Should bullfighting be banned?

The bulls live better than the animals raised for meat, and a ban would end the breed

Question: Should bullfighting be banned?
Position‹2 of 2: No, bullfighting should not be banned
Argument‹2 of 2: The bulls live better than the animals raised for meat, and a ban would end the breed

The argument

Defenders argue that the welfare case against bullfighting is measured against the wrong baseline. Fighting bulls are reared for years on extensive pasture, in herds, with minimal handling and no confinement, which is a better life than that of most cattle raised for meat in intensive systems and a considerably longer one. A critic who condemns the afternoon in the ring while accepting the supermarket, defenders argue, is applying the welfare standard inconsistently: the animals the critic permits live worse, for less time, and in far greater numbers. The second strand of the argument concerns what abolition would leave behind. The fighting bull is a distinct breed maintained because the event exists, and the pasture it occupies is kept in that state for the same reason. Remove the practice and there is no economic basis for either. Defenders argue that a ban would not produce a population of fighting bulls living peacefully, but the end of the herds and the conversion of the land they graze, so the animals whose welfare is invoked would not exist at all. Defenders accept that this does not by itself answer the objection to how the animal dies. Their claim is narrower: that the comparison usually offered, between a bull in the ring and an animal left unharmed, is not the comparison available. The real choices are between this practice and intensive farming of the same species, and between these herds and no herds, and on both comparisons they argue the case for prohibition is much weaker than it first appears.

Premises

[P1]Fighting bulls are reared for years on open pasture and in herds, without the confinement that cattle raised for meat generally undergo. [P2] An objection that accepts intensive farming while condemning the ring applies the welfare standard inconsistently, since the animals it permits live worse and for less time. [P3] The breed and its pasture exist because the practice does, so a ban would end the herds rather than give their animals better lives. [C] Therefore bullfighting should not be banned.

Counter-arguments

Those who favour a ban reply that this changes the subject rather than answering it: that intensive farming is also cruel is an argument for reforming farming, not for licensing a death staged as a performance. They add that a good life does not license any manner of ending it, that the breed's dependence on the ring is a consequence of having bred it for the ring in the first place, and that no animal is owed existence on terms requiring it to be wounded and killed in public.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The comparison with intensive farming is accurate and selective. It measures the practice against the worst available alternative rather than against the welfare standard the objection actually invokes, and nothing follows from one practice being less bad than another. [Rejecting P2] Inconsistency in a critic is not a defence of the practice criticised. If the premise is right that intensive farming is worse, the conclusion available is that both should be reformed, not that this one should continue. [Rejecting P3] That a ban would end the breed assumes the breed's existence is itself a good to be weighed, which the premise does not argue. An animal that is never bred is not harmed by not existing, so the loss identified falls on the practice and the land rather than on any animal.