Praise the Lord and pass the biscuits. I’ve waited years for this outbreak of sanity. I hate bullfighting and all cruelty to animals so much that when a bull called ‘Little Bird’ got loose during a bullfight and broke into the stands and started goring his tormentors, I cheered for the bull. They killed him of course: he didn’t do what he was supposed to do and allow these psychopaths to torture him to death. How anyone who dares to call themselves human can watch an animal tortured to death and call it sport is beyond me and all of Spain should hang its head in shame that this medieval atrocity continues in the rest of Spain. Homage to Catalonia, indeed.

I was hoping for more discussion of Catalonia and its independence movement. There are many twists to this issue, one being that Catalonia is one of, if not the most wealthy regions in Spain. Its independence could well be the death knell of Spain, which is on its uppers as it is.

Of course, like many Empires, the Spaniards once ruled the world, but they tossed it away, sending their treasures to the Dutch and English traders in return for baubles and beads. Stuff in other words.

Sound familiar?

You are absolutely spot-on, gerard. Unfortunately, I would replace “They are all” with “Humans are mostly brutal and fundamentally insane.” I wish it weren’t true, but one need only look at how we treat children and dogs to see how broken we are.

And I’m not talking about outright abuse and neglect, I’m talking about regular folks. Let’s see, we send children off to be cared for by underpaid servants, then they get to go to prison which we call school. If they can’t sit still for hours and hours every day, then we drug them. (And now we’re handcuffing and tasering them.)

Dogs, which live for relationship, are left alone, left tied outdoors, expected to be quiet and obedient, and never conceived as independent beings with their own needs. They and children are expected to serve OUR needs, OUR emotional holes, take care of US. We have become so twisted and sick after millennia of so-called civilization that most of us don’t know what it’s like to be truly committed to one another, animals, the house and ground we live in/on, the Earth.

I am not optimistic about our future, but every time something decent happens, such as outlawing bullfighting, I feel a bit better.

I’m glad for this bit of mercy in the world.  I don’t regard it as any different from dog-fighting, cock-fighting or, for that matter, people-fighting, small (prize-fighting) or large (war).  They are all brutal and fundamentally insane.
  Talking about “the Art of War” and about bull-fighting as an “art” or a “dance” etc. is a way of trying to hide sadism, behind a Japanese fan.