Barcelona Against Bullfighting

Barcelona Against Bullfighting; A Symbolic Vote is Passed.

Barcelona declared its opposition to bullfighting and became the first big Spanish city to take a decision which animal rights campaigners

welcomed as a step towards getting it banned in at least part of the country. City councillors carried the motion in a secret ballot, a spokesman said.

Although the vote has no practical effect, and bullfights will continue at the Monumental bullring, it will put pressure on the Catalan regional government to ban what many people consider an emblematic Spanish tradition.

Leah Garcés of the World Society for the Protection of Animals said: "The vote is a giant step forward for animal welfare and will help lead the way to what could be the beginning of the end of bullfighting in Spain."

Barcelona, the regional capital, has two big bullrings, one of which is being turned by the UK architect Richard Rogers into a leisure and shopping precinct, but it has never been significant in the world bull-fighting circuit.

Nearly a century ago it petitioned the national parliament to ban "any spectacle that includes the spilling of blood, the death, wounding or mutilation of animals".

The deputy mayor, Jordi Portabella, a member of the separatist Catalan Republican Left party, wrote in the local paper La Vanguardia yesterday: "The bull ... has a nervous system similar to that of human beings, capable of dreaming and suffering. It is peaceful, likethe cow or ox who flees from aggression and danger."

Although the vote was secret, the Catalan nationalist Convergence and Union party and a coalition of far left and green parties said they had voted in favour of a ban, and the conservative People's party, which was voted out of the national government at the recent general election, had voted against.

Catalan nationalists and separatists are among the keenest to distance themselves from a tradition which some see as Spanish, rather than Catalan.

Bullfighting continues to draw large crowds in much of the rest of Spain and is reported to be increasingly popular in France and in Portugal, where a longstanding prohibition on the public killing of bulls was recently ended.

Recntly Angel Requena, the Green mayor of San Sebastian de los Reyes, near Madrid, refused to ban the bullruns and bullfights held there in August.

"Bull culture is an intrinsic part of Mediterranean culture, which considers the bull a totemic animal," he said.

Article-Barcelona against Bulfighting published by the Guardian newspaper 4/6/2004.

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The Running of the Bulls in Pamplona.