„Catalonia's decision to proscribe bullfights has less to do with animal welfare than with regional assertiveness. Nothing wrong with that, of course: as a localist, I'm all for provinces and regions drawing up their own laws. But don't make the mistake of extrapolating too widely from a decision based largely on Catalan particularism. (...)
Toreo has never been as popular in Catalonia as in the rest of the peninsula. As long ago as 1931, Ernest Hemingway observed that »although bullfighting flourishes in Barcelona, it is on a fake basis because the public that attends goes as to a circus for excitement and entertainment«. Papa Hemingway put this down to a difference in character: Catalans, he believed, were too mercantile and practical a people to be much interested in death. Lacking the morbidity of Castilians, they rarely understood the poetry of the ritual being enacted on the sands. Missing the tragedy, they saw only the gore, and so were revolted. (...)
If I had to be reincarnated as either a domestic or a fighting bull, I wouldn't hesitate for a moment. The fighting bull is not sundered from his mother at birth. His horns are not removed, nor his tail docked, nor is he castrated. He is not penned up with hundreds of his kin, nor fed on processed meal. On the contrary, he lives in a state of nature for five years, roaming the pastures without human contact. At the end of those five years, he dies violently – albeit swiftly, as the matador is obliged by law to complete his work in 15 minutes. Such a life, followed by such a death, is surely preferable to the horrors of the abattoir, let alone the veal crate.”
