You may have heard that the Barcelona city council has declared Barcelona an official anti-bullfighting city, whatever that is. It's non-binding, and it's highly ironic that a city with TWO large bullrings (one is in disuse--supposedly it's going to be converted into a shopping mall--; the other is one of Spain's four or five most important, with a regular program on which all the major bullfighters appear) should get all persnickety now.

MY PERSONAL FEELINGS: I don't like bullfighting at all. I've seen two bullfights, one in Mexico City and the other in Madrid, and I know whereof I speak. I never watch bullfighting on TV. Never. Hey, I'm a vegetarian. I don't eat mammals or birds or fish--well, fish at restaurants, ok, but rarely. Meat, never. This is not something new; I've been doing it for the last twenty-five years.

ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST:

It's cruel to animals. It sure is. The bull gets stuck full of holes by the picador and by the bandarilleros before getting run to exhaustion and then butchered by the matador in what is almost never a clean kill. It's an ugly sight.

It's an old cultural tradition. Yep, that's certainly true. Spectacles with bulls go back to at the very least the Mycenaeans in the Mediterranean, and were practiced in Greece and Rome. Bullfighting as we know it has not changed a great deal since the 17th century, I don't think. Bullfighting is also central to the culture of most parts of Spain; major centers include Pamplona, Bilbao, Valencia, Burgos, Toledo, and Madrid, as well as Sevilla, Cordoba, and Malaga. And Barcelona.

Bullfighting's not Catalan. Rotundly false. There are gazillions of historical records showing that bullfights have been held in the Spanish style in Barcelona since as long as they have been anywhere else in Spain. A bad bullfight, famously, was the spark for the Barcelona riots on St. Jaume's Day in 1835; this was a serious urban rebellion that was brutally crushed. There are two large bullrings in Barcelona, and both are constructed in what's called here the modernista style; they date from the turn of the last century. This was before the influx of Aragonese and Valencian and Murcian immigrants in the teens and twenties that hard-shell Catalans accuse of being responsible for the alleged introduction of bullfighting here. Also, bullfighting has a strong local presence in some smaller katalanitsch towns in Catalonia, like Olot, Cardona, and several of the towns on the lower Ebro river.

The bulls have a good life and they wouldn't exist anyway if not for bullfighting. True. They live in nice open fields for three years before getting turned into pot roast. And the particular breed of bulls used for corridas de toros is bred specifically for bullfights and has no other use. Also, they eat the bull, or at least they did before the mad cow disease thing. I don't know if they've permitted the sale of toro de lidia again or not, but normally you could go down to the market and buy some steaks from the bulls that had been fought in the local corrida. You could argue that the cattle bred for slaughter are killed just as ruthlessly as bulls killed in bullrings, and you could argue that there's no moral difference because we eat them all. It's hypocritical to argue that we shouldn't make a spectacle out of death, because our society constantly does that; people all over the world get pleasure from hunting and fishing, and that's killing for fun just as much as bullfighting is. At least in a bullfight the bull has about a 50,000-1 chance or so. In the slaughterhouse that chance is zero. And as for fox-hunters who oppose bullfights, that's even worse than hypocritical. Fortunately, I believe there are few of these people.

It's Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism. Well, yeah, a lot of the ignorant criticism of bullfighting you see does come from England, and specifically from the tabloid press. But that conclusion is a little hysterical. Incredibly, that's what one of the PP guys in the Barcelona city council said in response to the anti-toros measure.

We're gonna look like real jerks at the Forum of Cultures. Heh, heh, heh. Snicker, snicker, guffaw, guffaw. In about a month the Big Politically Correct Multiculti-Katalanitsch Fiesta Excuse-To-Put-Tax-Money-Into-The-Hands-Of-Well-Connected-Real-Estate-Developers, officially called the Forum of Cultures and already touted as Barcelona's answer to the Millenium Dome, is going to kick off, and supposedly peace-and-love PC fruitcakes and nutballs are going to congregate here, and meanwhile down at the Monumental Jesulin de Ubrique and Fran Rivera are going to pincushion some large, angry cattle to the cheers of thousands of real spectators from Barcelona and Spain--despite many claims, tourists do not make up the majority of bullfight spectators except maybe at third-class Costa Brava resorts like Lloret. That is going to look just great. I think I'll get a job as a barker for the bullfight empresarios, touting and shilling trilingually among the crowds of foreigners milling about the front gate of the Forum. That is, assuming there are any foreigners.

CONCLUSION: Sorry, folks. If you eat meat and wear leather, then you've got no more right than anyone else to oppose bullfighting. You, too, benefit from cruelty to animals, and more specifically, to mammals. I don't oppose bullfighting. I will not patronize it ever again. I do not watch it on TV. I would probably avoid buying a product advertised by a bullfighter. I do not buy the scandal magazines that often capitalize on the private lives of bullfighters. But if people want to watch it, and many Spaniards do, you can't outlaw it. The best you can do is regulate it and make sure it's done under certain recognized procedures.