Bullfighting

"At the first bullfight I ever went to I expected to be horrified and perhaps sickened by what I had been told would happen to the horses..... The killing of the horses in the ring was considered indefensible. I suppose from a modern moral point of view, that is, a Christian point of view, the whole bullfight is indefensible; there is certainly much cruelty, there is always danger, either sought or unlooked for, and there is always death."
Thus Ernest Hemingway opens his book "Death in the Afternoon", a book about how magnificent the "art" of bullfighting is.
In yesterday's Times Roger Lewis wrote an artcile with the title "I'm with Hemingway on the glory of bullfights", and a very fine piece it is too in its defence of what, to some of us who tend to sentimentalise the lives of animals, would consider indefensible. The ritual taunting of a wonderful angressive beast, the humiliation of it by weakening it to the point where it can no longer offer any defence; then the killing of it in, seemingly, such a barbarous way that surely no person with any feeling for animals would find acceptable.
Roger Lewis argues otherwise: that we sentimentalise animals; we wish to see them set free; we do not understand the history of the practice so cannot feel the ritualistic spiritual joy of the spectacle.
He goes further to argue that political correctness has taken over the Western world to such an extent that everything now "has to be cerebral, kept inside the head or on the computer screen like the violence in children's computer games. Politically correct persons want to obliterate or muzzle any evidence of the link between modern man and our urges to be bacchanalian. The bullfight is a massive threat to this."
I saw two bullfights years ago in Barcelona. The first had a famous matador (I think it may have been Antonio Ordonez); the second had no one of note. In the first the bull met an instant death when the sword was driven into his body; in the second the bull did not intsantly die and the man was booed. I don't know why I went the second time because the first horrified me so much. It was all so savage and bloody. Yet Lewis and Hemingway make good cases for its continuation not as a sport but as a ceremony, a sort of religious ceremony that elates rather than, as in my case, horrifies.
The best part of the spectacle is when the bull comes out into the ring: he's looking for someone to kill and, I have to say, I had a secret hope that he would be successful.
Now it's banned in Catalonia and I'm not sure that I approve: my instinct tells me one thing, Hemingway and Lewis another.