PARIS: Members of the French parliament are expected to vote for the first time on Thursday to go for a possible ban on bullfighting after a national debate that has motivated animal rights defenders against fans of the traditional blood sport.
Despite a healthy public opinion in favor of banning the practice, the bill is possibly to be rejected by a majority of lawmakers who are cautious about stirring up the bullfighting heartlands in the southern parts of France.
There are also chances that the legislation, proposed by a vegan left-wing lawmaker, fails to be tabled for a vote in the parliament at the eleventh hour.
Meanwhile, President Emmanuel Macron has said that they need to go for a reunion as he did not expect the draft law to be passed as according to him it was not the current priority.
Lawmaker denounced tradition as barbarism
Earlier during last week’s initial debate on the parliament’s law commission last week, the majority of the MPs voted against the proposal tabled by member of parliament Aymeric Caron, who denounced the “barbarism” of a tradition that was earlier imported from Spain in the 1850s.
A lawmaker belonging to Macron’s party told AFP on condition of anonymity that Caron has provoked people instead of trying to settle the issue.
The bill being tabled proposes modifying an existing law penalizing animal cruelty to remove exemptions for bullfights according to local traditions.
Permission has been granted in towns like Bayonne and Mont-de-Marsan in southwest France and some parts of the Mediterranean coast.
Ethics of society
However, Caron told a new channel that the traditional character of any activity has never been considered a moral justification for it, adding that there are also traditions that people have become able to stop when an activity collided with the ethics of the society.
It was worth mentioning here according to the National Observatory of Bull Cultures, some 1,000 bulls are killed each year in France. APP/AFP
