By Muriel Pilkington The local voice
When it comes to blatant hypocrisy, the Catalans take the cake.The very day last week the Catalan regional parliament banned bullfighting on the grounds of cruelty, in a town not too far away from Barcelona, a bull – its head lashed tightly to a stake - was bellowing in fear as a man attached iron holders to its horns and lit the flares they contained.
The bull was then set loose to run round the boarded-off streets of the town until its residents grew tired of the spectacle. At least that's the way it is supposed to end, with the bull being sent back to its home ranch the following day “to spend the rest of its life in peace”. However, a lot of the bulls are beaten so badly in the process by drunken men and youths that they have to be put out of their misery.
Known as “toro embolado”, this is a good old “cultural” Catalan custom which goes back centuries, while the bullfight is the sort of cruel, barbarous spectacle that only those evil Spaniards could invent. Local legend has it that the custom grew out of the fact that there was no electricity in the bad old days so they used the bulls to light the streets! What a load of old codswallop, or perhaps b******t would be a more appropriate word.
While the Catalans insisted the ban was not “anti-Spanish” - bullfighting is after all called the national fiesta – there was a spate of articles in the national press, accusing them of just that. The toro embolado is just one example of the Catalans' abhorrence of cruelty to animals. Another is the running of young bulls when more often than not the animals end up like that heifer in Alhaurin el Grande not so long ago.
After wading through several articles about the Spanish obsession with inflicting pain on fighting bulls – which in my opinion are one of the most magnificent creatures in God's creation – I had planned to reveal all the gory details to our readers. I have since decided to spare you all the mental and emotional agony that I went through. But I will give you a statistic I gleaned from a blog by Alfonso Valencia in the online newspaper SocioPolitico.com titled Spanish bulls fear the arrival of summer.
According to figures published by the National Association for the Protection and Wellbeing of Animals, some 60,000 bulls and cows are killed each year – in the bull ring, and in small towns and villages all over Spain. A bull suffers for 20 minutes or so in the ring, but the poor beasts who are unfortunate enough to end up as the main entertainment in small village ferias suffer for hours before somebody puts them out of their misery or they drop dead of sheer exhaustion. And according to Sr Valencia, such spectacles are on the increase rather than dying out.
It is to be hoped that the ban will turn the spotlight on the treatment of fighting bulls everywhere and not just in the bullring. Here at The News, we're working on an online petition to be sent to all the major international animal protection societies, foreign newspapers, the national press and the Spanish government in an effort to set the ball rolling towards an eventual ban on all spectacles involving live animals. As Marie Antoinette would have said: Let them use humans.
I'll be providing full details as soon as the petition is up and running.
While I don't want to appear heartless, I couldn't help muttering “Serves you right” when I read about a man being gored to death by a bull at one of those village “cultural events” in Catalonia – just two days after the ban was voted in.
And it gives me great satisfaction to know that Catalan deputy regional premier Jose Luis Carod Rivera - no doubt a great fan of those “cultural events” - is the most hated man in Spain.
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