Patrick,

Thank you for commenting. One of the things that is on my ever-growing to-do list is to address these exact issues, and I will do that. Seeing as how the question was asked, I will even bump this higher on the list. Basically the objections that reasonable people of Northern ancestry have (I do not feel a need to address the objections that come from radical vegetarians, animal rights activists, etc.) stem from a number of misconceptions about the bullfight.

Please note that these are brief notes typed at 1 am and will be elaborated later.

The first is the notion that bullfighting is a sport, which it is not. The bullfight is an art, and should be treated with the gravity of art, rather than the more entertainment-oriented understanding of sports. Art is a crucial human function, along with eating, learning, and so on.

The second misconception is the amount of suffering and the nature of the lives of lower animals. Now, I am here addressing the lethal bullfights of Spain. The bloodless bullfights use velcro and are analogous to a rodeo (even less aggressive towards the toro than roping, for instance). A bull is a large animal with very little thinking matter in the brain. In the ring a bull is supercharged with adrenalyne, and would only really feel pain if allowed to live much longer than the time between the first experience of the picadores and the final sword thrust. At most an adrenalyned bull will feel the various pics as an annoyance more than anything. The average urban dweller does not realize that a wild animal is doomed to die a pretty horrid death in nature, whether by starvation caused by the slowing down associated with old age, or by predation, which, depending on the predator, can be a fairly lengthy and awful death. Often a large mammal in the wild will survive the first couple of attacks by predators, only to finally succumb later in the winter. A fighting bull undergoes no such torments, rather is taken in his peak and is dispatched relatively quickly, providing art and food and clothing for humans.

The correlation between animal cruelty and human cruelty is real, however it really is a matter of the pointless torture of small animals. I know many bullfight aficionados, and can assure you that they are some of the most civilized, kindest, fairest and level-headed folks I know. The folks I have encountered who have gotten into fights at bullfights have been drunks who barely paid attention to the bullfights, but took the opportunity of a public gathering to act in the boorish fashion they would act in at a soccer game or other such event (fueled by hot sun and cheap lager).

Anyway, I will address these at some length, because I more than understand the misconceptions of Anglos in regards to this great art.

Erik,
I stumbled on this weblog by chance and have been reading it for only a week, so it’s possible that I might simply need direction to an earlier discussion. Since this is the space for sermons, I thought I’d bring up an thought that occurred to me while reading your post on the bullfight.
Now I’m not by any means a PETA supporter. I recognize that part of our nature is to use the animals on this earth to satisfy our needs and wants. However, I think that there exists a compelling reason to avoid causing unnecessary suffering to animals.
It’s not that animal souls correspond to human souls, or that their suffering is in itself terrible. However, we as human beings identify the pain of other animals with human pain, start at the yelp of an injured dog, recoil from the blood an animal sheds. At some level, then, we identify the pain we can inflict on unconscious agents with harm we can inflict on conscious ones. Cruelty to animals is connected in our minds with cruelty to humans, and thus to an ethics concerning the treatment of people.
I believe, for instance, that there is some likeness between the actions of striking a helpless pet cat and striking another person. Those actions are different in gravity, of course, but I think that they are similar in nature. As support, there is at least anecdotal evidence that sociopaths often begin by torturing animals. This leads me to infer that inflicting pain on an animal, without reason, is a sin.
I’m not explicitly condemning bullfighting, especially as I don’t know what a “bloodless bullfight” consists of. I wonder, though, what you think about my idea, and I’d like to know what Catholic theology might have to say on animal cruelty in general. Thanks.