Anger—a far more pleasurable emotion than terror

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 131.  

Not surprisingly, a visit to Spain—always with two or three of us together, since complicated Anglo-Spanish regulations forbade us to go on our own—was always an excitement. On two occasions we got no further than the nearest town, only just across the frontier, of La Linea. It was there that I saw my first bullfight. I approached the ring with trepidation, uncertain whether the experience might not be more than I could bear; to my surprise I found myself fascinated. Far from being cruel, the ceremony—there is no other word for it—seemed to me astonishingly humane. Of course the bull is killed, but so are hundreds of thousands of others every day; the question is how it meets its death. Almost all are herded—often panic-stricken—into a slaughterhouse. How infinitely more agreeable, I thought, if one were a bull, to be pampered throughout one’s youth and finally to be allowed to star in a magnificent drama, feeling only anger—a far more pleasurable emotion than terror—fighting a small group of much smaller and weaker people on whom one has a sporting chance of inflicting hideous wounds, and probably convinced of one’s ultimate victory until the last couple of minutes. All those other bulls should be so lucky.