On Monday, July 10, in the middle of a week saturated with animal abuse all over Spain, we witnessed a particularly shocking spectacle in Teruel involving young bulls and young boys and girls. The bullfighting regulations in Aragon have recently been modified to allow the participation of children from 14 to 16 years old in bull runs and ensogados, and children under 14 when accompanied .
The Government of Aragon attempts to guarantee generational replacement by encouraging children to witness the harassment and persecution of heifers as young as 18 months old. The animals, not much taller than a big dog, look clearly stressed and confused, suffer repeated falls and endure tail pulling, horn grabbing, shoving and kicking, all while a rope is wrapped around their heads limiting their movements to a minimum.
After the first pass of the bulls in the early hours of the morning, the calm around the Plaza del Torico was once again interrupted by the bull run, which was witnessed by dozens of minors. In 2022, this event was celebrated replacing the heifers by fake bulls with wheels, but the approval of the new regulations has allowed that this year 3 heifers were harassed to exhaustion. Two of them were forced to repeat the route, in a total of 5 bull runs during the hottest hours of the day.
Despite the fact that the animals are clearly exhausted, panting, with blood in their mouths and even when their desperate cries can be heard, the legality of this kind of events allows adult fans to instruct the younger ones in the lack of empathy and the normalization of the mistreatment of some animals. The stress that they experience leads them to head abruptly, they try to run away and kick in the air, also endangering the integrity of the participants. Despite their young age, the cows are quite heavy and have their horns considerably developed.
From AnimaNaturalis and CAS International we condemn the horror that cows and bulls suffer in the modality of the bull roping in Aragón and other Autonomous Communities, as well as the risk for physical and mental health that being a witness of the violence exercised on the animals represents for children.
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