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BULLFIGHTING

Animal rights activist attacked by bull in France

Bullfighting has hit the French headlines once again as a man protesting the blood sport was attacked by a bull in an arena in southern France.

Published: 28 August 2017 09:19 CEST

Animal rights activist attacked by bull in France

AFP

An anti-bullfighting activist jumped into the arena in Carcassone, southern France, on Sunday and was

promptly attacked by one of the animals he wants to protect, local police said.

Two protesters, a man and a woman, were in the audience before managing to make their way into the main ring during the “novillada”, a series of fights involving young bulls.

One bull charged at the man who, according to police a received “a long but not deep” injury from its horns.

The protester, in his 30s, “was very lucky” that he was not properly gored and was only lightly injured, another source said.

READ ALSO:

Video: Vegan activist jumps into bullring to protest French festival

Video: Vegan activist jumps into bullring to protest French festival

Earlier in August a protester entered the ring with slogans written on his torso. AFP

He was taken to Carcassone hospital for examinations. His female companion was not injured and was arrested by police.

Earlier two other protesters had briefly hung a banner saying “Stop Bullfighting” from the ramparts of the medieval French town.

Bullfighting is banned in most of France but is allowed in some southern regions where it is protected as part of local traditions.

Defenders of bull fighting say it has huge cultural importance, embodying traditions dating back hundreds of years but its popularity has been steadily waning in recent years.

This isn't the first time bullfighting has hit the French headlines. Earlier in August, The Local reported on a vegan activist who jumped into the ring to protest the blood sport.

The protester revealed slogans written on his torso, which were directed at French President Emmanuel Macron.

'Macron, you can stop this,' read the writing on his chest, while he carried a sign saying 'No to the Corrida, save the bulls – Vegan strike group'.

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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