A practice a community has sustained for centuries is not for outsiders to abolish

The argument

Defenders of bullfighting begin from what a prohibition would actually end. The practice is not only an event but an inherited craft, with its own training, music, dress, vocabulary and calendar, and in the places that maintain it the fights are tied to particular festivals and to the civic year. A ban would therefore not simply withdraw an entertainment; it would close an institution around which part of the public life of those towns and regions is organised, and remove the livelihoods of breeders, handlers, musicians and performers along with it. The argument is not that age settles the question. Defenders accept that a sufficiently grave harm would override a tradition however old. What they argue is that the burden lies with those proposing abolition, and that it has not been discharged: the harm alleged is contested, the practice is lawful and regulated where it occurs, and the people most affected are not the ones pressing for its end. Pressure for a ban comes largely from cities and countries where the practice has no footing, and defenders argue that abolishing a regional institution on the votes of those outside it is a poor way for a plural society to settle a disagreement about how a minority may live. They add that prohibition is unlikely to achieve what its advocates want. A practice embedded in local identity and resented as an external imposition tends to survive in reduced and unsupervised forms, where none of the rules that currently govern the handling of the animals and the conduct of the fight would apply.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Those favouring a ban reply that longevity is no justification, since many practices now prohibited were equally old and equally local, and the same argument would have defended each of them in turn. They add that the appeal to community cannot settle the question, because the interests at stake include those of an animal that belongs to no community and can express no view, and that the prediction of an unsupervised underground practice is speculative and would in any case be an argument about enforcement rather than about whether the practice is permissible.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That the practice is a civic institution is granted, and institutions are not thereby protected from abolition. The premise establishes that a ban would cost something, which nobody disputes, rather than that the cost outweighs the harm alleged. [Rejecting P2] Where pressure for reform originates says nothing about whether the reform is justified, and most extensions of animal protection have come from outside the trades they regulate. The premise also treats the affected community as the relevant constituency when the question is whether a wrong is being done to something outside it. [Rejecting P3] That a ban would drive the practice into unsupervised forms is a prediction about enforcement offered without support, and it would be an argument about how to implement a prohibition rather than against having one.