Bullfighting is another cruel spectacle of human dominance. The term "bullfighting" is a manipulative misnomer. There is no competition between a sword of a nimble matador ("killer" in Spanish) and a confused, maimed, psychologically tormented and physically debilitated bull.
The bull never has a chance to defend himself, much less to survive.
Supporters justify the act by calling it a tradition. They are right.
It is a tradition. A tradition of cruelty.

Every year about 10,000 bulls are tortured during bullfighting in Spain alone and in official bullfights only. The actual number is about 3 times higher.

These so called, “fighting bulls” are an artificially developed, more aggressive breed, which have been created using selective breeding. These bulls are designed to be more “entertaining” for the enslaving mob.
Before the bulls get to the bullring they are being branded with red-hot irons and metallic tags are pierced through their ears.
In order to weaken the bulls, they are fed only straw. This deficiency of necessary dietary components leads to muscular deficiency. This is only one of the ways to turn the bull into an even more "unworthy" opponent of this cruel and unfair "fight".

To provoke the bulls’ aggression, they are regularly being chased and hassled in the farm where they are held. Heavy weights are hung around the bulls’ necks for weeks before the fight in order to weaken them. The bulls suffer beatings to the kidneys.
They spike the bull at the top end of his tail, which produces a very painful and distressing sensation causing him to lose balance and fall backwards.

One common practice is to "shave" the bulls’ horns by sawing off a few inches.
Bull’s horns, like cat’s whisker, help the animals navigate, so a sudden change impairs the bull’s coordination. “Shaving” is illegal, so the horns are sometimes inspected by a veterinarian after a fight. But in 1997, the Confederation of Bullfighting Professionals, including Spain’s 230 matadors, went on strike in opposition to these veterinary inspections. The strikers claimed veterinarians were "not experienced enough" to inspect the bulls.

The bulls may also be given a cocktail of drugs such as stimulates to produce more aggression in the ring and uppers, or downers to cause them confusion and disorientation.
And as if all this is not enough, petroleum jelly is rubbed into their eyes to blur their vision before the fight.

All this pain and suffering is inflicted upon every bull before he is even taken to the arena. The bull is confined in a box for hours so that he cannot see daylight.
He can hardly move. When the doors of the bullring open and the bull sees freedom and light, he rushes forward. Only to find himself in the bullring bewildered, drugged, surrounded by malignant merciless crowd of people who are calling out for his death and cheering for the torturers.

In the arena, a group of humans in fancy dress begin to attack him. They exhaust and frustrate him by causing him to run in circles and tricking him until he falls. When the bull is tired and out of breath, he is approached by picadors. Picadors are men on blindfolded horses, who use lances to stab the bull's in their back and neck muscles.
This impairs the bull's ability to lift his head. They twist and spin the lances to ensure a significant amount of blood loss.

Horses used in bullfighting are drugged and blindfolded. They often have wet newspaper stuffed in their ears to impair their hearing, and their vocal cords are usually cut so that their cries do not "distract" the crowd. A horse may be heavily padded in the ring, but the bull can still throw the horse to the ground and gore him.

"The crowd cheers as a picador riding a blindfolded horse pokes a long sharp-tipped lance into the bull, twisting and turning his weapon so that muscle fibers are shredded and blood streams down the animal's back. This is not a ferocious bull. The animal frantically looks right and then left for means to escape.
There are none. He has no chance.
Colorfully dressed banderilleros run out holding sharp, multicolored ribboned skewers, one in each hand, and forcefully plunge them deep into the animal's flesh.
Ole! That's the sound of an excited crowd responding to a matador's sword thrusting deep between the shoulder blades of an exhausted bull.
Ole! That's the roar of the bloodthirsty crowd as the bull collapses upon himself after the sword pierces his heart, gallons of blood spurting and gurgling out of his nose and mouth.
Ole! The crowd screams with pleasure as a co-conspirator slice through the spinal cord and the animal begins its deathly shudder.
Ole! One last roar as the honored assassin slices off first one ear, then another.

People showed no concern or pity for the animals. At one point, a bull that had been stabbed twice in the back began to breakdown from the massive blood loss. The crowd joined together in a slow handclap as his legs trembled and his body shook for a full 30 seconds. The clapping turned to cheers as the bull collapsed to the ground in agony."

The bull's torment has not ended yet. After the pikes come the banderillas, which are harpoons decorated with colored bunting. The harpoons are being stubbed into the bull’s back. With every move the wounds get bigger and bigger.

The bull is exhausted. Now the matador enters the ring and prances around waving his cape "preparing the animal for its supreme fate". For the bull, there is no escape. He might be lucky and be killed straight away with one thrust of the meter-long sword to his heart… Or it might take several strikes, and the bull may die from perforated lungs. The terrified, bleeding bull collapses. He is not dead yet. No, this is not the end of his torment.

Parts of the bull are cut off with a knife while he is still conscious but paralyzed and breathing his last breaths, prone, helpless, suffering.
The gory trophies are one or both ears, maybe the tail.

The bull is dragged out of the ring by what is left of his horns, pulled by the horses. The bull is still alive. His skin is torn by the rough ground. He can feel everything.

In Mexico, bullfighting has an added feature, Novillada, or baby bullfighting. Baby bulls, no more than a few weeks old, are brought into a small arena where they are stabbed to death by spectators, many of whom are children. These bloodbaths end, with spectators hacking off the ears and tail of the, often fully conscious, little calves lying in their own blood.

Most bullrings are owned by the state, which subsidizes the fights. There are conferences, exhibitions and plenty of merchandize all on the theme of bullfighting. There are even several bullfighting schools in Spain, financially supported by donations and institutional funds. These schools practically teach humans how to torture animals, how to become crueler. Humans established Torture Education Institutions!

We wish we could only say regarding the recent Catalan bullfights ban that it is a small scale and regional change, in a very small and disputable industry and that came only in 2012 and after decades of intensive international campaigns, and that says something very pessimistic about the chances of a real change in our speciesist society. But we can’t even say that since even this relatively small ban which probably won’t affect the total number of tortured bulls per year, wasn’t made out of mercy for the bulls but for political reasons of the Catalans who aspire to segregate from the rest of Spain. If moral reasons were on the minds of the decision makers, the rest of the bulls and other animals torturing spectacles, which still happen in Catalonia, would have been stopped as well, and they weren’t even discussed.

Dozens of animal rights organizations campaigning for decades, thousands of demonstrations in front of Spain embassies, tens of thousands of letters to Spain governments, decades of a boycott on Spain by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world.
But nothing helps. Even the recent Catalan ban is small, regional and was made for political reasons and not moral ones.

If you can’t convince one country to stop one exploitation industry, how can you expect to convince all the countries to stop all of them?