You kill, it's part of your world as a bullfighter, it's a natural part of your world, and then you leave that world and it becomes unnatural.

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

A bull will try to outwit you. It will stop and hook when the last thing you expect from it is that it will stop and hook.

One of the things I've been thinking about lately is how the change in values makes the survival of the old values, where they do survive, all the more striking. There are pockets of the old bullfighting world that exist more or less intact, both in Spain and elsewhere.

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.

It's almost impossible to imagine bullfighting abolished from Spain entirely. Values do change, though.

You kill, it's part of your world as a bullfighter, it's a natural part of your world, and then you leave that world and it becomes unnatural.