“The only place where you could see life and death, i. e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it” wrote Ernest Hemingway. These days he couldn’t go to Catalunya to find some inspiration because bullfighting is banned. The decision was very controversial and it came as a result of a petition signed by 180.000 people who think that torturing animals just for the sake of fun is morally outrageous.
Bullfighting supporters adduced several reasons for maintaining the “spectacle”. Firstly, they gave what we can call a conservative argument. They said that bullfighting is a rooted tradition, like flamenco or paella, and there is value in keeping meaningful traditions alive. Secondly, they put forward an aesthetic argument. There is beauty in a corrida (a bullfight): the outfit, the risk of death, the bravery of the matador. The work of great artists like Hemingway, Almodovar or Garcia Lorca has been inspired by the ritual. A third and more twisted reason was the animalist argument. It was claimed that bullfighting is a good means to preserve the animals. The kind of bulls that are used in bullfighting are of a particular kind (toros de lidia). They are raised only for the ritual and they have a very good life until “their day arrives”– they enjoy better conditions than farmed animals so they can be brave enough. Finally, bullfighting supporters denounced that the interest behind the abolitionist campaign was not moral but political. For them, the popular initiative was not the result of a genuine concern for the animals but of the separatists’ strategy to dissociate Catalunya from anything considered as quintessentially Spanish. We can call this reasoning the political argument.
Read More »Stop bullfighting but carry on bullrunning, really?
