This is the conservative daily El Mundo, yet largely favorable to the bullfighting tradition, which throws a stone into the pond. Why ? Because this year, in Spain, the release of bulls in the ferias left fifteen dead according to the count of the newspaper, including two French. There have never been so many deaths, nor have there ever been so many injuries, especially minors.
During the bull runs, the streets are partitioned off on each side with barriers (“talanquères”), the bulls are released and run straight towards the arenas, and the more daring have fun running in front of them trying to escape them and to escape at the last moment. The best known are the Pamplona festivals, which attract tens of thousands of people each year, but the release of bulls is a tradition that continues in many village festivals.
How to explain such a balance sheet? After two years of cancellations due to the pandemic, the “encierros” (the name for bull releases in Spanish), have resumed with renewed vigor. There have been many more this year than before the Covid: 8,200 in the Valencia region alone, for example, which has eight deaths. When there are a lot of people, a lot of tourists, it creates bottlenecks at the talanquères, the runners can’t get out, they get gored or trampled. In question, too, the more or less high blood alcohol level of some participants, their inexperience or their lack of physical condition. According El Mundo10 of the 15 deaths recorded were over 50 years old.
These figures obviously give new arguments to those who oppose this tradition, and who also highlight the issue of animal welfare. Because the release of bulls is also ill-treatment: beatings with sticks, kicks, stress of which the animals are victims.
Is bochornoso that @rtve emita en horario infantil los encierros de San Fermín, commenting on the best jugadas frivolously después de estos, as if estuvieran retransmitiendo una carrera de motos, sin tener en cuenta al estrés y el miedo al que someten a los toros. Lamentable. pic.twitter.com/xQHomk94rC
— Javier Luna (@LunaJavier6) July 9, 2022
“It’s embarassing”says Javier Luna, defender of the animal cause, that RTVA, the Spanish public television “broadcasts the San Fermín bull run in children’s time, commenting on the best moves in a frivolous way after the bull run, as if it were a motorcycle race, without taking into account the stress and the fear to which bulls are subjected. Lamentable”.
But the subject remains highly sensitive, politically delicate; in the region of Valencia, the socialists and the radical left in power are against bullfighting but they have carefully avoided the subject of their coalition agreement so as not to offend part of their electorate. Bullfighting clubs, very influential, defend a practice “ancestral” and “authentic“, a practice “cultural“defended by the Constitution.
“Bullfighting attracts five million spectators a year in the arenas and 20 million in total if we count the bullfights and other bullfighting shows” says the Toro Lidia Foundation in particular.
Except that“at some point, this is a debate that will have to be addressed” said the number two of the regional government, Aitana Mas. Authorities are considering a possible ban or a way to improve the safety of these demonstrations, which remain extremely popular, even in regions that have otherwise banned bullfighting, such as Catalonia.