By the Horns

"The week before the biggest bullfight of her career, in Cádiz, Spain, this past July, 24-year-old Miriam Cabas posted a carefully produced video on Instagram. Cabas appears not in a traditional matador costume but in a cream pantsuit, watching a little girl-4, maybe 5-wave a red muleta at an imaginary bull. "Dreams come true," she wrote in the caption. "The little girl I used to be still guides me." Cabas triumphed that day, killing two bulls and receiving three of their ears as trophies."

"It was the first time she had fought animals antagonized by picadors, men on horseback who stab the bulls with lances, testing their aggression and forcing them to lower their heads on their subsequent charges at the bullfighters. For the uninitiated, this was a big deal: Cabas had reached the final stage of her training to become a professional matador, one of vanishingly few women to compete in the intensely traditional field."

Miriam Cabas, 24, prepared for a career-defining bullfight in Cádiz by posting a video evoking her childhood. She killed two bulls and received three ears as trophies, completing the final stage of training to become a professional matador. She confronted bulls that had been antagonized by picadors, riders who stab bulls with lances to test aggression and force head lowering. A British photographer followed her career for more than a year and documented the victory. Cabas was introduced to bullfighting at five by her grandfather in Los Barrios and persevered as one of few women in the tradition. Bullfighting faces regional bans and political controversy, with the far-right Vox defending it while parts of the left criticize it on animal-cruelty grounds. Cabas prefers not to make her politics explicit.

Read at The Atlantic