Bulls charge at the color red
The old claim turned out to be wrong and was rejected by evidence.
TaughtRed enrages a bull. That is why matadors use a red cape.
NowCattle are dichromats and cannot distinguish red from green. Bulls charge the movement of the cape, not its color. The cape is red to hide blood.
What actually happened
Cattle have two types of color receptor rather than three, similar to a person with red-green color blindness. To a bull, the muleta looks yellowish-grey. It could be any color and would work exactly as well.
The demonstration is easy and has been done repeatedly, including on television: present a bull with motionless red, blue, and white cloths and it ignores all three; wave any one of them and it charges. The red cape is a nineteenth-century tradition kept because it conceals bloodstains from the audience. What actually provokes the charge is a large moving object in the visual field of an animal that has been deliberately agitated.
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Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: Do bulls hate the color red?britannica.com
- Journal of Dairy Science: Colour vision in cattlejournalofdairyscience.org
Who was taught this
Still standard through 2005, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 1995 learned the earlier version.