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IVÁN FANDIÑO. PHOTO: BERTRAND LANGLOIS/AFP

BULLFIGHTING

Spanish bullfighter dies after being gored

Renowned Spanish bullfighter Iván Fandiño died in hospital on Saturday after being gored by a bull during a fight in southwestern France, a medical service source said.

Spanish bullfighter dies after being gored

The 36-year-old stumbled in the bullring after catching his feet in his cloak and was gored by the bull, whose horn punctured his lung.

The Basque fighter was performing at the Aire-sur-l'Adour bullfighting festival in France with fellow matadors Juan Del Alamo and Thomas Dufau.

Fandiño had won an earlier fight and cut off the bull's ear. He was photographed being carried away from the scene by his colleagues with blood seeping through his embroidered traditional costume.

Hospital authorities declined to comment but an independent medical source told AFP that Fandiño had suffered two heart attacks in the ambulance and died later in hospital in the nearby town of Mont-de-Marsan.


Fandiño is assisted after being impaled by the bull. Photo: Iroz Gaizka/AFP

The last time a bullfighter was killed while performing was in July 2016 when Spanish matador Victor Barrio, 29, was gored in the chest live on television. Just over a month earlier, 64-year-old Mexican fighter El Pana died after weeks in hospital, having also been gored in the chest.

Hailing from Ordonu close to the northern Spanish port city of Bilbao, Fandiño was well known for his daring, never hesitating to fight bulls that his colleagues had declined to take on. In Bilbao in 2012 he single-handedly took on six bulls put forward by six different breeders.

The centuries-old tradition of bullfighting remains popular in Spain, with around 1,800 shows a year before a total audience of some six million “aficionados” who see the sport as an art integral to Spanish culture.

But authorities are under increasing pressure to clamp down on the sport on animal rights grounds.

READ ALSO: 'Torture isn't culture': Thousands protest bullfighting in Madrid

Activists renewed calls for a total ban after Barrio's death, saying the tradition is both cruel and anachronistic, while a year ago the regional government of Castilla y Leon banned the killing of bulls at town festivals.

The nationalist regional government of the northern Catalonia region outlawed the practice in 2012, but Spain's Constitutional Court overturned the ban in October 2016.

 

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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