition known as so ssaum: bull-on-bull fighting. Local historians trace it back more than a thousand years, to the Three Kingdoms era, to rice harvests and village festivals and the rhythms of agricultural life. Tradition, say its defenders.
What a five-month undercover investigation has revealed is something different – a legally protected system of organised animal abuse, propped up by millions of dollars of public money, running on a shadow economy of illegal bets, and attended, increasingly, by almost nobody.
What the Cameras Found
For six months last year, investigators from Last Chance for Animals (LCA) and its South Korean partner, Animal Liberation Wave (ALW), moved quietly through the country’s bullfighting circuit. They filmed at Cheongdo County’s stadium, the self-styled Mecca of Bullfighting, at three bull training facilities, and at regional tournaments scattered across various provinces.
What they documented was not the contest between two bulls freely expressing dominance that tradition’s defenders describe. It was a managed, coercive, and violent system, designed to brutalise the animals involved.
At training farms, bulls were made to drag heavy loads uphill. They were whipped. They were tethered to poles for two and three days at a time, unable to turn their heads, unable to lie down. Investigators recorded the body language of animals in acute distress – open-mouth panting, excessive salivation, compulsive ground-licking. Their nostrils showed chronic tearing from the relentless pressure and yanking of the salko rope.
Inside the ring, the collisions were not incidental. They were the product. Bulls slammed skulls, gored flanks, locked and drove into each other’s weight. Investigators documented bleeding foreheads, facial wounds, and in at least one case a horn driven into another bull’s eye. Between twelve bouts per day at Cheongdo’s weekend tournaments, injured animals received no veterinary care.
A nationwide study observing 130 matches in 2025 found that more than 60 percent of completed bouts produced bleeding injuries including torn foreheads, wounds to the nose, gashes along the face and flanks. Forty-one percent of bulls refused to fight at all and had to be physically forced into engagement by the rope. That refusal is not a technical malfunction. It is each animal’s clearest available statement about what is being done to him.
Then, in January 2026, another layer emerged. South Korea’s Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs opened a formal investigation into allegations that organisers had been administering painkillers or other pharmaceuticals to injured bulls – not to treat them, but to make them fight through injuries they would otherwise not be able to bear.
A Legal Exemption – A Financial Sinkhole
South Korea’s Animal Protection Act prohibits cruelty to animals for entertainment. While the act bans dogfighting and cockfighting, bullfighting is exempt. It is protected by a separate piece of legislation, the Traditional Bullfighting Match Act, which grants it legal standing as a cultural tradition. This is not an oversight. It is a political choice.
Follow the money and the choice becomes harder to defend.
Eleven municipal governments provide financial subsidies to bullfighting events. In Cheongdo, public subsidies to the corporation managing the county’s landmark stadium rose from £3.2 million in 2020 to £5.3 million in 2024 despite falling attendances. A further £1m was paid to the private company that built and owns the arena under a pay-for-use contract that many have described as opaque and unaccountable.
In Changwon, where 76 percent of surveyed residents opposed using municipal funds for bullfighting, the city allocated the equivalent £100,000 for its 2026 competition anyway. Jinju budgeted £120,000. Uiryeong county committed £220,000. These are not abstractions. They are schools unfunded, roads unrepaired, health services stretched thin.
Running alongside the official economy is an illegal one. Investigators documented direct betting between spectators and bull owners at tournaments.
The People Have Already Left
Another finding of the investigation focused on what is happening outside the ring. The tradition, it turns out, has already been abandoned by most of the people it is supposed to represent.
A public opinion survey of 1,000 residents of Gyeongsang province, the heartland of South Korean bullfighting, found that 95% had never once attended a match. Among those surveyed, 53% supported phasing out the practice completely, citing animal rights and a shift in public consciousness.
The investigation itself ran as the most-read, most-commented article in the newspaper Hankook Ilbo. Primetime broadcaster MBC Newsdesk devoted a six-minute feature to the findings. Seventeen South Korean media outlets picked up the story. The resistance to bullfighting is not arriving from outside the country. This is a domestic reckoning, driven by Korean journalists, Korean legislators, and Korean citizens.
The Psychology of the Crowd – Why Cruelty Hides in Celebration
The few men and women who do attend bullfighting matches are not, in any obvious sense, monsters. They are ordinary people, parents and grandparents, farmers, and shopkeepers, who have grown up near these events, been brought to them as children, and absorbed the framing until the suffering in front of them became invisible. This is one of the most consequential facts about human psychology – our capacity to not see what is plainly before us when a social framework tells us to look elsewhere.
But to understand how a crowd watches a bleeding bull be led back into the ring, we need to understand something deeper than individual moral failure. We need to understand how cruelty comes to nest inside culture, how violence against animals has, throughout human history, found its most durable home not in dark corners but in our brightest public moments – festivals, feasts, weddings, religious ceremonies, and national holidays.
The pairing is not accidental. It is structural. When animal suffering is woven into celebration, it acquires a social immunity that standalone cruelty never could. The suffering is laundered through joy. It arrives wrapped in music, food, community, and memory, and the psychological cost of objecting becomes the cost of destroying the celebration itself. To challenge the bullfight is, in the minds of many attendees, to attack the festival. To question the feast is to insult the host. The animal’s pain is not a discrete event to be judged – it has become load-bearing architecture in an experience people have been conditioned to love.
Psychologists call this process moral disengagement – a set of cognitive mechanisms by which people suspend their ethical principles in specific contexts without abandoning them elsewhere. Psychologist Albert Bandura, who mapped this phenomenon in detail, identified several mechanisms that allow ordinary people to participate in harmful acts – euphemistic labelling (calling it “a tradition” rather than “forced fighting”), displacement of responsibility onto organisers or culture or history, and the dehumanisation, or in this case, de-animalisation, of the victims, stripping them of the individuality that would make their suffering legible.
The tradition frame is particularly powerful because it inverts the burden of justification. In ordinary moral reasoning, causing harm requires a defence. But when suffering is ancient enough and festive enough, that logic reverses. Suddenly it is the reformer who must justify change, not the perpetuator who must justify harm. The crowd at the ring didn’t decide to do anything. They arrived, as they always have. The bull arrived, as it always has.
There is also the role of collective experience in suspending individual conscience. The psychological research on crowd behaviour consistently shows that being part of a large, unified group, sharing excitement, sharing noise, sharing the momentum of an event, temporarily weakens the individual’s sense of personal moral responsibility. The crowd does not decide together, it simply moves. No single person in the stands made the choice to return the bleeding bull to the ring. Diffused across the crowd, that decision belongs to no one in particular, and so no one in particular feels it.
Beyond Korea, the pattern repeats with uncomfortable consistency. Spanish corridas frame gore within opera-like ceremony and national mythology. The Pamplona running of the bulls is a tourist spectacle coded as adventure. Cockfighting persists across Southeast Asia and Latin America embedded within local identity and masculine codes of honour. Trophy hunting wraps itself in conservation language and the aesthetics of wilderness. In each case, the experience surrounding the animal’s suffering, the pageantry, the camaraderie, the cultural weight, does the psychological work of making that suffering feel not only acceptable but somehow affirming.
And there is something else, older and less flattering – the long association, in many cultures, between the demonstration of power over animals and social status. Hunting, fighting, and slaughtering animals in public has functioned, for most of human history, as a display of dominance, not only over the animal, but over the squeamishness of those who might object. To watch without flinching has been coded as strength. To object has been coded as weakness, sentimentality.
None of this makes the people in the crowd evil. Ironically, it makes them human, susceptible to exactly the cognitive frameworks that every human being is susceptible to, operating inside social structures that make certain moral failures easy and invisible. The point is not to condemn them. The point is to understand how this happens, because understanding how it happens is the only way to interrupt it.
What Comes Next
Unfortunately, South Korea is not an outlier. Its bullfighting debate exists within a vast and global landscape of human-on-animal violence: Spanish corridas, Chinese bear bile farming, trophy hunting, factory farming, forced animal labour, testing on animals, and all of this underpinned by the deliberate breeding of animals for traits that guarantee them lifetimes of suffering. The thread running through all of this – the designation of certain living beings as resources, as property, as instruments of human appetite, entertainment, and economy.
For most of recorded history, the dominant legal, religious, and economic frameworks of human civilisation have treated that designation as natural, unremarkable as gravity. What is shifting, unevenly and incompletely but unmistakably, is the recognition that the designation is wrong.
When the bulls leave the ring for the last time, they are slaughtered. They move from one system of exploitation into another, the rope through the nose replaced by the bolt to the head. Their injuries, torn nostrils, gouged eyes, bruised and broken flanks, go with them. Some of them had refused to fight when they could. They had communicated, in the only language available to them, that they did not want this.
The question South Korea is now being forced to answer, and that every society must eventually answer, is this: at what point does tradition lose its legitimacy, and be seen for what it has always been – an ill-founded excuse.
Footnote from the author:
There is something truly magnificent about a bull – not merely in the physical sense, though that power and presence is undeniable, but in the depth of character that lies beneath. These are animals of remarkable intelligence, each one a distinct individual with a personality as consistent and recognisable as any person’s. Bulls remember companions, places, routines, and human faces. They problem-solve, they learn, and they form strong bonds of genuine loyalty within their herds.
The ways in which a bull expresses who he is are endlessly fascinating. Some are gregarious souls, drawn naturally toward company, comfortable standing at the centre of herd life, while others carry themselves with a quiet aloofness, watching the world carefully before deciding to engage. In younger bulls, play bursts forth – mock sparring, chasing, the kind of exuberant energy that is life affirming and infectious. And even in stillness, a dominant bull communicates volumes through a steady gaze and the slow, deliberate authority with which he simply occupies a space.
There is gentleness here too, which perhaps surprises those who have never looked closely. Bulls form deep attachments, to herd companions, and show real distress at unwanted separation. They are stubborn and adaptable, cautious and bold, playful and dignified. To spend time truly observing a bull is to encounter a creature of genuine emotional richness, and to come away with a profound sense of wonder at just how extraordinary they are.
— © 2026 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer – Insta: @TheAfghanWriter
