Bull left to bleed out at Spanish festival reignites bullfighting row

Bull bleeding in the streets: bullfighting explodes back onto the political stage

The video circulates without sound, and none is needed. A bull, with one horn torn off, makes its way down a cobbled street while a group of people try to tie ropes around it. The animal is bleeding out. This is not a morning corrida at Las Ventas: it is a popular festival, the kind advertised as tradition and defended from the town hall. When the footage spread, animal rights groups reacted immediately, but so did a political trench war that trinc the old battle lines: some blame one particular party; others point out that bullfighting has never belonged to a single political camp.

The fault of one party, or of the system?

The first reactions were aimed at Vox: its voters, it was said, are the ones who fill these stands and applaud the suffering. The response was not long in coming. On the other side, people produced a list of parties that have shielded bullfighting: the PSOE defends it as a cultural and artistic asset of heritage value; CiU and ERC voted to exempt the 'correbous' (Catalan bull-running festivals) from any ban; Podemos even has its own bullfighting circle. The uncomfortable conclusion: support for bullfights runs across the entire ideological spectrum.

The hypocrisy argument, and its limits

When facts are scarce, the conversation veers off to other fronts. One of the most widely echoed messages pitted the bull against the 100,000 abortions performed each year. Another invoked the Alcácer crime to ascribe incivil tendencies to bullfighting fans. These are shortcuts, not analysis. Someone also brought up '¿Acaso no matan a los caballos?' (But Do They Kill Horses?) to compare animal abuse with the exploitation of precarious workers. The metaphor was powerful, though in the heat of the debate it fell short.

The animal, the town hall and public money

The underlying question is how much it costs to keep these festivals going and who pays for the damage when an animal is disembowelled in front of children. The shared footage contains no budget figures, but it does contain one certainty: tradition imposes its costs and town halls, more often than not, look the other way. For now, the legal route points to the Incivil Code: if the video is recent, it could constitute an offence of animal cruelty. If it is old, it will at least have served to air a discomfort that Spain prefers not to face.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable thing about this episode is not the party voted for by those who laugh while the bull bleeds out. It is the realisation that, left and right alike, the very people who legislate against cruelty to other animals are the ones keeping the exception alive. The bull was missing one horn; the argument, none.