The romantic imagery painted of Spanish bullfighting in Ernest Hemingway’s famous book The Sun Also Rises might soon be the stuff of history. Spain is edging ever closer to banning the sport.
[social_buttons]Thanks to a petition with 180,000 signatures, the regional government of Spain’s northeastern Catalonia area will soon debate banning the sport tied so closely to Spain’s image. Recent polling indicates that less than 30% of Spanish citizens like bullfighting, reflecting an overall trend that animals should be treated more humanely.
Of course, it is likely that opposition to banning the sport will be noisy, especially when it’s a multimillion dollar generating industry that’s subsidized by the Spanish government. Then there are also those fans to whom the sport is a profound tradition to be upheld, like a ten year old matador who set a Guiness World Record for killing six young bulls in one weekend despite protests. He later declared, “No one can stop me fighting… I was born a bullfighter and will die one.” At least this boy has been banned from bullfighting in Spain and now must practice his trade in Latin America.
The famous city of Barcelona has also made efforts to stop the torture that bulls face in the arena. In 2004 they passed a declaration that condemned bullfighting, but came short of banning it. 125,000 people still attended bullfights in Barcelona’s Monumental Bullring in 2008, showing the declaration alone was not entirely effective. In Spain’s Canary Islands, however, the sport has been successfully banned.
But now as the Catalonia region of Spain moves to ban the sport, we can only hope others will follow. About 250,000 bulls are estimated to die each year in the nine countries that allow the sport, with 60,000 of the kills occurring in Spain.
Awareness about the need to protect animal rights has become much stronger across Europe in recent years. Earlier this month the European Union banned seal products in condemnation of Canada’s brutal seal hunt.
For more information about the effort to ban bullfighting, visit the webpage for a Bullfighting-Free Europe.
Photo Credit: J>Ro on Flickr under a Creative Commons license
Americans are very fast in making laws. Spain is very sllloooowwwww…and once the law is made it takes loooonnnnggggg till every realizes that it even exists.
The reason that bulls get killed in such an horrendous way, is, that there are no humans who voluntary would submit themselves to such a treatment. It is like bullying…picking on those that can’t defend themselves. It is a from of cowardice. The matador may well be mistreated by his wife or his mother and torturing the bull may be a form of compensation.
There is one slight difference between the bull and the matador…the matador can decide if he enteres the arena or not. The bull has suffering imposed.
Are you sure, that it is right to impose suffering?
If a child is raped in front of your eyes on the street, would you look the other way? Would you be offended by the act? Would it be your responsiblity to do something about it? Would you accept a dog being stabbed in public? Of course we all can look the other way and say IT IS NOT OUR BUSINESS.
Perhaps not caring at all would be a nice solution.
We all know what is right and what is wrong, if we just dig deep enough into our conscience.
A matador is brought up thinking of himself very highly. His pride is fed from the moment he is born…add to this a bit of ignorance…He will never admit that what he is doing is wrong.
The world is based on duality, everything has an opposite. What goes around comes around…The Universe/Nature has it’s own way of fixing things.
I am glad they are working on banning bull fighting. This is so in humane. They are catching the bulls and chasing them down and spearing them with those spears decorated with streamers and other stuff… it essentially is like torture and is cruelty to animals. I though we supported being humane, to animals this would be considered cruelty to animals… its just so wrong i only hope they will realize that too.
yeh, pablo, but we don’t kill horses on rodeo’s….do we? and every website i’ve gone on to do research on bullfights, there’s always a bunch of ppl calling us americans hypocrites…..and being american….im reely sick of it. i dont wanna be a hypocrite, but sense some ppl r being pretty racist then i guess i’ll hav to. so ur saying sticking a bunch of spears through a bull and leaving it covered in blood to die is ART?? well….i may not be an artist but im preetty sure thats non a fit definition…..and no, im not trying to be racist towards spain at all, even tho many ppl r being pretty racist towards americans
just read the news ,about the matador being gored, lovely it made my day. not so nice when on the receiving end is it, the little sadist.
I hope in my lifetime to see the end of bullfighting and the running of the bulls. It breaks my heart to see such brutality. In this day in age, there is no need for such behaviour. I am sickened by horrific sisplays like bullfighting, dogfighting and cockfighting and the attitude that it is “our culture”. We had slaves in our culture once. Women couldn’t vot in our culture once. We all need to grow beyond “Our Culture”. Let two bullfighters fight it out in the arenas, now, that is good “culture”.
to Osca what a sick person you are. If that is what you call respect, then would you swap places with the bull.
a lot of decent people care, that is why we have petitions and protests.
pablo how on earth can torturing an animal to death in the name of sport be art. Art is flamenco dancing and some of your historic buildings. the matador and picadors are cowards, they would not dare face a fresh unharmed bull. as for the sick people who enjoy watching this barbarity, well they do not deserve to be called human. yes rodeos should be banned as well. any form of animal cruelty is not acceptable
“artistic mastery unimaginable in other compititions”
How about we replace the bulls with adult or teenage humans, still think it’s artistic?
They need to ban this archaic pseudo-sport that’s no more romantic or masculine than shooting the proverbial fish in a barrel.
I would also push for an end to Rodeos and Horse/Dog Racing and fighting and all of the other pseudo-animal sports.
Living next door to Spain.I have never been to a Bullfight which to my mind is a barbaric pass time and should be banned as soon as possible.
The poor bull has no chance and the only time it pleases me is when the matador is thrown up into the air.
There’s no sense to torture living beings in the name of art, tradition or whatever. Bullfighting is only animal abuse.
This may be a good news. But also I would ban that crazy running the streets with the bulls. Every time when they run the streets with the bull somebody gets hurt.
There are all sorts of activities in the world that some people like and other abhor. The way some people feel they have to impose their tastes on other is frightening. I, for one, hope those who enjoy bullfighting will continue to be able to pursue their aficion, and that the narrow minded, intolerant bigots who oppose it fail in their efforts.
These bulls are eaten for food. You are hypocrites unless you also want to ban meat and leather goods. If I were a bull I would want the chance to face my killer one-on-one instead of being electrocuted and pushed down a chute into a slaughterhouse.
You should also support the ban on Fox hunting in England and boxing unless you are racist.
I can only smirk when I read this article. How can you effectively ban bullfighting? Seriously? Invest your time in something more productive than worrying about the fair treatment of animals in a foreign country. Help yourself, your kin, your community, and then your nation first. I really dislike when people are gun ho about the environment with such great economic despair. Why don’t you stop your bitching about mother nature and all of this green stupidity. Want to take an initiative? Go join your local volunteer chapter and become a member of the American Red Cross, help out at the local food shelters, collect cans, or volunteer your time at a community center. That has a greater impact than deterring a bunch of fuckers running around a ring and stabbing bulls. You sir continue to live with your self-righteousness, but in the end you are no better than a bullfighter, in fact, you might be even worse.
i agree with Carles we should try to make a new kind of artistic mastery with people like Matthew…
it’s never bullshit trying to make things better, don’t worry Matthew people like you will still find another nice hobby…hunting maybe?
I saw a bullfight years ago and it is so gruesome! Please stop this sport. Amazing to me was the amount of very small children cheering the Matador on! Very disturbing!!
I’m sorry, but I got to agree with Matt.
Bullfighting is an ugly, barbaric, violent spectacle; much like life. The whole sport is a ritual about man and beast, nature versus rationale. Its bloody and graphic, and most people don’t have the stomache for it.
That said, most people have no stomache for the facts of life.
Those bulls are beautiful, bread for strength and health. They live well and die in about 15mins of pain.
Go to a stockyard and see where your meat comes from. The animals are slow suffering with sores. And you eat it. If you breed cattle for food and sport, its no different than planting carrots for food.
Most people just can’t handle being reminded of the brutality of life.
This hippie will keep on loving and caring about animals, and maybe you’ll get it one of these days before it is too late…..
Not even ‘aficionados’ to bullfights in Spain would claim that bullfighting is a sport (they would probably say its an art). Where did you get that idea? It is something I would like to see disappear, like stoning, flogging or lethal injection. Nether of them is a sport, and those that practice it, don’t claim it to be a sport ether (with the possible exception of Texas)
As a spaniard (from Madrid) I can tell you we envy catalonian initiatives toward bullfighting banning, and also I can corroborate the fact that most of the people in Spain, specially young generations, consider bullfighting as a bloody crime to be eradicated from our land. Hopefully we’ll achieve it soon.
Haha, what the hell?
It is a form of art, the animals are treated with respect inside the ring, there are rules and expectations, and besides the meat is used after they kill the bull.
I have just come back from a trip to Madrid where I saw a bullfight in the famous Las Ventas ring. As someone who cares about animal rights, you may wonder why I went. Well, I had many reasons. I wanted to understand why a civilised country like Spain still condones what, in the rest of Europe, many of us consider to be a barbaric sport.
Perhaps there was another side to it? The way it captivated Hemingway and other writers and artists indicated that it wasn’t all blood and guts. And it’s been a cultural institution in Spain for hundreds of years. You can’t just dismiss something like that without experiencing it yourself.
So I went, and I appreciated the graceful, skilled moves of the Matadors. The way they made gaining control over an angry 600kg beast look as easy as playing with a kitten.
What I did not appreciate was quite how unfair it was. The bulls never have a chance throughout any of it. Only after a few minutes of being in the ring, they are speared by a man on a heavily-armoured horse. He’s the biggest coward I’ve ever seen, as high atop his armoured horse, the bull doesn’t even get the opportunity to see him, let alone ‘fight’ him. The horse just gets hit in the side by the bull’s horns, but is thankfully unharmed due to all the protection.
After this, the bull’s energy level is noticeably lower, along with his fighting spirit. By the time the matador comes in with his red cape on his own, the bull has already been stabbed around 9 times by the banderilleros and picadores (guys on horseback). I wouldn’t say that this was in any way fair.
And as if that’s not bad enough, when the matador goes for the ‘moment of truth’ and kills the bull with his sword, it doesn’t always go according to plan. If he’s skilled, the killing is more humane, as the bull dies with one stab through the aorta in his neck. If not, then the matador will attempt again and again to get it right, injuring and hurting the bull badly, with blood gushing everywhere. This certainly isn’t graceful, majestic or brave. And it happened in 4 fights out of the 6 I saw in the famous Las Ventas ring, where, incidentally, the best matadors perform.
For only around 5 minutes does the matador ‘fight’ the bull on his own. During the other 15 minutes of each fight, there are many people who help. The bull is always on its own. And of course, it doesn’t have a plan or strategy, just a natural instinct to fight, which has been specially bred into it.
And when the goriest moment happened where one of the bulls (out of the 6 that were killed just at that one bullfight) took over 5 minutes to die, due to the matador messing up the ‘moment of truth’, all the audience clapped and cheered. Like we hadn’t just witnessed death. I’m glad I was physically repulsed, and am not desensitised to seeing an animal being killed for entertainment.
The point is, yes we do eat meat and you have to kill animals for it. But that’s different to killing animals for fun and entertainment. It desensitises people to killing. That’s what I saw first hand.
So if you want to know my main reason for going to a bullfight, it was so I could answer back to people like the guy who wrote the comment above mine. Now I know. It really is cruel and barbaric, and no-one can tell me otherwise. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
Not to start a political debate, but Catalunya does many things differently from the rest of Spain. Bullfighting has never been part of the tradition there as it has been in Pais Basco, Madrid and especially Andalucia. For god’s sake, the official language of Catalunya isn’t even Castellano Spanish. Please stop sensationalizing non-stories.
Hi
I like bullfighting, I’m Spanish.To me it is an ART. May be we must start banning torture in Guantanamo and Abu Graib. Later on, stop torturing bulls and horses in rodeos all around USA. Then the US Citizens will have the moral right to talk about torturing animals in other countries.
Hypocrites.
Ok Matthew , then we can come back to the the roman circus with gladiators because it was .. a form of artistic mastery unimaginable in other competitions …
Fuck you hippies and your “lets save the cute little animals” bullshit! Bullfighting is a sport that is a form of artistic mastery unimaginable in other compititions. It displays mans dominance over beast, but in a more fair manner. Having witnessed bullfighting first hand I can honestly say that it is not nearly as unhumane as you make it, even though that word is unfit for animals.
As a race, it is our duty to move foward, to be come better. No one can argue that the tourture and death of an animal that can think and feel for entertainment is good. It is not. We no longer watch gladiators or slaves being killed in the ring for entertainment, because we understand it is cruel and wouldn’t want to be in thier position. It’s the same with animals. To say there are bigger battles else where is cowardice.
I hope this partition succeeds.
I am catalan and I have to say bullfighting is not a general tradition in a lot of regions in Spain and we see that, not as a sport or art, but as a murder.
I totally agree, I hope this kind of violence stop soon in every place in the world.
Y’know I am in general a supporter of animal rights, but when you compare bullfighting to industrial farming, the former is a non-issue. The number of bulls and the amount of pain they endure in the ring is so minute compared to that of factory farmed cows, it’s much ado about nothing. The death of a bull in the ring is comparable to what a wild cow would experience at the claws and teeth of a natural predator.
If Spanish and Latin American people decide they no longer have the stomach for the spectacle, that’s fine, but otherwise there are bigger fights where activists should be putting their energy.
No more bullfighting will be a grat progress for Espana where so many animals are slaughtered.
thank you so much for the encouraging news! I’ve signed many petitions and hope deeply that they do indeed help.