Why Catalonians banned bullfighting

Our family has a special interest in Catalonia, because my cousin has lived and worked there for nineteen years.  Just last month we were pleased to be visited by a young Catalonian girl, and we talked briefly about the events there.  The new ban on bullfighting is not simply a matter of several million people becoming animal lovers - it's also about establishing a national identity, as is explained in the Guardian this week:

Killing off bullfighting offers Catalans a lovely and easy revenge for various humiliations heaped on them by Madrid in recent times; it also fulfils their deep anxiety to be understood and appreciated throughout the world as a separate nation, a place with a different identity and a different sensibility from the rest of Spain. Most Catalans loathe bullfighting, they view it as part of a strange, dark, foreign, Iberian spirit which has sought to encroach upon the modern, European spirit to which they feel allegiance...

[Catalans] see Madrid not as different as much as dominating. They wonder why the first AVE (Spain's fast train), for example, was built to go from Madrid to Seville in 1992, but there is still no AVE from Barcelona to France, which is the direction Catalans want to go. They notice the gradual downgrading of Barcelona airport. They notice that, since Catalonia is one of the richest parts of Spain, their taxes are used to build up infrastructure elsewhere rather than in Catalonia. They cannot legislate on matters such as immigration, which affects them deeply. They feel discriminated against in many ways, both small and large...

The language, which Franco had banned the public use of, has now become, to a large extent, the normal first language. The street names in Barcelona, for example, are in Catalan only. There are radio and television stations in Catalan. Education is conducted through Catalan. The survival of the language has been helped by the fact that it is spoken by the middle classes in the towns and cities as a first language. Although Catalans are fiercely proud of their identity and their heritage, anyone who comes to live in Catalonia can more or less be included in the nation by learning the language...

One of the reasons why it has been easy to ban bullfighting is that tourists who come to Barcelona no longer want to see a bull being massacred. In a way, since the early 1990s a new sort of tourism in Spain has been invented by the Catalans. Tourists who come to Barcelona now don't go home with a bad sangria hangover, a fluency in roaring "olé!" and vicious sunburn. Instead, they visit the city's Gaudí buildings, they go to the Picasso museum and the Miro Foundation; they love the cool nightclubs and the wonderful restaurants. They walk the city and get to know its streets...

Unlike the Basques, they do not have a terrorist army, and there is a deep revulsion among Catalans for what Eta has done. They are pro-European and have also shown some flair in how their politicians deal with Madrid... It was these connections that caused them, then, to seek a new estatut, or constitutional arrangement with Spain, which would give them greater power over matters such as taxation, language policy and the creation of infrastructure... The court, in a long and detailed judgment earlier this month, ruled against the Catalans, and managed to add insult to injury by stating that there was only one nation in Spain, and that was the Spanish nation, and that Catalonia, as a historical entity, had only come into being as a result of the Spanish constitution of 1978...

This drove people crazy. When more than a million people marched through Barcelona on 10 July to protest against the court's decision, most of the flags being waved were Catalan independence flags; the decision has meant that even larger numbers of Catalans see complete independence from Spain as the only long-term solution.

More at the link.