ZEBU FIGHTS

Was it the Portuguese navigators of the ^16th century, or Moorish travellers from Spain? No one really knows who originated this Fujairah tradition. As Ernest Hemingway once said, "the fighting bull is to the domestic bull what the wolf is to the dog" . Look at these beasts weighing almost a ton, with their wide ears, wicked horns and fat humps full of calories, which the Indians call Brahmins (the Supreme Self of Hinduism), in fact zebus descended from the Bos primigenius namadicus! Bred on milk, trained for endurance walking and swimming, pampered by Hamdan Bin Sultan or Mohammad Fares, two great local "manadiers", they engage in combat ("mnattah") with sometimes stupefying rage: the principle is to make the opposing bull back out of the defined circle, like a boxer being thrown out of the ring, in less than 3 minutes. Once the 5-minute time limit has been exceeded, the bulls are considered to be stragglers. The winner, hard to identify for the uninitiated or those who can't decipher the Arabic shouted into a megaphone, sees his value rise, and with it the pride and notoriety of his owner. The crowd shouts, calls out to each other, becomes animated at the height of the confrontation and petrified with horror when one of the bulls pretends to charge into the audience, primarily at the Frenchmen in the red T-shirts. On enquiry, a super-bull can fetch up to 700,000 AED and often comes from a specialized breeding farm in the Netherlands or Austria.