He Jumped Through a Hole in the Truck

I want to tell you about a Brahman bull named Esplendor, because I think his story says everything that needs to be said about the difference between defending animals and defending the ideology of animal rights — and because he deserves to be remembered by more people than currently know his name.

The Escape‍ ‍

A truck carrying Brahman bulls to a slaughterhouse in Usme, Bogotá, was moving through the Kennedy locality when Esplendor saw his opportunity. I don’t know what he saw, exactly — a gap, a weakness in the structure, something that registered as a way out of a situation his entire body understood as wrong. What I know is what he did: he threw himself at the side of the truck, forced a hole wide enough to accommodate his massive frame, and jumped.

A large Brahman bull, landing on a Bogotá street, running through forty blocks of Kennedy. There were videos everywhere within minutes — people filming from windows and sidewalks, the bull moving through traffic, enormous and terrified and free and determined all at once. He destroyed a taxi. He was hit by two large trucks during the chase and kept going. He ran until he couldn’t run anymore, until the injuries accumulated past the point his temper could compensate for, and then he was caught.

The videos were everywhere that afternoon. He was in the news cycle before the chase had even ended.

I watched those videos and made a decision before I’d finished watching them.

The Call

I didn’t know if it would work. I want to be honest about that — this wasn’t a practiced campaign, a strategic operation with a guaranteed outcome. It was a phone call and a campaign launched the same afternoon, on the logic that the story was viral enough that people might respond, and that if they did, the money might be raised before Esplendor was sent back into the system that had been transporting him to his death.

I called the slaughterhouse. Several times. After a few hours, the manager connected me to Esplendor’s owner — a large cattle dealer, the kind of man who moves animals through the commercial system the way the commercial system is designed to move them, which is to say efficiently and without sentimentality. We spoke. I explained what I wanted to do. He listened.

The community responded. By that afternoon, we had raised the money. Esplendor was purchased from his owner — a financial transaction, a commercial exchange, money for a life — and the campaign that raised the funds was visible to everyone who participated in it.

On the following day, I went to retrieve him.

The owner, under his own instinct about what mattered, told me to also take Luciana. She was a thin cow he described as poor quality, not worth much by commercial standards, someone the system had already categorized as marginal. He said this almost as an aside — take her too, she’s not worth anything anyway.

Two lives, one financial instrument, one afternoon of a community deciding that Esplendor’s escape meant something.

And then the ideologues rushed in.

I want to address this directly, because I know what was said at the time and I know what gets said every time something like this happens, and I think the saying of it deserves a direct response rather than the dismissal it sometimes gets.

The radical vegans — the abolitionists, the ideological purists, the people whose commitment to the doctrine of animal rights has, over time, become more important to them than the animals the doctrine exists to protect — said that I was participating in the system of animal exploitation by purchasing Esplendor. That I was commodifying him. That paying his owner reinforced the economic framework that produced the slaughterhouse truck in the first place. That a truly principled advocate would not engage with the commercial system on its own terms, even to extract a life from it.

I’ve been doing this work for almost thirty years. I helped build the animal rights movement in Portugal from nothing. I’ve organized campaigns, stopped hunting tournaments through the courts, led protests outside bullrings, and spent the last six years killing myself to protect hundreds of animals in the Colombian mountains. I have some standing to say what I’m about to say, and I’m going to say it without apology.

The pure ideological animal rights position, followed to its logical conclusion, would have sent Esplendor back to the slaughterhouse.

Let that land. The position that purchasing an animal reinforces exploitation — held consistently, applied to this specific situation — means Esplendor dies. The bolt gun, the slaughter floor, the end that the truck was carrying him toward. All of that happens, and the ideological position remains pure, and Esplendor is dead, and the doctrine is intact.

I find this position not only wrong but morally obscene. And I want to explain why through three comparisons that I think are not rhetorical flourishes but actual philosophical equivalents.

What Oskar Schindler Taught Me

Oskar Schindler used financial instruments — money, commerce, the economic machinery of the Nazi system — to save Jewish lives that would otherwise have been exterminated. He participated in the system. He employed Jewish workers as a commercial operation, which meant he was, by the logic of ideological purity, commodifying them, instrumentalizing them, using them as means rather than ends.

He saved over a thousand lives.‍ ‍

The ideological purity argument, applied to Schindler, produces the same conclusion it produces for Esplendor: better death than commodification. Better the gas chamber than being saved by a man who used commercial tools to do it. The Jews he employed should have refused his protection on the grounds that accepting it reinforced the system.

This conclusion is monstrous. Anyone who reaches it has allowed their doctrine to devour their humanity. Schindler was not a saint — he said so himself, he was an opportunist and a profiteer who found, in a specific set of circumstances, that the tools he had were exactly the tools the situation needed. He used them. Over a thousand people lived because he did.

Was he commodifying them? By the strictest reading of the ideological position, perhaps. Did that matter to the people he saved? Ask them.

Paying The Ransom

What about human hostages held by kidnappers? Should their families refuse to pay ransom on the grounds that paying reinforces the kidnapping economy, that it commodifies the hostage, that it participates in the system of human trafficking?

There are international insurance products specifically designed to cover ransom payments. These exist because the world has decided, practically and morally, that saving a life matters more than the ideological purity of not participating in the system that threatens it. The person who is kidnapped does not, upon rescue, complain that their family commodified them by paying for their freedom. They are alive. That is what matters.

Would the radical vegan, if kidnapped, instruct their family not to pay the ransom? Would they accept death rather than be purchased back? I genuinely want them to answer this question, because I think the answer reveals whether their commitment is to the doctrine or to the lives the doctrine is supposed to protect.

What I Know From the Inside

I was a victim, once. I’ve written about this elsewhere, and I won’t go into the details again here, but the essential fact is this: I grew up inside something that was, by any honest accounting, a form of captivity. A brutal predator, a household with no exit, children who were subjected to something that shouldn’t have been allowed to happen and that nobody stopped.

If someone had had the power and the money to get us out — if a financial instrument, a commercial transaction, some form of purchase or payment had been available that would have changed our situation — I would have been grateful. We all would have. The question of whether we were being commodified would not have crossed any of our minds. We would have been out. That’s what would have mattered.

This is why I defend the use of economic instruments to help animals.

Not as a comfortable theoretical position but as someone who knows, from the inside, what it feels like to be in a situation that requires rescue, and what the experience of not being rescued feels like, and what I would have wanted from anyone who had the power to help.

The golden rule of ethics — if I were in their place, what would I want someone to do for me — is the only moral compass that matters here. Everything else is doctrine.

The Movement I Helped Build and Left Behind

I want to say something about the animal rights movement, because I think it’s relevant and because I’ve earned the right to say it.

I helped create this movement in Portugal. I organized the first academic conferences on animal law and ethics in the country. I ran the campaigns. I did the work, for years, with the specific exhaustion that comes from building something from nothing. And then I watched it calcify — not into something stronger, but into something more rigid and less effective, a movement increasingly obsessed with ideological purity and intersectionalization, stuffing every micro-cause into the same tent until the tent became about everything and therefore about nothing, and the animals — the actual animals, the specific ones, the ones with names — got lost in the doctrine.

The defenders of animal rights have split into two categories that are not the same thing: those for whom the animals are what matters, and those for whom the ideology is what matters. For the first group, a bull escaping a slaughter truck and being purchased to freedom is a victory. For the second group, it’s a compromise of principle.

I am done with the second group. I have been for some time. I no longer call myself a vegan, not because I’ve changed what I eat or what I refuse to participate in, but because the word has been captured by people for whom the word matters more than what it was supposed to mean. I am a bad person who tries, as consistently as possible, not to benefit from animal exploitation — knowing that the world is so connected and so imperfect that perfect consistency is impossible, and that aspiring to perfect consistency is both stupid and dishonest, and that doing what you can do is the only available standard.

Five Months

Esplendor arrived at the sanctuary injured, massive, and furious. He had been hit by two trucks. He had fought through everything the chase demanded of him. His temper was so strong that for a long time it compensated for the injuries — he wasn’t limping, because he was Esplendor, and Esplendor didn’t limp.

It was impossible to come near him at first. He was traumatized in the specific way that an animal is traumatized when it has experienced what he had experienced — not just the chase and the injuries, but everything before the chase, everything the truck represented, everything his life up to that point had taught him about what humans do. He had no reason to trust anything.

We began physiotherapy. Every possible medical treatment. Long, patient work at the distance he was willing to allow, which was a significant distance at first and gradually became less. Weeks passed. Something changed — slowly, incrementally, the specific change that happens when an animal decides, based on accumulated evidence, that the humans in front of it are not the same as the humans before.

He became sweet. Warmer. He let me near him. We became friends, in the way that a man and a Brahman bull become friends, which is nothing like how people become friends and is somehow more complete — because there is no performance in it, no management of impressions, just the slow, patient accumulation of trust between two creatures who had both learned, the hard way, that trust is not given freely and shouldn’t be.

Five months after his rescue, Esplendor went into a coma. His hip condition, which had been deteriorating since the injuries of the chase, had reached the point where his body couldn’t continue. He never came back from the coma. He died that afternoon.

I loved him beyond words. I still do. The loss was a major shock, the way the loss of something you’ve fought for and found and then lost is always a major shock — not just grief but the specific weight of a life that was taken twice, once by the system and once by the injuries the system left behind.

But here is what I want to say, clearly and directly, to everyone who argued that purchasing Esplendor was ideological compromise:

He had five months. Five months of physiotherapy and care and the specific warmth of a community that raised money in an afternoon because they saw a bull jump through a hole in a truck and understood, immediately, what that meant. Five months of learning that humans could be something other than what the truck had taught him. Five months of becoming sweet, of letting someone near, of friendship that neither of us had planned and both of us needed.

Was that worth less because he was purchased? Did it matter less because a financial instrument was used? Would he have preferred the bolt gun?

Luciana: The Legacy of a Rescued Bull

She is still here. The cow the dealer said wasn’t worth much — poor quality, thin, marginal by commercial standards — has been at the sanctuary since that day. She is now fat and strong and temperamental in the specific way that a cow with a strong personality is temperamental, which is to say she does what she wants and looks at you sideways when you suggest otherwise. She is alive because a cattle dealer said take her too, she’s not worth anything anyway, and because someone said yes. And because one transaction took place and saved two lives.

I think about her sometimes when the ideological argument surfaces again. The animal that was saved as an afterthought, because the transaction was already happening and adding her cost almost nothing and she was there. The one the system had already written off as not worth much.

She is worth everything. She has always been worth everything. The system was wrong about her from the beginning and is wrong about all of them.

That’s the whole argument. Not the philosophy, not Schindler, not the ransom question — just Luciana, fat and temperamental in the Colombian mountains, alive because someone made a phone call and a community opened their wallets and a financial instrument was used without apology to do the only thing that actually mattered.

Save the animal. Everything else is secondary.

Esplendor’s story, and the sanctuary that became his home for five months, is part of the larger account that runs throughout this blog and through the Good Bad Person Series — particularly Overcoming Fear: The Scorpio Path and the Plan X Series title Leave No One Behind.