Pictures from the Pamplona Running of the Nudes

You forget one important point.

I am Spanish and from Barcelona. Why is what I just said quite surprising? Because most people from Barcelona says he is “Catalan”.

Many my friends went to the protests in Pamplona. Why? Because to be anti-bullfighting is to be anti-Spain. Catalan nationalists want to destroy the image of Spain. To portray Spain as barbaric animal killers helps their cause.

This is very sad. It dilutes the cause of people who really want to fight for the animals lives. But it is difficult to take animal rights protesters in Spanish so seriously because we know that their motives are not always so genuine.

So, yes, Mr Corrigan, you are right in that which you say. But there is even more to the story.

I would disagree. Killing animals in an abattoir may seem cruel, but they’re being killed for food. The ones in a bullring are being killed for entertainment.

It’s like comparing a person hunting and killing an animal in the woods, then using the carcass for fun; with a teenager prodding a cat in a box with a fork until it goes mad and then he smashes its head with a brick.

The former – perhaps except to vegetarians – is acceptable. It’s hunting. Other animals do it. The latter is unforgivable, pathetic and childish – like bullfighting.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who cheers the bull on when it gores one of the “fighters”, even though the bull always loses.

If you want to see proper bullfighting, look to the U.S. And it’s not often I’ll hold our American cousins up as a shining example! They ride the things and the human rider invariably comes off worse. The bull’s rounded up and ridden again and again and again until they retire like racehorses.

Now *that* is a sport – both sides have a chance.

Mosh, this is precisely the point I question in my post: The huge sums of money spent on bringing large numbers of animal rights campaigners to Pamplona could be spent on better things. Anti-bullfighting protesters always emphasise the inhumanity of the act – saying that killing animals should not be done in the name of ‘art’ or ’sport’. They probably have a point. But is it really the job of animal rights campaigners to dictate how humans should behave, when the number of animals they can save is minimal at best? I imagine that most people who donate money to PETA do so hoping it will be spent on saving as many animals lives as possible, not on these self-righteous proclamations. The animals themselves seem to be an afterthought.

So it’s not the animals that PETA are concerning themselves with, it’s humans’ ideas of what is entertainment. Is that really their job? There are other charities, such as religious ones, who dedicate themselves to our moral wellbeing, why does PETA think this falls under their remit?

Hmm… Mosh you would do better to read the blog you are commenting on before you speak.

This blog addresses an interesting point in the whole methodology of charities. Most charitable causes are Good in the eyes of all but the most fervent supporters of bullfighting, or whatever it is that we’re talking about. Unfortunately, the people who are attracted to become activists for the cause tend to be quite extreme. They risk alienating the moderates, who provide them with all their funding. So they disguise what they’re doing with clever language. With bullfighting, they say “Look, isn’t it disgusting that humans would do this?” and we say “Well, yes”. So they say “Right, so that’s why we’re fighting it”. But if they would remember their job – to save animals lives – and if they termed their debate in those terms, by saying “Look we want to save the 5,000 bulls a year that are killed in bullfighting”, then people in possession of the facts could say “Hmm… just 5,000? That’s not very many really, is it? Don’t you have better things to do?”

It’s clever marketing to grab us by the balls, because they know that if they tried to grab us by the head, they would fail, such is the intellectual vacuum that exists in the charity industry.

You’re sick! Animal rights campaigners love animals! We want to save them all! That incluedes the bulls! PETA is the best!!!!!!!

PETA is a business like any company (albeit not a profit-making one). They need to market themselves well like any business. Attention grabbing headlines like nude protests in sunny Spain is a way of gaining attention for their cause – not just the cause of bullfighting but the cause of PETA in general. The money that PETA raises from the awareness created by the nude protest can be spent on the abattoirs and the other less interesting but more important issues.

Of course, I say ‘can be’. I have no idea if it is.

PETA campaigns for all animals, including the poor animals who suffer and die for bullfights as well as those who are tortured for meat.

Congratulations to all of the people with big hearts who take part in PETA protests.

As far as I’m aware, PETA works to end all kinds of animal abuse – factory farming, the fur and leather industry, vivisection, and yes, bullfighting.

Bullfighting is a horrific industry, and the bulls suffer greatly. This protest must have got loads of media coverage, and so informed people all over the world.

Lisa and PJ – you would make very bad army generals. When you’re fighting a war, you don’t fight on all fronts at once. And when you’re marching on Moscow, you don’t pick a fight in a little village when there are bigger fish to fry.

Off for a bacon sandwich now. Care for one?

It’s a shame that all the good points are being made by the anti-PETA people and all the PETA supporters can do is say ‘bullfighting is bad, mmmkay?’

I’m afraid I’m not going to buck the trend, as I am not in possession of the facts. But I’d like to see PETA reassure me that they do know what they’re doing.

Its very simple, its about animal cruelty, nothing more.

This whole thing reminds of the pandas. People obsess over saving pandas our of mawkish sentimentality, when it is a futile endeavour. Even Chris Packham agrees: http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/packham-panda342.html

Think with your brain, not your heart!

I have worked for a number of animal rights organisations (including PETA) and one thing I can assure you is that the people who work in them are committed to all animals, not just the ones in highly visible kinds of animal abuse such as this. Sadly, what I can also tell you is that the media aren’t. I have spent many fruitless hours trying to interest the media in broiler chickens or mice in laboratories but it’s a story they’ve little interest in telling. High profile events like Pamplona focus people’s minds on cruelty and can be guaranteed to bring coverage and attention to the rights of animals and to those who work to protect them. This is legitimate campaigning which adapts to the media environment and helps both the bulls in Spain and PETA’s work with animals of all kinds. A huge amount of good work (some of it much more costly than this demo is likely to have been) goes on behind the scenes and to get a measure of what PETA do and the balance of their interests, people should check out their website, rather than headlines – that’s peta.org.uk for European citizens or just peta.org for the US.

Should we pick and choose which non human animals we try and help just because it will only affect a few? As an animal rights organisation dedicated to helping all animals doesn’t PETA have a duty to try and help all of them? Not just pick and choose based on arbitrary decisions such as the fact that other people get pleasure from watching them suffer.

PETA does try and help the animals in the meat industry, just as it does with animals involved in vivisection and animals being used for clothing; the demonstration at Pamplona isn’t done at the exclusion of other causes, all of which are as equally important.

These sort of demonstrations do get a lot of media attention, as has been mentioned, surely that is a good thing, as it brings attention to the underlying cause – that animals are suffering, and that’s not acceptable. Animal rights are something that unfortunately many people don’t seem to think about, partially due to the fact that they are not aware of the atrocities being perpetrated against them, so in conclusion yes I think the money and time used on demonstrations like this one are well utilised as it makes people realise what’s happening. And they have to know what’s going on before they can care enough to take a stand against it.

There’s nothing self-righteous about trying to protect those that cannot protect themselves.

Thousands of bulls are slaughtered in the ring every year in Spain, and every one of them dies in a terrifying assault—you can’t call it a fight when one side always loses, violently. Their deaths are frightening, painful and lingering and it’s only right that the largest animal rights organisation in the world would be doing everything it can to stop it.

Kathleen’s comments show the general level of intellectual engagement with the subject that most animal rights protesters have with the subject.

Mimi, you also miss the point I was making in the beginning. It is about an efficient use of resources. When the bigger problems are sorted, of course move on to the smaller ones.

AC: PETA may sleep well at night knowing that they are proportionately responding to each area of animal rights, but what about the people who come to the protest? They will each have probably spent hundreds on attending the event. Isn’t it PETA’s responsibility to say to those people, “Stay away and donate your money to x”, where ‘x’ might be, say, a scheme to replace antiquated machinery in abattoirs with more modern and painless equivalents. Can you be sure that naked protests is the most efficient way of preventing animal suffering?

Damian, I thought your piece was more thoughtful than many comments we get about animal rights campaigning but you accused us of self-righteousness, “dictating” to people and, worst of all, that animals are an afterthought. My reply was just to try and show you and others that we’re thoughtful about what we do. We can’t dictate to anyone – we can only draw attention to the facts and let them make their own minds up. As for “self-righteous”, one person’s self-righteous is another person’s righteous. We have prinicples and we would be betraying those principles not to stand up for them. Almost every animal rights activist (including me) used to eat meat so we recognise that people who don’t agree with us aren’t necessarily bad people, and may be better than us in other ways. I hope I’ve shown that the animals are never an afterthought. As for the best way of helping animals – there is no “best way”. Campaigning is an art as much as a science and we can only do our best according to our judgment. Different techniques and approaches work for different people and we try to reach as many people as possible. Bullfighting is a hideous, violent sport that brings immense suffering. Neither PETA or anyone else should ever apologise for opposing it. Which do you think is the bigger issue: the horrible, violent deaths of tens of thousands of living feeling beings in front of audiences who take pleasure in it, or how a few animal rights supporters choose to spend their money?

AC, thank you for your continued engagement with me on this. You asked:

“Which do you think is the bigger issue: the horrible, violent deaths of tens of thousands of living feeling beings in front of audiences who take pleasure in it, or how a few animal rights supporters choose to spend their money?”

Let’s rephrase that question:

“Which do you think is the bigger issue: the horrible, violent deaths of tens of thousands of living feeling beings, or the hundreds of thousands of living feeling beings that could be saved if a few animal rights supporters chose to spend their money differently?”

Firstly, you will see I have taken out the ‘pleasure’ aspect. This may be important on a humanity level, and I would understand if a Christian group, or even some Spanish nationalists, opposed it on these grounds. But PETA is supposed be about saving animals from humans, not saving humanity from itself. The motive of the killing should be irrelevant. It seems to me that PETA would rather save one animal that is killed ‘for pleasure*’, than five killed for other reasons. So it is essentially not about animal lives anymore, but about how you believe humans should behave. This is what I call self-righteous.

Secondly , I have added back into the debate the question I had been talking about all along – appropriate use of resources. When a PETA supporter chooses to go to Pamplona to protest, that is not money they had earmarked for an Xbox – it was money that could have gone on saving other animals. It is PETA’s responsibility to ensure that money is spent wisely. Flying protesters around the world to emotive events does more damage to animals through the carbon emissions than it helps them. I think it is irresponsible that PETA doesn’t encourage its activists to fight battles closer to home instead.

When termed like this, I think you know my answer.

*This pleasure argument is also futile. What would you call ‘not for pleasure’? Animals killed for food? There are two problems with this viewpoint. 1) These bulls are also eaten after the event. 2) Don’t all meat-eaters eat meat ‘for pleasure’? There are plenty of vegetarian alternatives to meat. So if we therefore see all animal killing as for ‘pleasure’, then that no longer sets bullfighting apart. The only thing left is that the bulls are killed in public as opposed to in private. But here we get back to the self-righteousness again: when all other things (such as number of animal deaths) are equal, it seems you are concerning yourselves more with how human public life should be run than with the animals.

Hear, hear.

AC. What exactly do you want to happen with the bulls after bullfighting is banned? You don’t honestly think they’ll be left to run around the meadows of Spain, rolling around in the daisies and buttercups, do you? They’ll be slaughtered. And with so many to be killed, you can guarantee it won’t be humanely. Have you ever been to a Spanish farm? Of course not, you’re too busy getting naked.

Sorry I wasn’t able to reply yesterday and I guess it’s probably time for us both to move on. Just quickly, yes, Damian, I agree with you that animals killed for meat are killed for pleasure too, and I also agree that it doesn’t matter to an animal what the reason it dies is.

I mentioned the pleasure people take in bullfighting because I do think any rational, humane person would and should be disturbed by that, whether they support animal rights or not, because the suffering of the bulls is integral to the whole enterprise. Slaughtering an animal for food in that extended, brutal way would be illegal. Cows and bulls suffer in farming too and PETA is doing their best to fight that too – but a literally sequential approach to campaigning (as any professional campaigner in any field will tell you) where you concentrate all on knocking off one problem and then move to the next is as naive as it’s ineffective.

Some people will post messages on this forum pontificating what should or should not be done about bullfighting, the truth is that the chances that PETA or any other organisation have to put an end to bullfighting come to nought. Bullfighting can come out of existence in time, but not just because a party of enviromentalists in the buff so desire.
It will take many many years, before this may happen. Moreover, some locals think that it is just an antispanish feeling of foreign origin which make them even stand firmer. it is better to stop kicking against the pricks, since bullfight goers and fans regard this as a simple act of caressing