An animal is made to suffer in public for the sake of a performance

The argument

Proponents of a ban begin from what the event actually consists of. A bull is brought into an enclosed ring it cannot leave, is wounded in stages by men on foot and on horseback, and is killed at the end by a sword thrust. The wounding is not incidental to the spectacle but its structure: the stages of the fight are organised around weakening the animal until the final act can be performed at all. Supporters of a ban argue that if the same sequence were carried out on an animal anywhere else, it would fall foul of the cruelty laws most countries already have, and that the only feature distinguishing it is that it is done in a ring before a paying audience. The argument then turns on what the suffering is for. Advocates of a ban accept that societies permit animals to be killed for food, controlled when their numbers threaten crops or habitats, and used in research under licence. Each of those permissions, they argue, rests on a purpose that could not be served without the harm. Entertainment is not such a purpose: nothing is lost by its absence except the pleasure of the audience, and a pleasure taken in watching an animal be wounded is the weakest possible ground for setting aside a prohibition that applies everywhere else. Proponents add that this is why reform of the practice does not meet the objection. Shortening the event, restricting the weapons or improving the handling of the animal beforehand would each leave the central feature in place, since what is objected to is the public killing itself rather than the conditions surrounding it. On this reasoning bullfighting should be prohibited rather than regulated.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Defenders reply that the comparison with ordinary cruelty cases ignores how these animals live before the event, since fighting bulls are reared on open pasture for years where cattle raised for meat are not. They add that a ban would end the breed's reason for existing rather than improve its welfare, and that the entertainment framing misdescribes what participants and audiences take the event to be, which is a formal confrontation with its own rules, music and standards of conduct rather than an amusement.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The description is accurate and it does more than describe. That the wounding is the structure of the event rather than incidental to it is the point at issue between the two positions, and stating it as a plain feature assumes what defenders of the practice deny. [Rejecting P2] That the same treatment elsewhere would fall foul of cruelty law shows the practice is exempted, not that the exemption is unjustified. Cruelty statutes generally carry exemptions for slaughter, pest control, hunting and research, so standing as an exception is the ordinary condition of lawful harm to animals. [Rejecting P3] The purpose test is stated more strongly than the premise's own examples will bear. Societies permit harm to animals for purposes that could be served otherwise, the eating of meat where other food is available among them, so the standard as formulated would prohibit much that the argument elsewhere accepts.