In less than a month, my wife and I will be heading to Spain. We'll tour the country for a week and then - assuming the U.S. isn't bombing anything nearby - we'll leave on a Mediterranean cruise.

We booked the trip weeks ago. Since then we've read books, studied maps and spent hours on the Internet figuring out exactly what we'd like to do with our limited time and measly dollars.

Because my wife has never been to Spain, she wants to soak up the culture by visiting churches, museums, castles and art galleries, which requires the packing of a different pair of shoes for each.

Not me. I'm eating a short ton of seafood paella, sleeping it off on a beach, and then hitchhiking to Zaragoza. I lived there when I was a kid. In a way I'm just going home.

Actually, if you haven't guessed by now, we will almost certainly be visiting some churches and castles and galleries, and then taking a nice train to Aragon.

One thing we definitely won't be seeing is a bullfight. I saw them as a kid. I'm not interested in watching a large slobbering, thick-witted creature tormented to death - unless it's Larry Erdmann.

Please don't send me e-mails about the pageantry and the drama and the tradition of the bullring. A bullfight is nothing more than the slowest and showiest way to kill a large animal.

Don't go thinking I'm a friend of bulls either. The only thing I like about bovines in general is their taste. The fact is that I'm not on either side. I'm on the side of the fight.

I'd go to a bullfight if it were even remotely fair. It would be worth every penny (.000001 Euros) of the admission were there at least a 50 percent chance the matador would get his prostate checked by a yard of horn.

I felt this way even as a kid. Watching bullfights, I wondered what kind of a person would climb into a ring wearing his pajamas and a shoe for a hat, and proceed to pick a fight with an animal the size of a backhoe.

I was young but instinctively knew the answer: a person the gene pool wouldn't miss.

But these are rigged fights and the bull almost always loses. Where's the sport in that? It would make better sense were they to substitute the poor bull for a creature far more deserving of the treatment, like, oh, say, a televangelist or Donald Trump.

This is, of course, an opinion I plan to keep entirely to myself while vacationing in Spain. I don't want to give offense to Spaniards. They might decide I'm right and institute a new national blood sport of tourist fighting.

rkirby@sltrib.com