In an arena in the southern French village of Raphèle-lès-Arles on a torpidly hot July afternoon, a young black bull paws the floor next to the exit door. Eight raseteurs – the white-clad runners whose job is to seize tokens fixed to the animal – yell to get its attention. This is an event dedicated to working out if these uncastrated juveniles have the nasty streak needed to become stars of course camarguaise, the non-fatal sport that is the cousin of bullfighting.

Much of the Camargue, the delta region at the terminus of the Rhône river, is crazy about anything with two horns, a nose-ring and a problem with the colour red. Lighter and more fleet-footed than its Iberian counterpart, with upright, lyre-shaped horns, the Camargue bull is lionised in the sports sections of local newspapers and commemorated with statues at the entrance to many villages.

“We have a special relationship with the bull that is hard to explain”, says Alexis Chabriol, president of the Youth Union of Provence and Languedoc for the Defense of Our Traditions. “For me, when I capture a bull, it’s not to take a photo for the social networks. It’s not to do it any harm. It’s to have this contact with the bull, this inexplicable frisson. It’s something we really have deep inside.”

Bull aficionados such as Chabriol believe they are keeping alive not so much a sport as an art. The likes of Picasso, Lorca and Hemingway saw these activities as part of a Mediterranean continuity that stretches back to ancient times.

A bull helped birth the continent itself, according to myth: Zeus took the form of one to impregnate the Phoenician princess, Europa; their son was the Cretan king Minos, who had the labyrinth that housed the minotaur built.

In the confrontation between, and enmeshing of, man and bull, Picasso saw the essence of the artistic struggle with nature: “If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a minotaur,” he said in 1960.

But the south of France’s “taurine culture” – la bouvino, as it’s referred to in Provençal – is as much on the defensive as the bull inside the Raphèle-lès-Arles arena, who is stubbornly sticking to his safe space by the bolted door.

In recent years, ranchers have faced increasingly vocal attacks from animal rights activists, in large part focused on the profession’s association with the deadlier corrida – bullfighting – which still takes place in nearby Arles, Nîmes, Béziers and other municipalities. There is growing pressure to reform practices the ranchers say are essential, such as branding by hot iron and ear-tagging.

The sport is in outwardly decent health, with audiences actually increasing during the pandemic period and afterwards, to about 400,000 spectators a year by 2023. But it is increasingly corralled into a rural hinterland, which now votes mostly Rassemblement National, and alienated from the urban decision-making enclaves from which much animal rights activism emerges. The nearest major city, Montpellier, destroyed its last arena in 1968.

The financial state of many arenas and manades (ranches) is brittle, with both heavily reliant on volunteers to function. Respect for the supposed star attraction, meanwhile, is declining. Spectators to the abrivados, the horse-flanked processions down to the arenas that precede bull-running, no longer know how to behave, says Chabriol. They often throw fireworks or manhandle the bulls, increasing the number of accidents.

This is causing tensions with the insurers of these events, making them harder to organise, which in turn hits the manades’ bank balances. “The new generation are coming to these traditional events more for the sensationalist side rather than because it’s really their passion,” says Chabriol. The way out of the quagmire, he reckons, is to head back to the past. “We’ve got to go into reverse, stop all that, and go back to the essential.”

But embrace history too tightly and it leads to stagnation, as the ranchers here know full well from their cattle breeding. The Camargue folk customs in their present form are in fact not so very ancient: it was in the early 20th century that its “inventor”, Folco de Baroncelli, re-established dilapidated cattle farming customs dating back to the middle ages and codified haphazardly organised games in local arenas that were becoming a target for republican reformists. Now la bouvino’s new challenge is to redefine itself all over again.

“Today, I see it as a challenge to live up to what he did. But it’s hard because he set the bar so high,” says Bérenger Aubanel, De Baroncelli’s great-grandson and co-head of the Aubanel-Baroncelli manade. We are sitting in what was once De Baroncelli’s front room in a house in Le Cailar, a village surrounded by the best pastures in the Camargue. Around us is the paraphernalia of the De Baroncelli legend: photographs of him with Buffalo Bill at the latter’s travelling roadshow, stylised tauromachy prints by the artist Hermann-Paul, the spurred tips of bull-herding tridents, a dowdy stuffed flamingo.

Another modern business strategy with a taurine ring could be key to revitalising the Camargue traditions: branding. Since 2018, major Camargue figures have mounted a campaign to have the region’s bull-ranching traditions recognised by Unesco on its Intangible Cultural Heritage list.

Claire Mailhan has been leading the Unesco campaign that will hopefully result in greater recognition and funding. An initial attempt, which made a case based solely on the course camarguaise, was rejected; it’s hard not to suspect that the close proximity to the inflammatory practice of Spanish bullfighting, which was refused Unesco classification in 2020, was a factor. Now her association is addressing this image problem with a new dossier that emphasises bull-ranching’s role in supporting the wider ecosystem.

“The fact that our activities and our traditions impact an extensive, semi-wild farming area allows us to maintain that environment,” Mailhan says, over a coffee in a business park just outside Nîmes. “We’re responsible for the upkeep of open spaces. We’re involved in the struggle against the rising saltwater. It allows us to maintain biodiversity in the delta and beyond, because the project doesn’t just concern the Rhône’s two branches.” As well as the bull-related heritage, her team are also highlighting other traditional activities in the region, such as thatching and saddle-making.

According to Mailhan, there is a general “panic” about how to represent the interests of the taurine community. Question marks remain about how effectively current political structures – including the special Camargue committee at the French parliament – are representing the interests of a region historically neglected by Paris. Both Mailhan and Chabriol speak of the need to better educate new generations in the meaning of these traditions in order to revitalise them. This outreach work already takes place, but largely in local villages where the amount of new converts is limited.

Women are one obvious recruiting demographic for la bouvino, but there is ambivalence on this score in what remains a macho and cloistered milieu. It’s still the case that only men are admitted to the Nacioun Gardiano, the ceremonial organisation for the Camargue’s gardiens, or herders, created by De Baroncelli in 1904. This is despite historically important female manadiers (ranchers) such as Fanfonne Guillierme, who died in 1989 and was still riding in her 80s, as well as the increasing number of women, like Mailhan, shepherding from horseback in the bull pastures.

There has even been one recent attempt to get women bull-running. Some, including Mailhan, question that they are physiologically suited to this perilous sport, in which gorings are frequent and fatalities not uncommon. But former raseteur Richard Ribeira believed it was possible if women were trained separately, with bulls and cows of appropriate size and aggression. So at the start of 2020, he launched a dedicated school for women raseteurs in the village of Villeneuve-lès-Maguelone, just south of Montpellier. Unfortunately, Covid stopped it in its tracks, and only half of its 10 pupils wanted to continue afterwards. What really killed it, Ribeira thinks, was a general lack of belief in the concept: “[The taurine world] was being criticised because there was nothing for women there. But as soon as we did something, no one supported it.”

Ribeira says the sport’s organising body, the French Federation of Course Camarguaise (FFCC), originally insisted he set up a mixed, not a women-only school. He believes they thought it would bring them too much trouble for too little payoff. (The current FFCC administration were not involved and say they support women’s development within the sport.) Chabriol is also critical of the establishment who govern bull-running, believing they are letting it slide into decline. The breeding stock of the Camargue race is so limited now, he says, that it is increasingly difficult to find high-quality bulls for competition. And too many raseteurs, according to him, are in it solely for the money, without a higher aesthetic appreciation for their own sport.

Without some radical new vision, some injection of relevancy for the 21st century in the same way De Baroncelli managed for the early 20th, la bouvino is staring a painful future in the eye: withering into an anachronism or a museum piece. Reflecting on that possible tragedy, Claire Mailhan remembers Buffalo Bill’s companions in the roadshow that first caught De Baroncelli’s eye: “I don’t want us to become like the Native Americans one day, with people saying: ‘Those are gardiens – that’s all that remains of them.’”