Collateral Damage

Yesterday's Senate hearings-- in which lawyered-up (who wouldn't be?) executives of Goldman Sachs were grilled on television by demagogues affecting not to understand such fundamentals of finance as the difference between a gross position and a net position-- were great theatre. The hearings even produced some comic moments, such as a Senator from Nevada taking umbrage at comparisons between Las Vegas's casinos and Goldman Sachs. Meanwhile, during the histrionics, the general stock market sold off sharply, and the stock of Goldman Sachs advanced.

Unfortunately, whatever new financial regulation emerges from Congress will not be so funny, with all sorts of unpredictable, unintended consequences. I anticipate also at least three predictable, unintended consequences: Government bureaucracy and costs of  financing in the United States will increase; the new legislation will widen the relative advantage of the largest firms, like Goldman Sachs, as regulation always favors the incumbents; and financial practices that are inhibited here will simply move offshore.

The moribund venture capital industry is an example of unintended consequences of government regulation spawned during political frenzies. A decade ago, the U.S.'s vibrant venture capital industry was the envy of the rest of the world. Since 1980, in the U.S., companies no more than five years old have accounted for approximately all of net new jobs: On balance, older companies have hired no one. A decade ago, in technology-driven areas like Silicon Valley, Boston, and Austin, venture capital financed about a third of all start-up companies. Moreover, professional venture capitalists backed many of what are now the most important companies in the U.S.-- including Apple, which currently has the second or third highest market capitalization of any company in the S & P 500.

Today, all but a handful of venture capital general partnerships are struggling to replace the capital in their expiring funds. Over the last decade, the venture capital industry's returns to its limited partners have been abysmal, and limited partners have been responding by cutting back or eliminating their investments in venture capital. Consequently, the venture capital industry is losing the capacity to back start-ups, particularly in capital-intensive industries.

Historically, the venture capital industry has been extremely cyclical, and the nadir of a cycle has been the ideal time to invest in venture capital. But the venture capital industry is now not just in a cycle: Much of the infrastructure that supported venture capital has been destroyed by unintended consequences of government reforms. Over the past 14 months, the stock market has rallied more than it has in any such span of time since the Great Depression. If venture capital's pains were going to be alleviated by an upward cycle, such relief should have evidenced itself by now in robust initial public offerings of venture capital-backed companies.

Successful initial public offerings enable venture capital firms to earn a return on their investments, return capital to limited partners, and attract capital from limited partners to invest in new partnerships. The credible alternative of an initial public offering also enhances the price that a venture capitalist can negotiate for the sale of a portfolio company to a more established company. Rapidly growing companies based on proprietary technologies typically have negative cash flow for many years. Absent the initial public offering, or the sale, of a portfolio company with negative cash flow within a commercially reasonable time, a venture capital firm either has to accept dilution of its ownership interest in the portfolio company, put more capital than budgeted into the portfolio company, or liquidate it.

The government's inadvertent destruction of the infrastructure that supported venture capital began in the late 1990s with decimalization of stock trading. Prior to decimalization, which permits bids and offers for stocks at spreads as low as a penny per share, stock prices had always been traded at spreads quoted in fractions of a dollar per share, as determined by competition between market-makers-- typically, $0.75, $0.625, $0.50, $0.375, $0.25, $0.1875, $0.125, $0.0625, etc. The government also took away the market-maker's information advantage by requiring market-makers to show their best ("inside") quotes publicly, rather than exclusively to other market-makers. As a result of these reforms, market-makers could no longer make a profit dealing in any but the very largest companies' securities, and they ceased making markets in securities of smaller capitalization companies. Without the liquidity previously provided by market-makers, institutions became reluctant to buy securities of smaller capitalization companies; and securities analysts could afford to spend time following such companies only by participating in any investment banking revenue that such companies generated for their firms. The narrow spreads and lack of liquidity also meant that individual brokers with a retail clientele could no longer make a good living by specializing in smaller capitalization companies.

Next, the government inadvertently completed the destruction of research coverage of smaller capitalization companies by banning participation of securities analysts in investment banking revenues. Analysts were also restricted in helping to market initial public offerings. So if an institution bought an initial public offering, it would have to do so with limited analytic assistance in understanding the new company, with little or no subsequent research coverage of the company, and with no market-maker standing ready to commit capital to facilitate any subsequent buying or selling of the new company's shares. 

Just in case a smaller company somehow manages a successful initial public offering, it now has to deal with the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a poorly drafted piece of legislation passed in the dead of night during the political frenzy over World Com and Enron. Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission had no idea what it would cost companies to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley. The deleterious result for smaller companies was that it became prohibitively expensive for most of them to go pubic. Moreover, in a small public company, the CEO and the CFO in particular now have to divert significant amounts of their time from running the business to complying with Sarbanes-Oxley. Thus, an unintended consequence of Sarbanes-Oxley was to entrench large companies by building a barrier blocking smaller companies from access to the public capital markets. There has been some talk in Washington about modifying Sarbanes-Oxley's requirements for smaller companies. But the accounting firms-- which have a very strong lobby in Washington-- have used the pretext of Sarbanes-Oxley to raise auditing fees to multiples of their former levels, and they would be unlikely now to sign off on less expensive audits that transferred less risk from the accounting firms to their clients.

To be fair, even if the government had not unintentionally throttled initial public offerings, they would have had obstacles to hurdle. It is now well documented that initial public offerings, as a class of investment, produce substandard returns, as measured from the initial price at which they trade in the marketplace (which is typically higher than the price at which underwriters price the deal to their favored clients). Investors have new instruments with which to speculate-- from publicly traded SPACS, ETFs, etc., to private, leveraged bets on bets designed by financial engineers. Many investment banks and institutional investors have grown to be so large that only a big initial public offering could be of interest to them. And many speculators were burned a decade ago in the dot-com boom and bust.

Ironically, the government historically extolled and passed legislation to help the venture capital industry and never targeted it for reform. From time to time, there will still be a few reasonably successful initial public offerings. More frequently, venture capital firms will sell portfolio companies to larger companies. More rarely, a venture capital-backed company like Google will become so dynamic that it will stage a wildly successful initial public offering. But initial public offerings and the venture capital industry as we knew them are moribund. They were just collateral damage.

  

A Good Trade

This morning, Todd Pletcher, the trainer of Eskendereya, the overwhelming favorite for this Saturday's Kentucky Derby, announced that the horse has injured a foreleg and will not run. Similarly, last year's Derby favorite, I Want Revenge, was scratched on the eve of the race because of injury. To me, Eskendereya appeared not only likely to be the shortest-priced favorite in recent years to contest the Kentucky Derby, but also likely to be the first horse to win thoroughbred racing's "Triple Crown" (consisting of the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, and Belmont Stakes) since Affirmed in 1978.

Like grand prix race cars, thoroughbred horses have always been fragile. In order to be competitive, both have to achieve an exquisite balance between power and weight; between speed and sufficient structural soundness to complete the race. In the United States, thoroughbred horses are becoming even more fragile, making fewer and fewer annual and career starts. (There is great debate over the reasons for this growing fragility; I doubt that it is a coincidence that in the other major racing countries horses are not permitted to run with aid of medication.) 

A key determinant of the gross earning power of a stable of racehorses is the number of races that they contest. Thus, all else being equal, a horse owner has to maintain more and more horses to generate the same gross revenues. An owner has to have great passion for the game to stay in it: Few stay for long. Since 1973, my wife and I have owned-- on our own and with partners-- fluctuating numbers of horses. 

Last year, we sold one horse and found a home for another that was no longer racing sound. Because of my surgeries, I did not go to the yearling sales last summer to replenish our stock. Consequently, we now have only three horses, Hot Money, Mustang Island, and Backslider. 

It was tempting to ask our trainer, Christophe Clement, to race at least one of these horses-- Mustang Island, a sound horse coming off a winning race-- in Florida this winter, so that I could have the pleasure of watching him train and race. But I knew that, if Mustang Island ran in the winter, he would not be at his peak in the spring in New York, when he could run for higher purses against weaker, restricted competition. So I never broached the subject with Christophe, There is a right way and a wrong way to do most things in racing, and I would find no satisfaction in doing things the wrong way.

Like Mustang Island, Hot Money is a four-year-old gelding. Both are shipping to New York from Florida tomorrow. Hot Money has proven that he is a fast, competitive racehorse, and he is training very well. He will be entered in a six-furlong allowance race for New York-breds, to be run on the turf on May 5. Christophe thinks that Hot Money is at his best on firm turf, so we will now start worrying about rain.

According to Christophe, Mustang Island is not quite in peak condition, but could possibly be ready for a race on May 8. As he won his last race impressively-- albeit against moderate opposition-- in his first start on turf and only the second start of his career, we can still dream a little about his potential. 

An old racetrack aphorism has it that no man ever committed suicide with an unraced two-year-old in the barn. Although Backslider is a three-year-old, he is unraced. He has not yet-- to use another horseman's expression-- come to hand, but I am guessing that he might be ready to run by about the end of May. 

I hope that I will physically be able to go out to Belmont Park to inspect our horses and to attend their races. If not, I should be able to watch them race on television in the knowledge that, win or lose, we gave them their best opportunity to succeed.

If I had never owned and bred racehorses, my net worth would be higher. But I would be poorer. Most important, it has been a family activity. I made a good trade.

 

Another Try

This morning, my platelet count was high enough for Dr. Saltz to recommend that I resume chemotherapy with a reduced dosage of FOLFOX. Summing up my remaining therapeutic options, he said that we don't have many cards left to play. 

At my request, Dr, Saltz outlined what I gathered to be the two remaining potential alternatives. One is a chemotherapy that I could take only if the results-- which he is awaiting-- of a genetic test indicate that it is suitable for me. This chemotherapy usually has side effects that sound hideous to me; when it works, it always has these side effects. I will not make a decision about this chemotherapy unless it becomes an actual alternative. But, at this moment, it seems to me that subjecting myself to this chemotherapy would be inconsistent with my desire for quality of life, as opposed to quantity of life. 

The second potential alternative is FOLFIRI, the chemotherapy that I underwent last year. FOLFIRI could not be expected to have much effect on my cancer now; my current cancer cells have undergone a Darwinian selection process for resistance to this chemotherapy. 

This morning, I learned also from Dr. Saltz that I have developed a surgical hernia-- a condition unrelated to an inguinal hernia. Like any other hernia, this surgical hernia could only be corrected through more surgery. Even if I were willing to undergo such elective surgery, I could not do so without halting chemotherapy. So, contrary to all instinct, I must passively accept permanent, uncomfortable disfigurement from surgery as part of the collateral damage of cancer treatment.  

Dr. Saltz cautioned Susan and me that my disease could take take a sudden turn for the worse. In response to a question from Susan, he indicated that I should have my affairs in order. In response to a question from me, he said that although I could see the hospice consultation service at MSKCC at any time, he did not think that it was necessary at this time. I was startled and gained new perspective when he added that I could consider my chemotherapy as palliative care.

This afternoon, I received the reduced dosage of FOLFOX. Over the next couple of weeks, an absence of severe side effects-- particularly, but not exclusively, with respect to my platelet count-- would constitute good news. Of course, until I have another CT scan, Dr. Saltz will not know if the FOLFOX is actually shrinking my tumors; and if so, to what extent. Presumably, a reduced dose is less effective than a full dose.

Sic terminal cancer.

Mersana

A few days ago, Mersana Therapeutics, Inc. (www.Mersana.com), and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. announced an agreement in which Teva would pay, if all milestones were met, at least $334 million to Mersana in exchange for rights to develop and market Mersana's XMT-1107, which combines Fleximer with a drug derived from fumagillin. XMT-1107 will be Mersana's second oncology product to enter the clinic. Mersana's XMT-1001, a conjugate of Fleximer and campothecin, is currently completing a Phase 1 study.

Fleximer is Mersana's proprietary, nanoscale polymer that can be linked to small molecules and biotech drugs across therapeutic categories to enhance their delivery-- with the goal of improving effectiveness and safety. In addition, Mersana is working on Fleximer as a delivery system for drugs based on short-interfering RNA (siRNA), which hold significant promise for treating cancer and a host of other diseases, but lack a viable delivery system. 

As I phased out of my job at Harris & Harris Group, I gradually reduced my direct involvement in its portfolio companies. Nevertheless, until I retired from Harris & Harris Group, I remained a director of Mersana. 

When I read the news about the Teva deal, I emailed Mersana's CEO, Julie Olson, and COO, Pete Leone, to congratulate them.  Julie made me feel really good by saying in her email in reply, "We wouldn't be here had it not been for all of your support and belief in the technology and the team!" 

There are a number of companies in Harris & Harris Group's portfolio with great promise. But, given Mersana's potential for improving the health of mankind, if Mersana were to fulfill my dreams for its technology, my small role in its corporate history would be more than enough of a legacy for me to have left behind.

Fun Is Good

According to my friend, Matthew Stevenson, in his latest book, Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited: The St.Paul Saints-- an independent, minor-league baseball team that was run by the actor, Bill Murray-- had as its motto, "Fun is Good." 

This delightful motto reminded me of something that a French friend--a woman-- told Susan and me some three decades ago: "It is important to have fun, because life is not funny."

Experiencing Time

A friend, who recently underwent surgery about a month after receiving his cancer diagnosis, remarked in an email to me a couple of days before his surgery that it had been a long month. My experience has been similar. It has been less than 14 months since my cancer diagnosis, but it seems to me that the diagnosis was rendered years ago-- five years, 10 years ago, maybe longer. Assuming that this perception that time is slowing is common for people living with cancer or terminal disease, I wonder what causes it?

Conversely, it has always been my impression that people without cancer or terminal disease perceive that time is accelerating as they age. When I was healthy, it certainly seemed to me that time was moving faster and faster. The explanation that I have heard for this perception is that a year is 20 percent of a five-year-old's life, but only two percent of a 50-year-old's life. Although this explanation seems plausible, I have never been wholly satisfied by it. And why may the correct explanation, whatever it is, not apply to those living with cancer or terminal disease?  

Why Nanotechnology?

A few months ago, a friend at M.I.T. gave me a copy of the best book on nanotechnology that I have seen for "general readers who are interested in the implications and applications of science." The book is No Small Matter, Science on the Nanoscale, by Felice C. Frankel and George M. Whitesides. This well-written and visually beautiful book uses "both images and prose to give a sense of the many things that are too small for the eye to see." 

According to the authors, "Nanoscience is an alluring new starting point for our civilization as it explores the world in which we live.... Why go beyond invisible, to nano? We offer eight reasons. 

Information Technology....

Life, and the Cell....

Physical Measurement at the Atomic and Molecular Scale....

The Unique Properties of Small Pieces of Matter....

Materials....

Quantum Phenomena....

Medicine....

Energy, Water, and the Environment....

We will not know the ultimate impact of nanoscience and nanotechnology for many years.... It is transforming the way science and engineering work together, and rewiring the sociology of technology; it is brokering the movement of knowledge among communities that barely knew of one another's existence.

Also, it's already very, very cool, and very useful."

I feel privileged to have been able to devote the last decade of my career to investing in, and helping to build an organization dedicated to investing in, companies developing and selling products and services enabled by nanotechnology. Not only was the work especially challenging and educational for me given my lack of a technical background, but also I got to know many of the brilliant pioneers on this frontier of knowledge and creation. And I treasure my memories of working with my former colleagues at Harris & Harris Group, Inc.

Limbo

My first treatment with FOLFOX  two weeks ago not only resulted in a potpourri of relatively mild, expected side effects (as treatments of chemotherapy accumulate, such side effects tend to escalate), but also a couple of unexpected side effects. The more serious of these unexpected side effects is a precipitous drop in my platelet count. This "very rare" reaction coincides with an enlargement of my spleen. My enlarged spleen may or may not be sequestering some or all of the platelets that are absent from my bloodstream. Because of my reduced platelet count, Dr. Saltz, my medical oncologist, reduced by half the amount of Fragmin that I had been injecting into myself each day as a prophylactic measure against blood clots. 

I had been scheduled today to have my second treatment with FOLFOX, but my platelet count had not risen sufficiently from its nadir to allow the treatment to proceed. The current plan is for me to return to MSKCC in a week to receive a reduced dosage of FOLFOX, if my platelet count has risen sufficiently. Meanwhile, my platelet count is now high enough both to forego daily testing at MSKCC and to resume injecting myself with full doses of Fragmin.

In summary, rather than being treated at the moment for cancer, I am being given time to recover from chemotherapy.

Reader Beware

I agree with the assertion that all autobiography is fiction. How could it be otherwise? Even if the author is sincere, he or she has a point of view, is rarely entirely altruistic, cannot be perfectly objective, is relying in part on memory, and is engaging in creative processes by choosing the aspects of his or her life to highlight and by transposing experience into written word.

My blog is not meant to be an autobiography. For example, I do not write about about living family members (one exception: I wrote six lines about my aunt Lucy, in my entry commemorating her daughter, my late cousin Missy). 

Although I try to be meticulous in my writing per se, my blog is prey to the same fictionalizing forces that affect autobiography. As a result, I can see that it downplays the day-to-day logistics and humiliations of living with cancer and cancer treatments and the cowardly horror with which I contemplate the process of dying of cancer. And there are certainly other ways, including ones of which I am not aware, in which I am seeking to cast myself in a favorable light in my blog.

Hank Williams

When a friend emailed me the announcement by the Pulitzer Prize Board today of its 2010 awards, I was delighted to read that the board had given a posthumous Special Award, for lifetime achievement as a musician, to Hank Williams. Mr. Williams died in 1953 at age 29. Among the many country music standards that he wrote and sung, the board cited in particular "Your Cheatin' Heart," "Cold Cold Heart," "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," and "Jambalaya."

A Museum of Regrets

Whenever I have read an interview of some prominent man who says towards the end of his life that he has no regrets, he wouldn't change a thing, I have been puzzled. (It always seems to be a man who says that he has no regrets.) Did he ever play golf-- didn't he ever wish for a mulligan? Did he ever make investments? He couldn't have bought racehorses!

Didn't he ever regret saying something? Didn't he ever regret gratuitously hurting someone, whether he did it deliberately or inadvertently? Didn't he ever regret trusting or hiring someone? Didn't he ever regret not going to the doctor sooner or not insisting on more frequent colonoscopies than the guidelines recommend? Didn't he ever regret doing something that was self destructive?

I just don't get it. How does one mature and learn to be a better person without regrets? 

An expression that has always made sense to me is, "Life is a museum of regrets."

Today

Today, it's cool and sunny in Manhattan. I'm looking forward to the broadcast, which will start in a few minutes, of the final round of The Masters. 

This morning, I was engrossed in a book that I have intended to read for decades, Robert Daley's The Cruel Sport, about Grand Prix motor racing in the late 1950s through 1967. In that era, sports car and Grand Prix racing were a passion of mine. During spring vacation, I would make an annual pilgrimage with friends to Sebring, Florida, for a 12-hour sports car race that attracted most of the top international racing teams and drivers. In those days, Grand Prix racing rarely took place in the United States. To this day, I have never actually attended a Grand Prix race.  

At lunchtime, I opened a good bottle of wine, the 2008 Felton Road Block 5 Pinot Noir, from Central Otago, New Zealand. Felton Road is one of two wineries that we visited in Australasia. 

Australasian Photos

Pecan Pie

A friend from South Carolina, Pat Martin, who is married to my great friend since childhood, George Martin, sent me one of her prize-winning pecan pies for Easter. My Grandmother Kiker-- my mother's mother-- made wonderful pecan pies. My grandparents had a big pecan tree in their front yard in Reidsville, North Carolina. I loved to climb that tree, and, in great expectation of the pecan pie to follow, I eagerly gathered pecans from it and cracked them and picked their meat. 

I had always thought that my grandmother's pecan pie was the best that I had ever eaten. While acknowledging the unreliability of 1950s' vintage memories and my misgivings about committing heresy, I have concluded that Pat's pecan pies are even better than my grandmother's were.

Reading, Writing, and Learning

Somewhere, I once read something by, or attributed to, Peter Drucker, to the effect that different people learn in different ways and that he  himself learned by writing; as did, for example, Winston Churchill. It dawned on me that maybe I learn best the same way? When I am writing, I concentrate more deeply, and my mind engages more fully, than when I am reading or listening. But I have written very little: No wonder that I have learned so little over the years!

I have always been addicted to reading prose (I have never been able to read poetry). I read out of curiosity; I read to learn; I read for pleasure. As a boy, my powers of concentration were better than they were later; when reading a book, I wouldn't even hear my mother call us to dinner. When I was growing up, I read mainly fiction. In college, I majored in English literature. In prep school and college, I disciplined myself to spend negligible time reading newspapers: I reasoned that, in a short while, today's events would mostly become forgotten background noise. 

A few years after being graduated from college, I found myself gravitating away from reading fiction, towards reading about contemporaneous events. As time went on, it just seemed to me that the world we live in is more astounding, more bizarre, and peopled by more interesting characters than anything that could be conjured up by any fiction writer. 

For many years, I read at least parts of four or five newspapers a day. I subscribe to stacks of magazines specializing in a wide variety of topics. To this day, as soon as I awaken in the morning, I am eager to collect the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal at our front door and start reading-- beginning with the Times's lead articles and then its sports pages (especially during pro football season). I never cease to be amazed that great newspapers can be published on a daily basis, and I am grateful for the opportunity to read them.

When I was growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, the public schools were in chaos. We had double sessions during at least the tenth grade, my last year of schooling in Jacksonville. I was never taught the rules of grammar, and I don't know them to this day. My parents sent me to a prep school-- the Hill School, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania-- for my last two years of high school, so that I would have a chance at getting into a good undergraduate school. (My brother had attended the Hill for three years, and he was matriculating at Princeton.) The Hill's headmaster was an English teacher, and the school put a lot of emphasis on writing. We had to write an essay each week, and I tried hard to avoid making the same mistake twice. 

I know very little about creative writing, having never read a book, much less taken a course, on the subject-- which probably comes as no surprise to any reader of this blog! So my writing is pretty much limited to what my ear and intuition permit me.

Strunk and White (The Elements of Style) was my Hill School bible. I marvel at what I consider to be good writing, and I am bothered to the point of distraction by what I consider to be bad writing. Sloppy writing with unintended ambiguities particularly irritates me. I had been reading great literature in prep school and college, so most of the reading assignments in graduate business school were an ordeal for me. 

My own writing experience is narrow and limited. In school, I wrote papers; in business, I drafted regulatory filings and wrote business correspondence, shareholder letters, and the like. Because my view is that anything that I might want to say through writing has been said before by better thinkers and scholars who are also more talented writers, I limited myself almost entirely to the writing that was required by my work. It has never seemed to me that I have much to say that would be of enduring value to anyone else. (For the same reason, I tried not to accept speaking invitations-- not that there were so many-- unless I saw a clear business need to do so.)

This blog is a different proposition for me: No one else has the grist for its mill. So if it is going to be written, it is incumbent on me to write it. I am finding that while I am doing the research for its entries, I am both refreshing my memory and acquiring new information. Am I also learning more about writing, from writing this blog? Perhaps I should get around to rereading chronologically all of the entries to see if my writing seems to be improving. 

If I really am one of the people who learns by writing, I have no way other than writing to develop my writing skills. Nevertheless, I am considering reading some of the Paris Review's interviews with authors. These interviews should be fascinating to read, even if I prove unable to learn the art and craft of writing by reading about it.

La Corrida de Toros

Lately, there have been protests in Madrid against la corrida de toros, bullfighting. Soon after being diagnosed with incurable cancer, it occurred to me that I was now inescapably part of a ritual akin to the Spanish bullfight-- in the role of el toro, the bull. 

With great pageantry, the corrida proceeds through three stages-- tercios. In the first tercio, the bull races out of a dark tunnel into the hot sunlight of the ring: fierce, proud, bursting with energy, responding to every provocation with a charge, naively hooking its horns at illusory targets. Then mounted picadores lance the bull's neck muscles: The bull's head drops, and its vitality begins palpably to drain away.

In the second tercio,  banderilleros-- assistants to the killer, el matador--  place pointed, barbed sticks-- banderillas-- in the bull's shoulders. Bewildered, in anger and pain, the bull continues to respond with valiant, futile charges.

In the final tercio, the matador demonstrates his mastery of the bull, while completing the bull's humiliation. Flanks heaving, the exhausted bull stands panting, matted with dust, sweat, and blood, finally beginning to understand the nature of its adversary. If the bull is lucky, it dies quickly, from one thrust of la espada, the killing sword. However messy the bull's death turns out to be, if the bull is deemed to have fought with acceptable courage, its body participates in a final ceremony: A team of mules drags the body around the ring so that los aficionados, the fans, can show their respect for the dead bull.

A difference in the possible fate of a bull entering the ring and that of someone with terminal cancer is that, on rare occasions, a bull's behavior in the ring is deemed to have been so exemplary that it is spared.