I was a bullfighter. I'd like to see the tradition continue. I'm sorry that Catalonia is robbing itself of a tradition that belongs in Catalonia.

Bullfighting is anachronistic - you enter into a bullring and you're leaving behind the values of the world outside the ring. I suppose that what I would want to acknowledge is that perhaps the tension, the crucial tension, isn't necessarily between the view of bullfighting as a tradition versus as an art form, but between the values inside the ring and the values outside the ring.

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.

I was a bullfighter. I'd like to see the tradition continue. I'm sorry that Catalonia is robbing itself of a tradition that belongs in Catalonia.

Bullfighting has some of the elements of a sport or contest, and in the United States most people think of it as a sport, an unfair sport. If you're in Spain or Mexico it's absolutely not a sport; it's not thought of as a sport and it's not written about as a sport. It has elements of public spectacle, but then so does, for example, the Super Bowl. It has elements of a deeply entrenched, deeply conservative tradition, a tradition that resists change, as you pointed out.

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

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.