Roger Helmer MEP

I recently received a letter from (of all people) the Quaker Animal Welfare Unit, asking me to sign a parliamentary Written Declaration to ban bullfighting across the EU.  The letter was laced with all the usual clichés about “mediaeval barbarity”.  Of course I personally hate the idea an EU ban on anything, especially on the long-established and particular cultural practices of member-states.  But bull-fighting is a sensitive issue which raises a lot of questions.
 
Many sensible people in Britain who have no problem with country sports — angling, shooting, hunting, coursing — nevertheless jib at the Corrida (and I myself would draw the line at any injury to the horses involved).  Some people regard it simply as the torture of a dumb animal for the sadistic pleasure of the onlookers.  Isn’t it just like bear-baiting, they ask?  I don’t think it is.  It is an epic and historic struggle between man and beast; the skill and nerve of the matador in his Suit of Lights set against half a ton of pure bone and muscle and aggression.  Its roots go back at least to the Minoan civilisation of ancient Crete, to the Minotaur, and perhaps further.
 
And while the odds are stacked against the bull, he is at least in with a chance.  From time to time an unlucky Matador pays the price of his temerity with his life.  I certainly would not have the courage to go out there in the ring under the fierce Spanish sun to face an angry bull.
 
To illustrate my own feeling about bullfighting, let’s do what biologists and logicians love to call a “thought experiment”.  Imagine (if you can) that you could stop a bullfight in the middle; that you could go up to the bull and say “Look old lad.  Let me take you away from all this.  We’ll hand you over to the RSPCA to patch up your wounds and put you out to grass”.  Do you think the bull would say “Thank Heaven for that.  Get me out of here”?  Or would it say “Get to hell out of my way and let me get at that guy in the shiny suit”?  I suspect the latter.