Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

BABY

Olé? Bullfighter takes five-month-old baby into the ring

One of Spain's most celebrated bullfighters has come under fire after posting a photograph of himself fighting a bull while holding his infant daughter.

Published: 25 January 2016 15:24 CET
Olé? Bullfighter takes five-month-old baby into the ring
Photo: F.R. Paquirri / Instagram

Francisco “Fran” Rivera Ordóñez was in the hospital recovering from a serious goring when his wife gave birth to his daughter Carmen on August 19th.

On Sunday night he posted the photograph of a training session in which he clutched his baby daughter in his arms while practicing cape work with a bull calf.

“Carmen’s debut,” he wrote under the hashtag #orgullodesangre – meaning proud of blood in English.

“This is the fifth generation of bullfighters in our family. My grandfather used to bullfight with me and my father like this. My father also used to bullfight like this with me, and I have done it with my daughter Cayetana and now Carmen.”

Perhaps to illustrate that such a practice was in keeping with the family tradition, he posted a photograph of himself as a toddler atop the shoulders of his father.

 

Se repite la historia . Viva la mejor herencia , el sentimiento , la pureza , honor .

Una foto publicada por Francisco Rivera (@f.r.paquirri) el 24 de Ene de 2016 a la(s) 3:25 PST

Alongside messages of support from his fans, the torero received criticism for putting his daughter in unnecessary danger.

 

“I am anti-bullfgihting, but I think that Fran Rivera has crossed the line, just for putting his daughter in danger,” wrote one.

Rivera Ordóñez – known to Spaniards as “Fran” – is one of the nation’s most popular bullfighter and regularly appears in the pages of gossip magazines.

The housewives’ favourite has yet to get back into the ring for a professional fight since suffering a 25cm goring to the abdomen last summer.

Rivera Ordóñez’s father, the great bullfighter Paquirri, was gored to death during a bullfight in Pozoblanco, Córdoba, in 1984, aged just 36. 

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

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.

SHOW COMMENTS