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ANIMAL RIGHTS

EU votes to put end to bullfighting subsidies in animal rights victory

A majority in the European Union's parliament has voted to stop farming subsidies going towards Spain's bullfighting industry.

Published: 28 October 2015 17:35 CET
EU votes to put end to bullfighting subsidies in animal rights victory
Photo: AFP

In a vote on Wednesday MEPs approved an amendment to a budgetary report that the EU money “should not be used for the financing of lethal bullfighting activities”.

The largely symbolic vote not to spend farm subsidies that could profit the raising of cattle for bullfighting was passed 438-199 with 50 abstentions.

The EU's common farm policy does not specifically allocate money to bullfighting or raising fighting bulls, but general farming subsidies can end up being used for breeding bulls in Spain, Portugal and France.

But more than €125 million ($138m) in EU agricultural subsidies are estimated at being used to raise bulls for bullfights each year.

The vote was hailed as victory by animal rights groups.

 

“This is a hugely significant decision that could be the final nail in the coffin for Spain's already struggling bullfighting industry”, said Mimi Bekhechi, the director of Peta.

“Tormenting bulls for entertainment belongs to the Dark Ages, not the 21st century, and today we're one giant step closer to relegating this cruel pastime to the dustbin of history,” she said.

A statement from the animal rights group added: “As bullrings increasingly stand empty and fewer and fewer Spaniards show any interest in attending the violent events, government handouts are the only thing keeping this cruel 'tradition' alive.”

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CULTURE

French MP abandons bid to ban bullfighting

A bid to ban bullfighting in France has been abandoned, to the relief of lovers of the traditional blood sport and dismay for animal rights' activists.

Published: 25 November 2022 09:33 CET
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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