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BULLFIGHTING

Disaster prone one-eyed matador Juan Jose Padilla is gored again

Juan Jose Padilla knows what it is like to be gored by a bull.

Published: 14 March 2017 11:45 CET
Disaster prone one-eyed matador Juan Jose Padilla is gored again
Padilla's scarred eye socket was revealed. All Photos: AFP

In 2001 he almost died when he suffered a terrible goring to his throat by one of the legendary Miura bulls during a bullfight for San Fermin in Pamplona.

In May 2011 during a bullfight in Zaragoza he was tossed into the air by a bull which then thrust one of its horns into his head, piercing his skull and smashing up his face.

The incident shattered his jaw, left him deaf in one ear and forced the removal of his left eye. It also earned him the sobriquet El Pirata  – The Pirate – because of the eye-patch he donned when he returned to the bullfighting circuit five months later.

But more injuries followed.

A year later, he escaped serious injury when during the San Isidro festival in Madrid he was thrown into the air by a bull.

Then last October, revisiting the same bullring where he lost his eye, he was again gored in the same eye-socket after kneeling in front of a charging bull but amazingly escaped with little more than a concussion.

Watch video of the latest goring of Juan Jose Padilla on Sunday March 13th. Warning: graphic footage:

Then on Sunday evening during a bullfight to celebrate Las Fallas in Valencia, the disaster-prone torero once again found himself hooked on the horns of a half-tonne beast.

This time his eye patch was ripped from his face and his false eye popped out. The 43-year-old was gored through the thigh and again in the chest. But somehow, Padilla got up from this and killed the bull. He cut off an ear and staggered out of the ring, taking his trophy with him to hospital where doctors described both injuries as serious.

He suffered a punctured lung but is said to be recovering well.

In an interview from his hospital bed he said that he hoped to be back in the ring bullfighting within months.

“It’s more than lucky, it’s a miracle: Once again the hand of God was on me,” he told Spanish agency Efe.

“This was a bad one,” he admitted. “But I’ll be back”.

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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