Following the temporary cancellation of my Oxford talk on my book Into The Arena and vastly exaggerated reports of death threats etc. abounding in the Oxford Times and Oxford Mail, I thought I would repost the talk I gave at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to show quite how virulently propaganda-like my talks tend to be. As my bullfight aficionado friends point out, if it is propaganda, it reads almost as though it is for the other side…

Yesterday evening I immensely enjoyed giving a talk to the sizeable audience at the 300-seat Scottish Power Theatre at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on my book Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bulllfight.  It was followed by a discussion with the chair, Al Senter, and the Q&A session with the audience that (along with brief personal chats with about half of those present who came to have their books signed by me in the London Review of Books tent afterwards.) The questions were all well-informed and interesting, not least because, as many of the audience members said to me in person, I’d answered most of their more general questions in my opening talk. So, here is the transcript of what I said:

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I was going to read from my book, but it seems that the most important topic in the United Kingdom in the 21st Century - when discussing bullfighting - are the ethical issues surrounding the harm and killing of animals for a public spectacle. So I want to address these head on.

As a liberal, it is not my intention, or my place, to tell people whether or not they should approve of or enjoy bullfighting anymore than it is whether they should approve of or enjoy opera. However, when people seek to ban an art form from existing, so that other people may not enjoy it, whatever claims have been made by other people who have never witnessed it, then certain questions have to be raised.

Whatever the motivations behind the ban on bullfighting on Catalonia  – and there have been accusations of underhand dealings, thumbing of noses at Madrid to gain votes, which has some circumstantial evidence for it as the popular Catalan regional hobby of attaching burning tar balls and fireworks onto bulls’ horns and letting them into the streets is unaffected by the legislation  – anyway, the stated reason is the ethics, or rather lack of ethics, of bullfighting. So, that is what I should like to discuss here.

However, before I can do that, I have to dispel some myths that have long surrounded the bullfight, pieces of propaganda that have been propagated by the anti-bullfight lobby such as CAS International, the League Against Cruel Sports and PETA.

The one I most often hear is the complaint that the matador faces a broken down and destroyed animal. Take a close look at this bull in these photos and tell me how broken down it looks.

Morante de la Puebla performs a ‘veronica’ (Photo: Author)

Morante de la Puebla performs a second ‘veronica’ (Photo: Author)

Morante de la Puebla performs a third ‘veronica’ (Photo: Author)

Morante de la Puebla performs a fourth ‘veronica’ (Photo: Author)

There is not a drop of blood on it and it is being passed in four perfect veronicas – named after Saint Veronica’s wiping of Christ’s face with a cloth, by the matador Morante de la Puebla, Spain’s greatest exponent of the large cape, the capote, which is used at the beginning of a fight.

There is an argument matadors should spend more time with the cape at the beginning of the fight, and I completely agree, but let’s get our facts right, they all face an untouched bull at the beginning of the fight for at least one series of passes by law. And I mean law, Spanish bullfighting regulations being part of national legislation.

That bull is as fresh and strong as one could want. Is it possible those horns have been shaved? Yes, possible. But by how much? (And note that the greatest matador of the post-war period, Manolete, was killed by a ‘Miura’ bull called Islero which had shaved horns.) Is it possible there is tranquiliser in that blood stream or that he has been injured? Well, if so, not very much! Finally, is it possible that vaseline or some other substance has been rubbed into his eyes? No. Because perfect vision is required so that the bull clearly sees the cape move and charges it, rather than charging the general shape of man and cape and ends up injuring or killing the bullfighter. (Bulls are functionally colour-blind, and charge at movement.) These activities are all also illegal. Spain, despite xenophobic and frankly racist rumours to the contrary is an EU member state, not a banana republic that ignores the law at will.

The bull goes on from being caped with the large cape to face the picador on his armoured horse with his lance. This is the most controversial, and to many the most abhorrent part of the bullfight. There he will be ‘cited’ to charge the horse, normally twice, sometimes only once, sometimes as many as three or four times. This is done by advancing the horse to within a few steps of the bull and then calling him, this time using sound to aggravate his ferocity.

As he hits the horse’s quilted armour, the peto, the picador’s lance will enter his shoulder muscles (actually just behind the great hump of goring muscle called the morillo which defines this breed of cattle). The bull will continue striving into the horse despite this – which is why the lance has a crossbar to stop the bull from killing itself – until it is drawn off the horse by a matador or one of his assistants with a cape.

It is notable that the bull charges onto the lance – the horse does not charge the bull - and then the bull does not retreat or leave but must be removed. There is no denying he feels the lance wound, but his reaction tells you how evaluates that damage – he does not exhibit what they call in animal behaviour texts ‘classic pain behaviour’, i.e. running away (see Reference 1, references at end.) The reasoning for having the picador is to bring the bull’s head lower and to slow and regularise his charge.

Or, rather, the reasoning from the matador’s point of view, which is the view many aficionados, ‘fans’, take as well. However, some, purer, and often older, aficionados, watch bullfights only for the bull and for them this section shows the bull’s courage, strength, determination and ferocity. Think of that what you will.

The horse leaning onto the bull serves a similar purpose to the lance, tiring the animal. This is why picadors’ horse-breeders, like Alain Bonijol in France, train their horses to lean in, first with a carriage with horns, and then small, semi-tame bulls. By the way, this is all “reason”, the cause is historical: the bullfight grew out of the horseback bullfight of Castillian and Moorish knights, whose servant on the ground – the killer or matador, for that is what the word meant – came to exceed his master in popular appeal.

Now, injuries to horses must happen, but I have ridden all my life and have yet to see a horse leave the ring lame in 300 hundred bulls. Contrary to rumours you may read, the armour goes all around the horse’s body. Trained picadors’ horses are an expensive commodity and the days of elderly horses being eviscerated for proof of the bull’s courage are thankfully long gone. The body-armour, the peto, they wear, and especially the breeder Alain Bonijol’s kevlar variant of it, offers good protection. Which is not to say that it still wouldn’t be like undergoing tackling practice for a game of rugby. It is illegal to tranquilise the horse before the fight.

After the picador comes the placing of the banderillas, three pairs of coloured sticks with barbed spikes at the end. The reasoning and the history behind this are something of a mystery to me. Chasing the moving man who places them rather than hitting the static horse – in combination of the sting as the barbs strike home – certainly seems to reinvigorate the bull. And, visually, it allows bullfighters – matadors or more often their assistants – to show athleticism and derring-do, although many aficionados I know seem to nod through this part of the fight unless something spectacular happens.

Although the barbs undeniably hurt the bull, one must remember the size, scale and ferocity of the animal. Its leather alone is up to a half-centimetre, a quarter inch, in thickness. They are usually placed by the assistants to the matador, although sometimes they are placed by him. Matadors of the older style, who often fight the larger, more dangerous bulls, regularly place them themselves. The greatest of these is my friend Juan José Padilla, shown doing so in my photo from Seville last year.

Juan José Padilla places banderillas ‘de poder a poder’ (Photo: Author)

As can be seen, this bull is still in fearsome shape. Its head is lower, and it is moving slower, but it is far from being half-dead from blood loss. This is a 610 kilogramme Miura bull – just shy of 1,400 lbs or 100 stone – and it has some 36.6 litres  – 64 pints – of blood. A healthy bull can lose 25% without serious problems for the duration of the fight, which is over 9 litres or 16 pints. That’s the entire blood content of a small man’s body twice-over. (Ref.2)

So when the matador faces the bull for the most famous part of the fight, with the muleta, or red cloth, the bull is undeniably a different animal, but it is far from powerless. In fact, it is only because the bull has been moulded into this shape that the matador can then exercise what the modern Spanish audience loves most, which is “artful” bullfighting, one of whose tenets involves bringing the bull as close to the matador’s body as he can. This damage to the bull makes it possible for the matador to take greater risks. However, it is far from being putty in his hands. Witness the bull’s ferocity and speed in my photo of the greatest exponent of the muleta in the world, José Tomás.

José Tomás performs a ‘manoletina’ (Photo: Author)

This photo I took in Córdoba in 2009. I could not take one 2010, because José Tomás was not working in Spain, as, before he could return from fighting in Mexico, he almost died. Whilst he was caping – with the muleta, after the picador and the banderillas – the bull found him under the cloth and took apart the workings of his inner thigh in a manner which lost him 18 pints of blood (as I said, this is the circulation of two men of his size: they were pumping it in and it was just coming out again).

That press photo above doesn’t do the damage the matador sustained justice. This one of the matador Julio Aparicio taken just a few weeks later in Madrid does.

Modern medicine being as astonishingly advanced as it is, both survived. However, it was not always thus. Should you have the stomach for it, you can easily find on the internet the film of the death of Paquirri in 1984, his last words being to tell the panicked surgeons, tranquillo, ‘calm down’. Or, from an earlier era, you can read the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan on the death of Manolete, or the poet Federico García Lorca’s lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejías, or Ernest Hemingway on his friend Gitanillo de Triana, or the great matador Juan Belmonte on the death of his friend and rival Joselito in his autiobiography… the list goes on and on. Since 1700 533 professional bullfighters have died in the ring, as the blog post after this one here details.

However, I am not trying to claim that bullfighting is some sort of battle between man and bull.

(The photo and those following are from a colleague on my book, and World Press Photo 2009 Prize-Winner, Carlos Cazalis. The pass being performed by Tomás above is a caleserina , invented by and named after Alfonso Ramirez ‘El Calesero’, the photographer’s grandfather.)

A fifty percent mortality rate on either side is not the desired result. This is because bullfighting is not a sport.

It is written about in the cultural pages in Spanish newspapers, and the suffix ‘-fight’ is an English invention, the word bullfighting coming from our own bull-baiting with dogs, something that truly is a grotesque blood-sport.

What we call the bullfight, should really be called the corrida de toros, and the bullfighters, toreros (toreador, a word people pick up from the opera Carmen, is an archaism no longer in use in Spain).

If the corrida de toros  is a contest, it is metaphorically so, like the contest between man and mountain in rock-climbing. Is that a fair contest? I don’t think that question even makes any sense. This is not gladiatorialism, it is a tragedy containing a ritual sacrifice, and the task of the matador is to deal with the bull in a manner which transmits that, finishing as cleanly and bravely as he can. He regulates his level of danger as an actor modulates his voice and physical behaviour. Matadors don’t get gored because they can’t avoid it. They get gored because they are deliberately trying something their skill, or the bull’s temperament, cannot support. Just as sometimes an actor will overreach his ability or try something the script will not bear.

Despite this dramatic analogy, the corrida is the only spectacle that not only represents man’s struggle with death (among other things), but also just is that struggle. I don’t want to bogged down in the further argument about whether it is an artform, but as a representational public spectacle, it is unique in this.

(This photo of Padilla training is by my friend Nicolás Haro.)

When the man faces the bull, even at the end, there is always a risk. And in order to kill well the matador must increase the risk and go over the horns, such as the very finest matador with the sword, my friend Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez, so often does. (Paquirri, whose death I mention above, was Cayetano’s father.)

Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez kills ‘a volapie’ (Photo: Author)

This bull died very quickly and cleanly afterwards, although that is not always the case. The most gruesome sight is when the sword opens a conduit between a pressurised blood vessel and a lung, causing blood to spew out of the mouth. Whether it is the most distressing reality for the animal, I don’t know. It is the long deaths upset me personally the most: when the bull walks back to the wooden barrier, clutching onto life. Sometimes, though, even then he is not without fight.

A Miura bull rears after the killing stroke from El Fundi (Photo: Author)

By law, the matador must go over the horns once with the sword, although he may try again should this not prove fatal for the bull swiftly enough. Usually, he will change to the descabello, a heavier sword with a broader, flat blade at the end, which is used with a downward strike to sever the spinal column at the entry point to the skull. Done correctly, it causes the animal to drop to the ground instantly. It drops, because all motor neurones are severed and you cannot sever all motor neurones without severing all sensory neurones, taking away any pain the bull may be feeling in its final moments. (If the descabello is not required, the moment the bull falls to the ground from the sword-wound an assistant to the matador does the same job with a dagger to make sure the spinal cord is severed.)

Having dealt with some common misconceptions about the corrida, I will now try to talk about its rights and wrongs as it actually is.

First on the list of wrongs is the most obvious one: men sending an animal into a ring to be injured by a picador’s lance and three banderilleros’ pairs of spiked sticks. Then, after a maximum of 15 minutes of caping, killing it with one or more sabre-thrusts.

And all for reasons of human entertainment.

The second mark against the activity – as if it needed one – is that witnessing this hardens the human spirit to suffering in general beyond the bullfight. This is a psychological reason to legislate against the bullfight. Like all psychology, it is underpinned by a deeper ethical problem: that of the virtue of the audience for wanting to watch a corrida in the first place. Along parallel lines runs the progressive argument that in 21st century Europe such a throwback to our Roman gladiatorial past has no place. This argument is based on the very idea of what it is to be ‘modern’; in a word, the corrida is uncivilized.

There are also the various specific abuses that go with a big money industry in which key players have a great deal to lose (for the matadors, most notably their lives). So, as with horseracing, there are accusations of doping. There is also the infamous ‘shaving’ of bull’s horns which prevents them from using them accurately.

Some of these criticisms have clear counters. In terms of animal welfare, the fighting bull lives four to six years whereas the meat cow lives one to two. What it is more, it doesn’t just live in the sense of existing, it lives a full and natural life. Those years are spent free roaming in the dehesa, the lightly wooded natural pastureland which is the residue of the ancient forests of Spain. It is a rural idyll, although with the modern additions of full veterinary care and an absence of predators big enough to threaten evolution’s answer to a main battle tank.

I am not claiming the reasons for this are pure: the bull must grow its formidable muscle and learn to use its horns in dominance fights with its herd-brothers – it is ranched from horseback and has not really encountered a man on the ground until it enters the ring. All this is so that when it enters that ring, it looks like this.

Rather than this.

Even though both came from something more like this

By contrast, according to the brilliant book by Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals, 78.2 per cent of beef cows in US are raised on factory farms. The UK is better, but the numbers are still significant.

And as for the humane death one might hope was the sole upside of factory farming, here is Safran Foer’s analysis of the US abattoir system which kills 34.4 million cattle a year:

Let’s say what we mean: animals are bled, skinned and dismembered while conscious. It happens all the time, and the industry and the government know it. Several plants cited for bleeding or skinning or dismembering live animals have defended their actions as common in the industry and asked, perhaps rightly, why they were being singled out.

(The photo above and the ones below are from another World Press Photo prize-winner, this time 2010, Tommaso Ausili.)

The reason for the horrifying cruelty is simple: this is an industrialized process with tight deadlines and even tighter profit margins. So, although the bolt gun which shoots a metal rod into the animal’s brain is meant to kill it outright, “sometimes the bolt only dazes the animal, which either remains conscious or wakes up as it is being ‘processed’.” Processing involves the animal being hoisted it into the air by a chain around a leg so its throat can be cut.

As one slaughterhouse worker put it, sometimes “they’d be blinking and stretching their necks from side to side, looking around, really frantic.” From here, the head is skinned and the legs below the knee are removed. Some are still awake at this point, as the interviewee continued: “As far as the ones that come back to life. . . the cattle just go wild, kicking in every direction”.

It is worth noting that the reason for this horror is entertainment, pure and simple: it is so that someone who ‘fancies a burger’ can have one. It is certainly not for any nutritional reason, in fact, given the obesity crisis in the western world, it has a negative nuritional value. And that is before we have even brought up the subject of leather as a clothing material… (To say nothing of the environmental costs of intensive cattle farming in terms of both the land itself and climate change. Fighting bull-breeding is the most extensive form of pastoral farming in the Western world.)

The biggest contrast with the bullfight here, other than its relative lack of injurious savagery, is that fighting adrenalises the animal, and, given that this particular breed has been selected for generations for its fighting ability, there is a good reason to believe that this actually reduces suffering in terms of pain. To quote Professor Bateson, the former head of Animal Behaviour at Cambridge University:

Sports and battlefield injuries are often not felt until the game or the battle is over, when they may cause intense pain. (Ref.3)

By which stage the animal is, of course, already dead. What is more, by replacing terror with rage by allowing an inbred fighting instinct to be both aroused and maintained, psychological suffering is reduced as well. For whilst any extreme emotional state will actually remove pain, as the American animal scientist Dr Temple Grandin has pointed out time and time again to the meat industry, fear is a form of suffering just as much as pain is. (Ref.4)

Anger may not be a pleasant emotional state, but one would be hard put to call it suffering. Raging against the dying of the light is an infinitely preferable alternative than going gently, or dangling upside down with your face peeled off.

A brief aside on the landscape in which the bulls live. Here is how it is described by a 2002 European Commission environmental study on Mediterranean ecosystems:

Dehesas are typical ecosystems in western and south western parts of the Iberian Peninsula. They result from ancient methods of exploiting the landscape, which are well adapted to Mediterranean ecological conditions. A very important characteristic of dehesas is their high ecological value, with a combination of nature conservation with natural resource exploitation. Simultaneously, dehesas give shelter to a great diversity of wildlife species (some endangered and extinct in many other parts of Spain), which are preserved in these areas of human intervention. (Ref.5)

The harsh economic truth being that if the bullfight is banned, the farmers will have no choice but to convert their land to normal agricultural use or sell it to those who will. According to the study, bullfighting ranches make up half a million hectares – one and a quarter million acres – of dehesa, a fifth of the total in Spain. And those who say that this need not happen are quite disingenuously ignoring that the Spanish government was debating selling off its dehesa even before the economic crisis hit its present depth. Who in that near bankrupt nation is going buy this land, designated for agricultural use (rustico), and maintain it as a nature reserve?

As for horn-shaving and doping, these are serious issues which the authorities have tried to stamp out, but I am sure it does still occur. The fact that doping a bull may further reduce whatever pain or distress it feels, and that shaving its horns is not only painless – if you shave to the quick it bleeds – but the greatest matador Manolete was killed by a bull which later turned out to have shaved-horns, don’t really mitigate it.

So, that is my list of rights and wrongs about bullfighting. Now, I leave it to you to make up your mind whether you can bear to watch one, and then watch it. If you can’t, fine. However, remember that as the stereotypical British family sits down together at the traditional time of the bullfight – 5pm on the Sunday – with their bellies filled with roast beef to watch David Attenborough narrate as a lion eviscerates yet another buffalo  – when they call their Spanish cousins barbaric they are at best guilty of hypocrisy, and at worst xenophobia. As a Brit, born and bred, I know where I stand as this picture of me shows -

– not without second thoughts, not without regrets, but also not without justification. As I say at the end of my book,

And in that ring are all the tragic and brutal truths of the world unadorned. It is for that reason above all that you cannot ban the bullfight, because it is already contained in the very facts of life itself. All you can do is turn away. And persuade others to do so as well.

Into the Arena is available at all major bookshops or from Amazon UK by clicking here.

P.S. The matador Padilla was nearly killed last year. You can read about his return to the ring – with one eye – on this blog here. You can read about my dispute in The Times Literary Supplement with the animal rights philosopher Professor Mark Rowlands over my view of bullfighting at the website of Into The Arena here.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

References:

1. E.g. Bekoff, M, Jamieson, D. (2002), Readings in Animal Cognition. MIT Press, MA.

2. Estimated from standard veterinary equation, see e.g. ‘Guidelines for the Welfare of Livestock from which Blood is Harvested for Commercial and Research Purposes,’ published by the Animal Welfare Advisory Committee of the New Zealand Ministry of Agriculture.

3. Safran Foer, J. (2009) Eating Animals, Little, Brown & Co. New York.

4. Bateson, P (1991) ‘Assessment of Pain in Animals’, Animal Behaviour, 42, 827-839

5. E.g. Grandin, T., Deesing, M. (2002), ‘Distress in Animals: Is it Fear, Pain or Physical Stress?’ Deilvered to the American Board of Veterinary Practitioners – Symposium on Pain, Stress, Distress and Fear: Emerging Concepts and Strategies in Veterinary Medicine.

6. Mazzoleni, S.. di Pasquale, G., Mulligan, M., di Martino, P., Rego, F. Eds., (2002), Recent Dynamics of the Mediterranean Vegetation and Landscape. John Wiley & Sons, London.

I was recently interviewed on the BBC and one of the people also interviewed, a representative from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), brought up an opinion poll “by Gallup” in 2006, which said that 72% of the people in Spain were “against bullfighting.”

Now, putting to one side the fact that PETA’s claim was not true – the poll actually said that 72% said they had “no interest” in bullfighting – this got me thinking. There was another “Gallup poll” I read about from four years before which said that 69% of Spanish people polled had no interest, and the most recent one, from 2008, gave the same figure.  These are big swings: millions of people.

So I looked into it further, and what I found was fascinating.

There have been ten such polls conduction by “Gallup” (the inverted commas are explained) since 1971, when 55% of those polled said they were interested in the bulls. This would seem to be a pretty steep decline, until one looks into how reliable these figures are.

For example, in 1987, the result was 48% of Spaniards were interested in the bulls, which is a pretty high figure given that Franco - who “enforced” bullfighting as the fiesta nacional  – had been dead for a dozen years and the country’s main public spectacle, like the UK’s, was actually football. It is certainly a great deal higher than the UK’s own national sport, cricket.

However, within five years – the interval between this poll and the next one – that figure had fallen to 31%. Within the election term of a goverment, six and a quarter million Spaniards had suddenly decided they had no interest in their fiesta brava. Now, that strikes me as a deeply dubious proposition, but I guess it is possible. What bad years of bulls those must have been. Either that, or seventeen per cent of the country underwent a quite amazing Damascene conversion on the issue of animal welfare.

This explanation becomes truly unbelievable, though, when you see that within twelve months of that poll, the figure was back up to 38%. It is simply inconceivable that almost three million people switched between” interested” and “uninterested” and then back again in that time frame. It is clear there must be a massive flaw in the polling strategy. So I contacted Gallup. Here is their reponse:

Gallup has not polled on the topic of bullfighting in Spain.

This seemed odd, so I sent them links to references to the 2006 poll in The Guardian, CNN and Time magazine, as well as a detailed break down of it from Wikipedia. This was the response from Gallup.

A local company that went bankrupt had the rights to use the Gallup name. They did that study—not Gallup as you know it. We have received other inquiries about this study, but I can assure you that the “Gallup Poll” did not do it.

Which just goes to show that Mark Twain was right: there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Next week I will be questioning how the League Against Cruel Sports can say on their website that the entire bullfighting industry in Spain only employs 400 people full-time, year-round. Which would mean that the 1,350 fighting bull breeding ranches registered with the Ministry of the Interior and listed on their website are, quite literally, farming themselves…

P.S. A number of anti-bullfighting groups have been trying to post the results of their own polls in the comments section, which I have about as much interest in publishing as I do the views of the bullfighting fan who claims to be able to prove that the bulls actively want to die.

However, I will publish the result of the most recent poll, despite my view polls aren’t worth the paper they are printed on. This was comissioned by El Pais, The Guardian of Spanish newspapers, and carried out by Metroscopia immediately after the bullfighting ban was voted through – but not yet carried out – in Barcelona in 2010.

The result is simple: 57% of people across Spain were against the ban of bullfighting in Catalonia, even though 60% of those polled said they did not like bullfighting.

37% of Spaniards said they were fans of bullfighting. That oh so famous 72% having now apparently dropped to 63% in 4 years.

Damned lies indeed.

Here’s one statistic that is true, and I know because I did the research myself: 533 professional bullfighters have died in the ring since 1700. See my blog post here for details.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Con agradecimiento a Juan Medina por mostrarme algunos de estos problemas numéricos en su excelente blog aquí.

After a remarkable 2012, I want to wish everyone a happy and prosperous 2013.

I will be back and forth to Spain throughout the year, back in the ring puerta cerada, running with los toros in the streets of Pamplona, Cuéllar and elsewhere, I was even contemplating taking my license as a matador de novillos sin picadores.

And I will be working in other ways with the three toreros who have been kind enough to open their doors to me, José Marí Manzanares, Juan José Padilla and Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez, and the three cities who have opened their gates, Sevilla, Pamplona and Cuéllar.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

El Juli, José Marí Manzanares, Curro Vázquez and, behind, the empresario Simon Casas, yesterday in the Congress. (Photo: Luis Sevillano/El País)

Yesterday, the lower chamber of the Spanish parliament voted on the matter brought before them by 590,000 signatures on a petition to make Los Toros Bien de Interés Cultural, protected cultural interest. Given that the vote was a landslide, 180 votes against 40, with the 107 socialist congressmen abstaining, it seems a given that the senate will nod it through, passing it into law, and, among other things, federally overturning the vastly, and distortingly, over-reported regional ban on corridas de toros, novilladas and rejoneo in the autonomous community of Catalonia which came into effect in 2011.

All I can say in this brief post, is that this is yet another step forward for animal welfare in Europe. And if you want to know why, read the post on this blog – you can find it on the list of posts on the right – about how bullfighting is not a moral wrong.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison