Fri, Jul 30, 2010 page6

• Catalonia votes to ban bullfighting

  EMBLEM OF SPAIN While campaigners celebrated a vote by Catalonia to ban bullfighting, those opposed criticized it as an attack on a national cultural treasure

  • THE GUARDIAN
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  Its orange sands have witnessed delight and death. Generations of matadors strutted their way across Barcelona’s Monumental bullring, drawing roars of approval from the crowds as they tormented the hulking bulls with their scarlet capes, before killing them with a sword-thrust between the shoulder blades.

  Now, however, bullfighting is to be banned from Barcelona and the rest of the northeastern region of Catalonia after the local parliament on Wednesday dealt a blow to Spain’s most emblematic pastime and unleashed a political battle over what some see as a threatened cultural treasure.

  Deputies voted by 68 to 55 in favor of a people’s petition calling on the bullfight to be banished from a region that once played host to some of the world’s greatest fights. The last matador in Catalan history will sink his sword into the last half-tonne fighting bull at the end of next year, with the ban starting in 2012.

  

  An anti-bullfighting protester holds a poster that reads “Bullfight abolition” on Wednesday in Madrid after Catalonia’s parliament voted to ban bullfighting.

  PHOTO: AFP

  “It is the worst attack on culture since our transition to democracy,” Catalan poet Pere Gimferrer said.

  While some mourned the loss of a cultural jewel, the vote was hailed by animal rights campaigners worldwide. Ricky Gervais and Pamela Anderson were among the 140,000 who signed an international petition to the Catalan parliament.

  “It sickens me to know that people are still paying money to see an animal suffering in such a horrific way,” Gervais said before the vote.

  About 13,500 fighting bulls die in Spain every year — many in bullfights funded by local authorities who are estimated to pay out up to 550 million euros (US$714 million) in subsidies.

  In Spain, critics pointed to dark, if barely disguised, political motives. Bullfight fans claimed many Catalan nationalist deputies had voted out of spite, because the fighting bull is an emblem of Spain — where it is known as the “national fiesta” — rather than of Catalonia.

  The local El Periodico newspaper reported that several nationalist deputies had decided to back the ban only after Spain’s constitutional court struck down parts of the region’s 2006 autonomy charter earlier this month. At least 430,000 people, or 6 percent of all Catalans, protested on July 10 in Barcelona against the court’s decision, which declared Catalonia was not legally a nation.

  Just as Britain’s fox-hunting ban mixed animal rights with class politics, so the bullfight ban brought together animal welfare and Catalan identity politics, local commentators agreed.

  “Some of our people will back the ban on the basis that if they are going to sink our charter, we will sink their bulls,” a regional deputy from the Convergence and Union nationalist coalition told El Periodico.

  Animal rights campaigners were upset that identity politics had been brought to play.

  “The issue is a moral one, not a nationalist one,” said Salvador Giner, head of the Catalan Studies Institute in Barcelona. “Bear-baiting was suppressed long ago and this is the same logic. Are we a modern nation, or are we going back to the middle ages?”

  Giner said the bullfight had a long history in Catalonia.

  “But it is a barbarous tradition,” he said.

  He also denounced those who voted against bullfighting, but protected the correbous, a form of bull-taunting popular in village fiestas in southern Catalonia.

  “That should be banned as well, even if politicians lose votes. That would be consistent,” he said.

  In recent years, the matador Jose Tomas — beloved of many Spanish left-wing intellectuals and artists — had brought fresh life to the Monumental, but in general the bullfight has been in decline in Catalonia for decades. There is only one major ring functioning in Barcelona, with just 15 fights a year.

  “This is dictatorship,” the Catalan bullfighter Serafin Marin said. “It is not a cruel show. It is a show that creates art: where you get feelings and a fight between a bull and person, where the person or the bull can lose their life.”
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