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BULLFIGHTING

Thousands march in Spain to support bullfighting tradition

Thousands of Spaniards, including leading lights from the world of bullfighting, on Sunday joined a protest rally in favour of the traditional but controversial pastime.

Thousands march in Spain to support bullfighting tradition
Photo: AFP

The protesters marched through the streets of the eastern town of Valencia to protest at local authority bans applied in some parts of the country.

Famous names from the ritualistic 'sport' famously portrayed by Ernest Hemingway in his “Death in the Afternoon” novel attending the march were Enrique Ponce and Julian Lopez “El Juli” Escobar.

Both joined another famous fighter, Jose Antonio Morante Camacho, better known as Morante de la Puebla, at the gathering.

Participants held aloft banners proclaiming the practice as a key element of cultural expression.

“The bullfighting world is aware of the problem and maltreatment we are suffering at the hands of a part of the political class,” said Morante de la Puebla.

“We are here to say, this is our life, it's a tradition,” he bellowed.

Ponce meanwhile read a tract in defence of bullfighting, insisting the tradition has for centuries been an integral part of Spanish culture even if some refuse to accept it as such.

And he urged that 'toreros' be treated with equal respect as those persuing other 'artistic' activities.

The morning had seen a lower-key protest against bullfighting with some 20 semi-clad activists who had splattered themselves with red ink to symbolise the bulls' suffering demanding the practice be abolished.

Spain is split overall on the issue.

Six years ago the largely autonomous regional Catalan goverment banned 'corridas' or bullfighting in the region.

Some cities run by leftist administrations including Madrid and Valencia also recently cut subsidies for bullfighting.

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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.

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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