Dogs are thrown to the bull

See How the ancient Spaniards hunted bulls on horseback in the countryside.

This picture depicts a striking practice, now in disuse, typical of the bullfights of Goya's time, in which the bull that proved to be unfit for the fight in the ring was released with dogs to immobilise him and facilitate the performance of the puntillero, who proceeded to stick the spike between his horns to put him to death.

We see the bull wrestling with five dogs in the middle of the ring, plus another dog that seems badly wounded and is crawling on the ground. Meanwhile, a uniformed man on horseback, a bailiff, turns his back to us and rides off into the distance. We can partially see the barrier that delimits the space, but not the public, as Goya draws the viewer's attention to the main event, the confrontation between the bull and the dogs, preventing him from being distracted by other matters.

The print is thematically related to another that Goya eventually discarded, Dogs at the Bull (Bullfighting C), which reflects the same type of action.There is also a Goyaesque lithograph, entitled Bull harassed by dogs, which also shows this unique bullfighting practice, which was eventually replaced by the use of fire flags. . In turn, the work is linked to a drawing by Goya that also depicts violent harassment by a pack of dogs, although not a bull but a cat and a man on a donkey: Man on a donkey, with a cat on his head, pursued by dogs (F.39).

Glendinning emphasises the harshness of the scene, while Martínez-Novillo, for his part, points out that Dogs at the Bull (Bullfighting C) would be a discarded version of the print in question, which he places in the category of those showing impersonal suertes, linking it, in his opinion, to Fire flags 

There is a preparatory drawing of this engraving, also titled Dogs are thrown to the bull.