Colombia bans traditional bullfighting
Bullfighting has a long tradition in Colombia. In May, parliament voted to ban it. Now President Gustavo Petro has signed the corresponding law.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro signed the “No Más Olé” law on Monday, which bans bullfighting for everyone in the country and was passed by Congress in May of this year.
«We cannot tell the world that killing living and sentient beings for entertainment is culture», Petro said at a ceremony in a bullfighting arena in Bogotá. He emphasized that the destruction of nature would mean the end of humanity and that nature has rights that exist independently of humans and must be respected.
The bullfighting arena will in future serve as a stage for «culture, sport, life and not death», said the president. The country now has three years to convert the bullfighting arenas into cultural and arts centres. Workers who earned their living from bullfighting would need to be retrained, with losses kept as low as possible, Petro added.
Bullfighting has been a tradition in Colombia since the Spanish colonial era. In recent years, however, there have been repeated protests by animal rights activists. Colombia was among the eight countries that permit bullfighting as a legal activity, along with Spain, Portugal, France, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela.
More on the subject of recreational hunting: The scientific evidence is presented in the overview Studies on the Effects of Recreational Hunting.
The position of IG Wild beim Wild: IG Wild beim Wild rejects recreational hunting. Our model is the canton of Geneva, which has managed without recreational hunting since 1974: without hunting seasons, without hunting dogs, without driven hunts, without high seats, without the animal cruelty and crime that go hand in hand with hunting season elsewhere. What has worked there for over fifty years disproves every position paper by JagdSchweiz. An association that bases its policy on claims it refutes in its own documents is not a professional organisation, but a factory for misinformation.
