BULLFIGHTS

Bullfights,  have recently been a very polemic subject in Spain  but  mainly in Catalonia. Finally after years of debating and discussing a resolution bullfights have been definitely forbidden. This has brought up a controversy because not everybody agree with the abolition.

I'm against bullfights because I don't like to see animals suffering only for our entertainment. The bull before going out to the ground in front of the torero suffers a lot and  goes through a period of a very high stress ( they're carried from one place to another in trucks  too small  ) and before dying they suffer a unbearable agony and I personally think that it's not necessary. Also I find unfair that the fight is always unequal and the torero has many advantages over the bull and the performance  always ends in the same way, this is dying the tortured animal.

On the other hand I must admit that being against bullfights is the easiest opinion and what everybody say and what you normally hear about this subject, but I try to think like people that like bullfights and I can even understand that for them is like an expression of art and a  tradition that represents their country and with which they feel identified. Among this  people there are many famous and inteligent people - like the american writer Ernest Hemingway to give some example - and also people which are defenders of animals. This is difficult to understant, isn't it?

I can  also understand that people from other countries like bullfights because is a different thing which they hadn't seen before and they like it like a typical  folklore of the country but maybe they don't really know that this happens very often and in lots of different places and they (like us) don't really see what happens behind all the bullfight show. 

I have friends from Madrid who like to see this kind of shows  and who are openly for the bullfights and sometimes when we meet somewhere out of Catalonia we go together to see correbous or similar kind of shows but in which the animal is not killed and in which the animal isn't theoretically hurt.

I don't really know if they should also abolish the correbous because I don't really know very much about it but I think that if the animal is not hurted and it's treated in a certain good conditions that should be OK. To be honest I always enjoy myself a lot in the correbous of La Puebla de Valverde in Teruel.

Finally I think that this decision has been really politicized and of course is one of the main reasons for the catalan nationalism. It's a way to say very clearly that the catalan people  are different from Spain which in my opinion and despite all the spanish friends I have is completely true.