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Asociación Defensa Derechos Animal Adda Ong

We denounce

Torture shows

Torture (from the Latin tortüre): Serious physical or psychological pain inflicted on someone, via different methods and utensils.

Bullfights

The bull: A mammal with warm blood and a nervous system, with a capacity to suffer and a memory to remember agreeable or painful situations lived previously. A peaceful ruminant with a tendency to run away before attacking. It can defend itself, by attacking, if it finds itself in a dangerous situation, cornered or hounded. Like any other bovine, its hypersensitivity induces it to frighten off a simple fly that lands on its body, with nervous movements of its tail or skin.

Bullfights are a compendium of violence, premeditated torture and deception practised in a public ring, against a frightened and disorientated animal that tries to escape from surroundings that are strange and hostile to it. A cruel show where the torture is regulated in “three parts” with three instruments of torment: “lance, banderillas and sword”, so that they are performed on the victim in an orderly, repeated and systematic way.

Account of Bull torture (torture utensils):

  1. The “Picador’s lance” (luck of the lance): A round pole ending in a metal point. Its purpose is to perforate and bore into the bull’s back (neck) to start to humiliate and destroy it. The perforations caused by the lance point (one to three times) can be very deep (up to 40 centimetres). The wound produces a loss of several litres of blood and considerable damage to its muscles, nerves and soft parts. The jabs with the lance reduce the animal’s strength and leave it seriously injured.

The bull’s charge is stopped by the body of the horse that is forced to act as a containing wall. The impact is comparable to the force of 500 to 600 kilogrammes of weight at a speed of 40 kilometres/hour. The traumatism of the impact is transmitted to the skull, the brain, the neck bone and the spinal cord of the bull.

The HORSE is another of the victims. Besides the trauma that acting as a containing wall during the charges can represent, on occasions it is knocked down and gored by the bull.

BANDERILLAS: Sticks 70 or 80 centimetres long ending in the shape of a harpoon. Three pairs of banderillas are what is reglamentary with the object of continuing to torture and to bleed the bull. Once they are stuck in it is difficult for them to fall out. The animal’s own nervous and desperate movements increase the loss of blood, as well as the tears and pain the harpoons cause to its lacerated flesh.

SWORD (luck of killing): in theory used for killing the bull by a death blow in its heart. Few times the slaughterer hits the mark and the bull, exhausted and tormented, has to suffer various death blows that perforate its lung, causing it a flood of its own blood and asphyxia.

FINAL THRUST AND SHORT DAGGER: Depending on whether the bull is agonizing stood up or laid down, the slaughterers try to finish it off with the dagger or the final thrust sword, sticking it in the nape of its neck, once or more times. It is not rare that, although apparently dead, the bull, paralized by the injury to its spinal cord, is still alive and conscious of its agony while they cut off its tail and ears or tow it to the slaughterhouse.

CAMPAIGNS, HOW TO COLLABORATE

A number of initiatives, campaigns and activities, have been carried out by ADDA in relation to this cruel show. Among these, worth mentioning is the joint campaign by ADDA and WSPA over the years, concluding in 2004 with the Declaration of Barcelona as an Anti-bullfighting city and which a number of towns in Catalonia have also joined.

Since 2005 a new movement addressed to the Catalonian Parliament is in course, which is to request the banning of bullfighting once and for all. This petition is supported by more than 600,000 signatures and also by the results of three surveys carried out by Demoscopia and commissioned by ADDA and WSPA.

82% of those interviewed think that bullfights are a cruel and unjustified show and 73.1% wants them to be banned.

See section on campaigns and news.

Collaborate by spreading the word and participating.