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Parliament in the Spanish autonomous community of Catalonia voted July 28 to ban bullfighting. By the end of 2012 it will be gone, throughout the region.

Simpleminded US and UK news reports mimicked the Spanish rightist line in dismissing the vote as a sort of hot-headed regionalist-nationalist instant-response to a June constitutional-court ruling declining to define Catalonia as “a nation.” This tired spin, however, neglects to note that people in Catalonia have been working against bullfighting since 1909, that by 2004 polls showed that over 80% of all Catalans opposed it, that last week’s vote was necessitated by the presentation in November 2008 of a petition signed by 180,000 people re-questing an end to the “sport,” and that the final vote last week, at 68-55, was merely a reaffirmation of a similar vote on January 1, which came in at 67-59 (and which I wrote about here). At that time too, it was claimed, falsely, that Catalans were less concerned about bulls, then about spitting at Spain.

In truth, Catalonia has banned bullfighting because Eros is winning, and Thanatos is losing. Blood sports of all kinds are in steep decline all over the globe. As they should be.

For bullfighting begins like this:

It’s a highly orchestrated spectacle that begins with the breeding of bulls in preserved areas known as dehesas. They are raised by their mothers for the first year, then taken away, branded, and kept in single-sex groups. At around two years of age, bulls are tested for aggression toward horses, and are not allowed to encounter humans until they enter the bullring. During their stay, they are encouraged to use their horns in tests of strength and dominance over other bulls, which often ends in severe injuries and even death.

And ends like this:

[W]hen I came to write a book about Barcelona I thought I should go one summer Sunday and attend a bullfight. I remember I didn’t last long. I knew nothing about the rules and intricacies of the sport so all I saw were crowds of well-fed, well-dressed people baying for blood, roaring and cheering at the sight of pain and demanding more of it as picadors on horses and a matador in a brilliant costume ritually tormented and tortured a bull. What was interesting was how present and real the bull felt to me, how close the animal’s pain and puzzlement was. Indeed, the bull, simply because of what it was going through, the ferocious rage and hurt it exuded, filled the ring with its aura much more than any of its killers did. So when it lay down and died and got dragged away, the scene was genuinely dramatic and powerful.

The crowd loved it. It was a useful experience learning that people in groups, without laws or limits set to govern their appetites, will have a great time watching some dumb and beautiful animal, who has no chance of escape, being cut open with swords and other sharp instruments. They can call it sport, they can call it tradition, they can write about its beauty, its poetry and its intricacy, they can invoke Hemingway and write about skill and ritual; for me that day the bullfight was a celebration of cruelty, of mob rule, of death, of picking on something weaker than you and amusing yourself at its expense. It was vile and it was disturbing.

The Catalan moniker for the campaign against bullfighting—”Prou!” or “Enough”—quite appropriate.

As Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, more than a century-and-a-half ago, “one must be really quite blind or totally chloroformed not to recognize that the essential and principal thing in the animal and man is the same”; “it may be confidently asserted that he, who is cruel to living creatures, cannot be a good man.”