Today there are laws that regulate society’s behaviour, which everyone should respect, and if that isn’t so, the state has legal representatives (Guardia Civil, police...) who must take charge of law enforcement. Neither one nor the other.

On September 19th, in a small town from Avila, Burgohondo, they celebrated their patron saint. As a “tradition” they have bullfights, which are not illegal. That day various people went there, for the manager of El Refugio del Burrito in Andalucia informed us that in that celebration a donkey was used in the bullring as a picador. Since this is absolutely forbidden we decided to record it and then denounce this humiliation. He warned the authorities about our visit and our intentions so that they wouldn’t be surprised about it.

We arrived to the town, bought the tickets for the celebration, and waited till for the event to begin. All afternoon was full of surprises, disagreeable ones of course. The first was that the act began with a walk of all the participants to the bullfight, led by the Guardia Civil. Aren’t the authorities supposed to make the laws be abided? Surprising, isn’t it?

Later, when the first calf was in the bullring, the organizers saw us and came up to tell us that because of us there wasn’t going to be a donkey in the party, and that the town was going to tell them something about it, all this said in very bad manners, of course. We kept on with what we were doing because not only the donkey’s humiliation was our concern, but also: the small cows were being fought by the youngsters of the town, they put them the banderillas (spears), they killed them, and would cut their ears and tail later. All of this is also illegal but they wouldn’t care much about it.

Since the people who were bullfighting, were doing it for the first time, or so it seemed, they would put the banderillas where they could, and had to do it 5 or 6 times to kill the poor cow. Really horrifying.

These and other images we hope will be useful as a proof to be able to end once and for all with barbaric acts like this one.

María