Animal rights activists protest bullfighting ahead of Pamplona festival
Pamplona, Spain, Jul 5 (EFE).- Dozens of animal rights activists took to the streets of the northern Spanish city of Pamplona on Tuesday to protest against the Running of the Bulls set to take place during the San Fermin festival this week.
The protest was organized by animal rights groups AnimaNaturalis and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
Dressed up in dinosaur costumes and traditional Pamplona clothes, protesters marched through Pamplona holding up placards reading “Bullfighting is prehistoric” and chanting “Sanfermines without cruelty”.
AnimaNaturalis spokeswoman Jana Uritz said the protest intended to show how bullfighting is “out of fashion”.
“The objective of this protest was to show how bullfighting is prehistoric, that is why we made it so graphic, with the use of dinosaurs,” Uritz told reporters at the protest.
“It is out of fashion, very old and we have to evolve,” she added.
Uritz went on to say that while some people believe the running of the bulls is not as bad as bullfighting, animal rights activists say both traditions should be done away with.
“The bulls are the ones who are going to die, the ones that are going to pass through the so-called ‘corridor of death’ and for us bull running is just as bad and just as old as bullfighting,” she said.
Each bull run ends in Pamplona’s bullring and the six bulls used will later be killed in a bullfight.
According to data provided by AnimaNaturalis, bullfighting popularity in Spain dropped by 58.4% from 2007 to 2018.
Despite this, the organization has estimated that over 9,000 bulls will die and more than 50,000 will be rented to be exploited in bullfighting celebrations.
Over one million people, many of them foreigners, are drawn to the city every year for the San Fermin fiestas that Ernest Hemingway included in his 1926 novel “The Sun Also Rises.”EFE
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