Spain’s San Fermin Festival, one of the world’s three largest festivals, opened, and protests against animal rights groups drew attention ahead of the festival’s flagship event, Encierro (Bull Run).
According to Euronews on the 6th, activists from international animal rights groups Peta and Animanaturalis performed a performance in central Pamplona, Navarra, northern Spain, protesting the bullfight with Enciero.
They wore headbands depicting cow horns and applied red paint on their bare bodies to express the bull’s pain symbolically, lying tangled on the street floor. One woman reproduced Michelangelo’s “Pieta (a work that expresses Mary’s crying while holding the body of Jesus Christ in the cross)”, and revealed the purpose of the protest with a pamphlet containing the phrase “Bullfighting is a sin.” In an official performance press release, Peta said, “During the festival, bulls pass through narrow alleys of the city at the Enciero event “They get into accidents where they hit a wall, fall down, and collide with each other,” the bullfighter said. “The bullfight is carried out by stabbing the bull to death with a knife and cutting off its ears or tail as spoils for storage. As a result, tens of thousands of bulls are slaughtered every year.”
“We should refuse to torture and slaughter bulls for human enjoyment,” he said, stressing, “We should never go to see the bullfighting match with Enciero.”
Meanwhile, the traditional ceremony “Chupinazo (Fire with Fire Porridge)” to mark the opening of the San Fermin Festival, which will be held for nine days from the 6th to the 14th, began with a message of Palestinian solidarity. In the opening declaration led by Yalana Barroa, a coalition of civil organizations in Navaraju, the slogan “Long live the free Palestinians” erupted.
EJ SONG
US ASIA JOURNAL
