Twenty animal-welfare organisations - Spanish and European - believe that proposed Balearic legislation on bullfighting is "the best possible option". The legislation is due to be approved next week and while it stops short of an outright ban on bullfighting, the restrictions and demands contained in the legislation are designed to make the staging of bullfights impossible.
Among these organisations, which can draw on millions of supporters nationally and internationally, are the Mallorca Sense Sang (Majorca without blood) campaign group and AnimaNaturalis. The spokesperson for both of these groups, the United Left politician Guillermo Amengual, says that eliminating the suffering of bulls is an urgent matter and that the legislation will represent progress in animal protection.
Leonardo Anselmi, who helped to get bullfights banned in Catalonia, believes that the Balearic law is the best way forward because it can get by the "margins of constitutionality" that were left after the ruling of the Constitutional Court. This ruling determined that the bullfight ban in Catalonia was unconstitutional as it infringed state powers. It was this ruling that led the Balearic government to rethink its law.
Among the numerous provisions in the Balearic legislation is one which stipulates that the bull must not be harmed (and therefore killed). They also demand very strict health and safety measures (for the bulls, the participants and the general public) as well as liability insurance of such expense that holding a bullfight becomes financially untenable.
Bullfights are not therefore expressly forbidden and nor is the Fornalutx correbou bull-run. As far as this is concerned, however, the law stipulates that rope cannot be tied to the horns and that the bull cannot be killed at the end of the bull-run.
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