County Down Local Partakes in Provocative Push to End Bullfighting in Pamplona, Spain
Ahead of the annual festival of San Fermín, which includes the Running of the Bulls, a group of ‘bloodied’ activists shackled in medieval torture devices, among them Lucy Watson (25) from Moira gathered in Pamplona’s Plaza Consistorial.
They are protesting over the torture of the 60 bulls which will be stabbed and slaughtered in front of jeering crowds after being forced to run though the city’s streets.
Watson and other demonstrators from animal protection groups PETA and AnimaNaturalis also walked part of the route that the bulls are forced to run before they are violently killed in the bullring.
“Many people who travel to Pamplona to run with the bulls have no idea that they’re participating in an event that celebrates the torture and death of these animals – and if they did, they’d likely run the other way,” said Lucy Watson.
She added: “I took part in this protest to open people’s eyes to the reality of this cruel, archaic event and to call for it to be stopped.”
Tens of thousands of bulls are slaughtered annually in bullfighting festivals around the world.
During these events, assailants on horses drive lances into a bull’s back and neck before others plunge banderillas into its back, inflicting acute pain whenever it turns his head and impairing its range of motion.
Eventually, when the bull becomes weak from blood loss, a matador appears and attempts to kill the animal by plunging a sword into his lungs or, if that fails, cutting his spinal cord with a knife.
The bull may be paralysed but still conscious as his ears or tail are cut off and presented to the matador as a trophy and his body is dragged from the arena.
PETA’s motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview.
For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk
