The owner of a hunting estate in northern Spain recounts how, not long ago, he killed a wolf. In the good old days, the animal would have been stuffed or perhaps simply thrown away. Today, the rare, illegally hunted trophy ended up in a chest freezer. “If important people come to hunt, we take it out of the freezer a day beforehand and tell them: look what we killed yesterday. That's what they want to see.”
 
As urbanisation advances in Spain, nature is increasingly confined. More and more people live in cities, where work and economic activity are concentrated. If you stay in the countryside, it will never be yours: you must move to the city to conquer it.
 
Once in the city, however, your perspective changes. You have work, money and comfort, but begin to miss something. Conquering the countryside becomes the pursuit of a romantic ideal. The countryside the city wants is neither wild nor even agricultural. It is a theme park representing rural life, somewhere to consume authenticity. Rural guesthouses strive to look very rural, cheeses very artisanal; things and places that had no names are given them, and city dwellers believe they remember who they were in previous lives or generations.
 
The struggle with nature is one of the things that makes a man a man. For the urban resident who can go years without seeing the animals he eats, only thighs and steaks, killing an animal for food offers an almost traumatic yet exhilarating encounter with reality. This is life. Being able to say: I killed it.
 
Of course, there are theme parks for this too. A hunting estate is not a wild mountain landscape where deer still survive: it is a private, fenced enclosure where deer are bred and fed all year. When hunting season arrives, the urbanite drives out in his SUV with leather seats, seeking his experience. He gives himself over to the blood, and the rough atmosphere of the hunt restores what he has lost: being from the countryside. Shotgun in hand, the rural Spaniard who conquered the city remembers that he is still a man, that he can survive.
 
Then he has his photograph taken with his frozen wolf and climbs back into his SUV, still not quite feeling that he has found what he came for.
 
In his eyes shines envy of the dogs, drunk on blood, who still know how to enjoy themselves wildly.