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.

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.

I never took pleasure in seeing a bull die. Relief, but certainly not pleasure.

Acting requires focus, too, but acting doesn't, you might say, demand focus. When you're in the ring you don't even have to think about focus because the danger is so imminent. Imminent. You train and you prepare and then the adrenaline kicks in and drives you into focusing intensely. You'd better focus, right? Or else you'll make your exit on a stretcher.

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.

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.

Cooking certainly has some of the elements of an art form.