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BULLFIGHTING

Bull takes on village in savage Spanish festival

A huge fighting bull gored a press photographer on Tuesday while he was covering a medieval festival in which Spaniards armed with lances chased and slaughtered the animal.

Published: 17 September 2013 15:59 CEST

Bull takes on village in savage Spanish festival

A participant throws a spear at a bull during the Toro de la Vega' festival on Tuesday: the festival has been the focus of large protests by animal rights activists. Photo: Pedro Armestre/AFP

Young men in jeans or shorts and t-shirts chased the 580-kilogramme (1,280-pound) beast, named Vulcano, through the fortified town of Tordesillas in central Spain.

It was slaughtered after crossing a bridge into a meadow where it faced crowds of people, some on horseback and many carrying lances.

A total of 12 people were injured in the event, known as Toro de la Vega, a Red Cross spokesman said.

Click here to see The Local's gallery of Spain's craziest festivals.

Most people suffered cuts and bruises but two people had broken bones and one person was gored: photographer Pedro Armestre, 41, a freelancer who works regularly for news agency AFP and was covering the event for the agency.

The bull gored Armestre in the right thigh.

Armestre, who was conscious and speaking to AFP's Madrid office after the injury, was taken to a hospital in Valladolid for surgery.

The Red Cross official said Armestre's condition was serious but not life-threatening, describing the skewering as "long but not too deep, that is to say, it is not an excessively serious goring".

Hundreds of activists from the Party Against Bullfighting and Animal Cruelty (PACMA), protested in Madrid three days ahead of the event. Banners at the protest declared: "Torture is not culture" and "Stop Toro de la Vega".

Activists from the group delivered a petition to Spain's parliament, saying it contained more than 85,000 signatures opposing the Toro de la Vega.

Tordesillas' mayor Jose Antonio Gonzalez Poncela played down the protests, saying there were similar demonstrations at bullrings around Spain "so it is nothing more than that".

"There are always people in favour and people against in all aspects of life, not just for bullfighting," he told Spanish public radio RTVE.

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French MP abandons bid to ban bullfighting

The 577-seat National Assembly had looked set to vote on draft legislation that would have made the practice illegal.

But the MP behind the bill withdrew it after lawmakers filed more than 500 amendments, many of them designed to take up parliamentary time and obstruct the vote.

“I’m so sorry,” Aymeric Caron, a La France insoumise (LFI) MP and animal rights’ campaigner, told the national assembly as he announced the decision in raucous and bad-tempered scenes.

Though public opinion is firmly in favour of outlawing the practice, the bill had already been expected to be rejected by a majority of lawmakers who
are wary about stirring up the bullfighting heartlands in the south of the country.

“We need to go towards a conciliation, an exchange,” President Emmanuel Macron said on Wednesday, adding that he did not expect the draft law to pass. “From where I am sitting, this is not a current priority.”

His government has urged members of the ruling centrist coalition not to support the text from the opposition LFI, even though many members are known to personally favour it.

During a first debate of the parliament’s law commission last week, a majority voted against the proposal by Caron, who denounced the “barbarism” of a tradition that was imported from Spain in the 1850s.

“Caron has antagonised people instead of trying to smooth it over,” a lawmaker from Macron’s party told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The bill proposed modifying an existing law penalising animal cruelty to remove exemptions for bullfights that can be shown to be “uninterrupted local
traditions”.

These are granted in towns such as Bayonne and Mont-de-Marsan in south west France and along the Mediterranean coast including Arles, Beziers and Nîmes.

Around 1,000 bulls are killed each year in France, according to the Observatoire National des Cultures Taurines.

READ ALSO EXPLAINED: Could bullfighting finally be banned in France?

Many so-called “bull towns” depend on the shows for tourism and see the culture of bull-breeding and the spectacle of the fight as part of their way of life – idolised by artists from Ernest Hemingway to Pablo Picasso.

They organised demonstrations last Saturday, while animal rights protesters gathered in Paris – highlighting the north-south and rural-versus-Paris divide at the heart of the debate.

“Caron, in a very moralising tone, wants to explain to us, from Paris, what is good or bad in the south,” the mayor of Mont-de-Marsan, Charles Dayot, told AFP recently.

Other defenders of “la Corrida” in France view the focus on the sport as hypocritical when factory farms and industrial slaughter houses are overlooked.

“These animals die too and we don’t talk enough about it,” said Dalia Navarro, who formed the pro-bullfighting group Les Andalouses in southern Arles.

Modern society “has more and more difficulty in accepting seeing death. But la Corrida tackles death, which is often a taboo subject,” she told AFP.

Previous judicial attempts to outlaw bullfighting have repeatedly failed, with courts routinely rejecting lawsuits lodged by animal rights activists, most recently in July 2021 in Nîmes.

The debate in France about the ethics of killing animals for entertainment is echoed in other countries with bullfighting histories, including Spain and Portugal as well as Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela.

In June, a judge in Mexico City ordered an indefinite suspension of bullfighting in the capital’s historic bullring, the largest in the world.

The first bullfight took place in France in 1853 in Bayonne to honour Eugenie de Montijo, the Spanish wife of Napoleon III.

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