The pardoner’s tale
ONCE UPON A TIME in Spain there was a little bull and his name was Ferdinand.” So begins the 1936 children’s classic about a toro bravo who prefers flowers to fighting. Ferdinand the Bull was an instant success, popular with every sandal-wearer and fruit-juice drinker from Eleanor Roosevelt to Gandhi. Hitler, naturally, had the book burned as pacifist propaganda.
Most aficionados heartily dislike the story, partly because it is implicitly abolitionist, but mainly because anthropomorphising a fighting
