Shockingly gruesome footage of amateur bullfighters trying out their sickening ‘skills’ has emerged from a festival in Spain.
The harrowing video shows a series of would-be matadors and their clumsy, brutal attempts to kill young bulls – barely more than calves – in the ring. The grim footage was filmed by animal rights campaigners in the municipality of Vinuesa, in Spain’s northwestern province of Soria, in the autonomous community of Castile and Leon, on August 17 and released today, Wednesday, August 24.
In the video, young men wearing jeans and T-shirts try to sharpen their skills using cloaks and spears. Many of them are inept and incompetent, causing the bulls to agonize as they pierce them with their swords, but fail to kill them.
Some of the terrified beasts can be seen roaring in agony as swords and spikes dangle from their backs. At one point, a cruelly injured bull lies on the ground in the arena gasping for breath as the would-be matador tries to find the right place to sever an artery.
Another scene shows a helpless but still alive bull being stabbed repeatedly with a sword and then stabbed in the back of the head with a knife after having had one of its ears hacked off while still moving. The footage was released by Spain’s Animalist Party, abbreviated in Spanish as PACMA, as part of its campaign to ban bullfighting.
The footage had notched up over 12,000 views at the time of writing since being posted online by the Animalist Party earlier today.
“We document a wild calf in Vinuesa (Soria), in which amateurs cruelly torture the animal to death,” the group stated on Twitter.
And tagging the official account of the Vinuesa City Council. Tourism, information and Vison, they asked: “Are you really not ashamed to allow this?”
Zenger News obtained a statement from the Spanish Animalist Party, which said, “PACMA brings to light images of a grotesque amateur bullfight in Vinuesa.
“Soria, August 24, 2022 – Bullfighting festivities take center stage this summer due to the constant controversies and compromising images in which animals appear to be suffering from high levels of stress and physical pain, fractures, agonizing deaths, resounding falls and blows and multiple humiliations by unscrupulous people.
“The latest cruel images have been documented and shared by the PACMA Animalist Party. This is a bullfight held on August 17 in Vinuesa (Soria) in which a group of fans ‘martyred’ several young animals to death,” the group declared.
“Our job is to make this known so that society can have an opinion about it and position itself. These events are carried out with relative discretion and it is usually a problem to document them because the organizers and participants do not want anyone to see how they torture animals,” Javier Luna, President of the PACMA party said.
PACMA said in a statement: “In the images, not suitable for sensitive people, it can be seen how a group of young fans constantly mock the calves and stick sharp objects into them until they decide to kill them, failing in numerous attempts and piercing them from the sides. Ear cropping is done with calves still conscious.
“The Animalist Party has documented several bullfighting events in what they call ‘a summer to forget’ in relation to the number of bullfights held in Spain after a considerable break due to the pandemic. They are trying to recover what was lost and trying to bring bullfighting to places in Spain where it is not even previously held, putting it in a shoehorn and bringing it closer to children because they know that the generational change is extremely low.
“It seems to us an outrage that no party wants to commit to the animal victims of bullfighting and that they remain totally unprotected despite the future Animal Protection Law or the reform of the Penal Code. We have a lot of work ahead of us,” Luna said.
PACMA has called on its supporters to rally in Madrid on September 24 for “Mission Abolition” to demand that the practice, considered by many to be an outdated tradition in Spain, be relegated to the past.
