I don't believe that anyone connected with bullfighting would deny that what happens in the ring has an element of suffering and perhaps cruelty to it. So then it comes back to whether the suffering and cruelty is justified by its place in a tradition that has deep roots in the culture. At present, the view in Catalonia apparently is that it does not.

Animals are complicated and so is the animal-rights opposition. It's hard to read motives in animals, and hard to read motives in politics.

For me, bullfighting was this very spiritual engagement with power, with power and death. You're pitting yourself against a force that's stronger than you and then you're winning or losing. It's power, a power play.

I'm good at killing, I'm known as a bullfighter who kills well, and that I can kill well, that I can compete technically with my male peers in my technique in killing, gives me satisfaction.

In one era the majority puts its faith and sympathy with the bullfighter, in another with the bull.

In fighting a bull you're always aware of a paradox concerning your perceptions of the bull. On the one hand it's your perceptions of the bull that give you the upper hand. You read the bull, you learn to read the bull more and more accurately, and this reading of the bull is how you deploy your intelligence against the bull's intelligence. Your accuracy in reading the bull is a weapon, maybe your most important weapon, against all the bull's weapons. On the other hand, you're human, you have the human tendency to read into the bull things which may not actually be there.

Madrid reacting with the forceful protection of bullfighting as an art form is an example of the survival of the old values.