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"And suddenly, I looked at the bull. He had this innocence that all animals have in their eyes, and he looked at me with this pleading. It was like a cry for justice, deep down inside of me. I describe it as being like a prayer - because if one confesses, it is hoped, that one is forgiven. I felt like the worst shit on earth."
-Matador Torrero Munera

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"Cows are amongst the gentlest of breathing creatures; none show more passionate tenderness to their young when deprived of them; and, in short, I am not ashamed to profess a deep love for these quiet creatures."
-Thomas de Quincey

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“And suddenly the bull looked at me, with the innocence of all the animals reflected in his eyes, but also with a supplication. It was the fight between the unexplicable injustice, the plea before the unnecessary cruelty. This time he showed me mercy, and I felt like the worst trash in the world.”
-Fabian Oconitrillo Gonzalez

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The above photo has been doing the rounds on the internet with claims it is Alvaro Munera Builes, a Colombian animal rights activist who in his youth fought as a novillero, a 'novice bullfighter', under the name 'El Pilarico' in Colombia and then Spain. In fact, not only is this not true, it could not be true.

Munera did not leave bullfighting because of some conversion in the bullring; quite the reverse. It was the bull that made him leave.

In 1984 a bull called 'Terciopelo', from the breed of Marques de Villagodio, caught him in the foot and tossed him across the ring, fracturing the fifth cervical vertebrae in his neck - along with other injuries - which rendered him permanently paraplegic.

It was only later after he had been transferred from hospital in Spain to a recuperative facility in Miami to be closer to his relatives in Colombia that he developed a 'moral' problem with bullfighting. According to his own account, it was the doctors, nurses, other patients and their families treating him with contempt because of his bullfighting past which caused the change. In his own words, he converted to their point of view because "there are more of them, they must be right."

Whatever you think of this as a reason for an ethical about-turn, it is clear that it was not the behaviour of a bull while dying that caused this man to end his run of 150 bulls killed.

One thing I can say with complete confidence is that matadors don't reach that stage in their career - well beyond that of Munera - and suddenly think it's all a mistake in the ring. He will have killed hundreds and hundreds of bulls before that moment. Much like the matador Sebastian Castella in the photo above in a strikingly similar situation.

http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Practical/Entertainment/Bullfight
ersRemorse.htm

http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2012/07/25/this-photo-is-not-what-i
t-seems/

http://www.snopes.com/photos/people/munera.asp

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