Some Spaniards may soon have to prepare for the unthinkable: a summer without bullfighting.
Instead of traveling to the ring this season, many of Spain's mighty bulls are being confined to the ranch under a quarantine aimed at halting the spread of a disease known as bluetongue.
The illness rarely harms cattle, but can be devastating to sheep -- a major part of Spain's US$9 billion livestock industry -- causing fevers and internal bleeding. The government suspects ranches that produce fighting bulls of harboring the infection, and has ordered 60 percent of them quarantined.
"The current measures would create the gravest crisis we have ever known," Enrique Garza Grau, secretary general of the National Association of Organizers of Bullfighting Spectacles, said in an interview.
"If they are not modified, we wouldn't be able to carry out even 50 percent of the events that are scheduled," he said.
In March, during the first bullfight of the season at the prestigious Plaza de Toros Las Ventas arena in Madrid, fans said they thought the government was siding unfairly with the sheep. The disease "doesn't affect the bulls, it doesn't affect people," said Rafael Manzanalo, 50, a Madrid native who said he rarely missed a bullfight at Las Ventas.
Manzanalo said it was absurd to let the disease threaten the season. "Bullfights went on even during the civil war," he said, referring to the conflict that ravaged this country from 1936 to 1939.
The government has said that the quarantine may be broken so that the bulls can travel to fights, but only under conditions that industry officials say are prohibitively expensive for many organizers, particularly those who put on the thousands of minor events in small cities and rural areas each year.
The additional costs of following the government's safety measures, which include a requirement that the bull carcasses be destroyed immediately after the fights rather than sold as meat, would make it impossible for small events to cover debts, dealing a major blow to the industry, officials said. The other requirement is that organizers buy all the dozen or so bulls that travel to a fight, not just the six that are usually killed in the ring. All the animals have to be destroyed immediately after the fight.
Bluetongue, which can kill up to 50 percent of the sheep in infected flocks, has not appeared in Spain in more than 40 years, although it was detected on the Balearic Islands in 2000. The name comes from the rare cases when the disease turns the tongues of infected animals blue. Bluetongue is transmitted mainly by mosquitoes, which are most active in the summer, the peak of the bullfighting season.
That puts the government in the unenviable position of trying to balance the interests of the fighting bulls, which represent a tradition that is nearly sacred in some parts of society, with those of sheep.
Spaniards spend more than US$1 billion a year to watch an estimated 17,000 bullfights, industry officials say, making the fights more popular than any of the country's spectator sports except for soccer.
"Our literature, our paintings, all of our artistic expressions are influenced by the world of the bull," Garza said. "It is a cultural spectacle, not a sport. It explains who we are."
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