French MPs Mull Banning Bullfighting

Date: 16 November 2022 - 21:37

News ID: ۱۰۹۰۶۸

PARIS (AFP) - French MPs began debating a ban on bullfighting on Wednesday, with a vote due later this month that has enraged lovers of the blood sport in the south of the country.
The issue has split the ruling coalition of President Emmanuel Macron and the biggest opposition party, the far-right National Rally, which is led by animal-lover Marine Le Pen.
Despite having widespread public support, most observers expect the bid to fail as a majority of MPs fear a backlash in rural areas and bullfighting heartlands where the practice is a cherished cultural tradition.
A poll by the Ifop survey group earlier this year backs Caron’s claim, with 77 percent of respondents approving of a ban, up from 50 percent in 2007.
A full vote is scheduled for November 24, which would be the first time the national assembly has pondered outlawing a tradition that was idolized by artists from Ernest Hemingway to Pablo Picasso.
The draft law would modify existing animal welfare law to remove exemptions for bullfights when they can be shown to be “uninterrupted local traditions.”
The law would also ban cock-fighting which is permitted in some areas in northern France.
“The MP Caron, in a very moralizing tone, wants to explain to us, from Paris, what is good or bad in the south,” the furious mayor of Mont-de-Marsan, Charles Dayot, told AFP.
Bullfighting is “our identity, a living culture. Leave us alone with our traditions!” added Dayot, who is vice-president of the Union of French Bullfighting Towns.
Although the head of Macron’s Renaissance party in parliament, Aurore Berge, signed an open letter calling for a ban on bullfighting last year, others in the party are fiercely opposed to the bill.
Judicial attempts to outlaw the practice have repeatedly failed, with courts routinely rejecting lawsuits lodged by animal rights activists, most recently in July 2021 in Nimes.
The debate in France pitching animal rights’ defenders against traditionalists is echoed in other countries with bullfighting histories, including Spain and Portugal as well as Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela.