Running With Or Fighting Bulls For 'Sport' Is Anything But

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Bullfighting is a traditional European and Latin American sport that involves bulls being publicly baited, taunted, lanced and eventually stabbed to death by bullfighters inside a ring. Fights often result in severe injuries for the fighter, and always end in death for the animal. Despite its blatant cruelty and violence, the sport is considered by many to be a cultural tradition and even an art form, and has thus evaded scrutiny in Spain.

In 2013, Spain’s parliament bestowed cultural heritage status on bullfighting, making it nearly impossible for bans to be put in place. However, recent polls have shown that 75 percent of Spaniards have not attended a bullfight in the past five years and that only 29 percent are in favor of it at all.

According to stopbullfighting.org ¹, an activist organization that collects information and raises awareness of bullfighting issues, while the bulls may seem quite vicious in the ring, they are anything but.

“The bull has wet newspapers stuffed into his ears; vaseline is rubbed into his eyes to blur his vision; cotton is stuffed up his nostrils to cut off his respiration and a needle is stuck into his genitals,” the nonprofit site maintains.

In fact, bulls aren’t temperamental, deadly beasts outside of the ring, either.

As zoologist Jordi Casamitjana told Humane Society International², bulls are “very peaceful animals that spend most of their live[s] eating grass, sleeping and playing with each other.”

Weaponry is foregone for urban architecture and evasion in Pamplona’s annual running of the bulls, but that doesn’t mean the animals fare much better. The savage spectacle attracts tourists from all over Europe, Australia, and North America, with the promise of an adventure that smacks of an Ernest Hemingway short story. According to the League Against Cruel Sports³, after being tormented with gunshots and electrocuted with cattle prods hose bulls that aren’t seriously injured in the kilometer run to the corrida are subsequently killed in the fights that culminate the event.

Any activity in which an animal suffers and dies in the name of entertainment ought to be considered inhumane. Such an outdated sport has no place in modern society.

Sign to tell the Prime Minister of Spain and Minister of Culture and Sport that protecting bullfighting as a cultural heritage practice is effectively handing over a death sentence to hundreds of thousands of bulls every year, and a testament to blatant animal cruelty.