Fruit of the latest news of the newspaper “El Mundo” which recounts how José Blanco and Mariano Rajoy coincided in the last bullfight in Pontevedra and others in various media of a different nature, I have decided to dedicate a few lines to this matter since it seems that the debate continues to feed.
The vote in Parliament recently on the ban on bullfighting has aroused worldwide interest, due to the importance of the bull in the brand Spain. Personally I understand the arguments for why it was banned, but I still see some hypocrisy or double standards in the debate.
I am not from bulls. I have never gone to a bullfight. I have listened to the debate with the opinions of intellectuals and philosophers, issuing judgments and supporting one side or the other. I also believe that there is an “identity” issue in the debate. You already know what it means when you insist on denying a topic. Excusatio non petita, accusatio manifesta. But the debate must be different and it is not logical that a party for being Spanish is bullfighting and the Catalan supporters, for such anti-bullfighting. It is true that, in many areas, Catalans have been characterized by being more modern than the rest of the peoples of the peninsula, as well as setting trends. Perhaps the nationalist parties are not so concerned about causing a stir in Madrid and dare to vote for laws that do not sit well with certain areas of Spanish society – and some even with a certain Catalan phobia.
This is not my case, but on this matter I find the Parliament’s decision a bit hypocritical, as I said. In fact, the industrialization of the food sector seems to me much more cruel than any bullfight. Eating meat in a generalized way is already taken for granted. As a child I saw how a cow was killed and bled to death, and this made me understand the enormous sacrifice that one supposes to be able to eat meat. It certainly led me to limit my own consumption.
Today we are, as a society, increasingly scrupulous but cruel at the same time. It is curious that it was in a pig slaughterhouse in Catalonia where I found out that pigs are fully aware that they are going to be killed before they die. Remembering how they scream and scream, you can’t sleep at night. Don’t those animals suffer? Or see the film “We feed the world”: http://www.we-feed-the-world .at/index.htm, mass food chains are just wicked…
I would rather advocate for the reduction of the industrialization of the carnivore sector and be able to choose to eat meat from the cow raised near me. Or a simple law that forced restaurants to include a vegetarian dish on the menu; it would be much more effective and avant-garde to limit animal sacrifices (Restaurante La Roca [the restaurant next to my work], with a vegetarian and smoke-free offer – what a beautiful utopia!). As for the bulls, perhaps it could be used to visualize the death of an animal, and thus be aware of where the meat that we consume comes from as if they were cookies. I, at least, would rather be a bull than a pig in that slaughterhouse waiting for a shot to the head.