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BULLS

Spectator gored to death during Spain’s oldest bull running fiesta

A man died after being gored by a bull on Thursday during a festival in Cuéllar.

Published: 30 August 2019 09:26 CEST
Spectator gored to death during Spain's oldest bull running fiesta
File photo of a bull during a running of the bulls festival: AFP

The incident occurred during a bull run in the town of Cuéllar, 155 kilometres (96 miles) north of Madrid. 

The 61-year-old, named as Jesús Ángel Arévalo, received “several deadly horn blows” in the chest and neck, but nothing could be done to save him, town mayor Carlos Fraile told local media.    

The man was merely a spectator at the festival and did not run in front of the animal when the bulls were released, but was watching from behind a wall on the outskirts of the town, when the bull separated from the pack and turned behind the wall.

Spain is renowned for its bull runs which are held across the country in the summer months but the encierros at Cuéllar, a medieval town two hours north of Madrid in Castilla y Leon, the activity dates back 800 years.

Cuéllar's 5km bull runs begins outside the town when the bulls are herded towards the town through pine forests and sunflower fields by riders on horseback. 

Spectators gather at the outskirts of town to watch the approach and runners join the last 1.5km dash through the town's narrow cobbled streets in the fiesta that takes place each year at the end of August.

The most famous run takes place during the San Fermin festival in Pamplona in northern Spain, where thousands of people come from across to world to run at their own risk in front of bulls through the city's streets.

Eight people were gored and 35 were injured this year at the Pamplona festival, which was made famous worldwide by Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel “The Sun Also Rises”.  

At least 16 people have been killed in bull runs since records started in 1911, the last fatality was recorded in 2009. 

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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.

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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