Every year, about 250,000 bulls are killed in bullfights -- stabbed multiple times with barbed lances and banderillas (spiked wooden sticks) before suffering slow, agonizing deaths in front of an audience, including children.
Please sign our petition to the Prime Minister of Spain calling for a national ban on bullfights and bull runs in Spain:
Now, even though bullfighting attendance is at an all-time low and bans have been enacted by several countries and cities, France and Spain are trying to protect this cruel bloodsport by getting it listed as a form of "cultural heritage".
Bullfights aren't "fair fights" between a bull and a matador. They're highly staged forms of animal cruelty, sanctioned and subsidized by governments. A UNESCO "cultural heritage" listing would give a veneer of respectability to the torture of animals for public entertainment and mean subsidies may be made available to financially safeguard the future of bullfighting.
They call this sport. This isn't sport this is animal cruelty! The poor bull is in pain. They throw spears in the animal and let it bleed out. They stab it. This poor animal doesn't deserve this. Bulls are beautiful and powerful animals.
The bull is acting in self defense against these people. It's trying to protect itself, it is the people that are attacking the bull.
I've even seen where they will light the bull's horns on fire.
God's beautiful creature, the bull.
Torturous bull runs and bullfights are condemned by the public internationally—and with good reason. Every year, more than 40,000 bulls are slaughtered in rings in Spain alone.
In that country’s infamous bull runs, bulls who are chased by screaming participants down the narrow streets—slipping and sliding, crashing into walls, and breaking bones—will be tortured and killed in the town’s bullring shortly afterward.
It’s no surprise that the majority of Spaniards oppose these bloody, violent, and archaic spectacles. Just this week, Spain’s Balearic Islands voted to criminalize killing bulls during bullfights. Several other regions in Spain, including Barcelona and 38 Catalan municipalities, have made strides to ban the centuries-old blood sport.
Spanish animal rights group PACMA, which released the footage, reports that attendance at the school is dwindling. The number of students enrolled has gone from 111 in 2003 to just 48 in 2013. This is hardly surprising. We’ve known for a long time that most Spanish people have no interest in bullfights or other barbaric events in which animals are killed for “sport”. But the school is being propped up by the government, from which it just received a €30,000 prize.
These bullfighting schools must be shut down, not awarded cash. In addition to ignoring the right of bulls not to be tortured, they are flagrantly ignoring the United Nation’s (UN) Committee on the Rights of the Child‘s report that exposure to bullfighting violates children’s rights. Committee Vice President Sara Oviedo says:
[T]he participation of children and adolescents in bullfighting activities constitutes a grave violation of the articles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child … as they are being indoctrinated for a violent act.
For a child, being forced to watch a bullfight can be traumatic enough, but encouraging children to participate in deliberately harming and killing an animal for “amusement” sends all the wrong messages to developing young minds and can lead young people to become adults who are dangerously desensitised to violence and have been stripped of their natural empathy. Compassion and kindness, not enthusiasm for inflicting pain and engaging in gratuitous violence, are the qualities that children need.
The UN Committee recommended that children should not attend or participate in bullfighting events because of their extreme violence – it’s time that countries that still prop up this disgusting and dying industry put a stop to it, for the sake of children and bulls alike.
What You Can Do
Share this page and spread the word that bullfighting is a senseless, archaic practice that should be ended immediately.
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You Can Help
Please sign our petition to the Prime Minister of Spain calling for a national ban on bullfights and bull runs in Spain:
Dear UNESCO leaders,
I am concerned that several political bodies have begun the process to recognize bullfighting and bull fiestas as cultural heritage assets.
Whilst I applaud the important work that UNESCO undertakes to preserve many expressions of cultural heritage, I would never support a move to accept bullfighting, or any other act of animal cruelty, as a practice worthy of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Within the countries in which these acts of animal cruelty take place there are large caring communities that oppose such blatant acts against sentient animals. Recent opinion polls have shown that bullfighting is not supported by the majority of citizens.
I would like to join you in celebrating many expressions of cultural heritage, but I could never celebrate animal suffering. Bullfighting is not culture, it is cruelty.
I trust that UNESCO would never give a veneer of respectability to the torment and stabbing to death of animals -- animal cruelty can never be an acceptable form of cultural heritage.
I am concerned that several political bodies have begun the process to recognize bullfighting and bull fiestas as cultural heritage assets.
Whilst I applaud the important work that UNESCO undertakes to preserve many expressions of cultural heritage, I would never support a move to accept bullfighting, or any other act of animal cruelty, as a practice worthy of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Within the countries in which these acts of animal cruelty take place there are large caring communities that oppose such blatant acts against sentient animals. Recent opinion polls have shown that bullfighting is not supported by the majority of citizens.
I would like to join you in celebrating many expressions of cultural heritage, but I could never celebrate animal suffering. Bullfighting is not culture, it is cruelty.
I trust that UNESCO would never give a veneer of respectability to the torment and stabbing to death of animals -- animal cruelty can never be an acceptable form of cultural heritage.
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