PETA and PACMA Bring Anti-Bullfighting Message to Valencia’s Fallas with Controversial Advertising Truck
Campaign denounced public funding for bullfighting while essential services like firefighting face budget cuts
Valencia – The Spanish animal rights party PACMA and the international organisation PETA launched a campaign against bullfighting during Valencia’s Fallas festival: a truck with LED screens was seen driving through the city’s main streets throughout the weekend, featuring a design that compared a bullfighter killing a bull with a firefighter rescuing a child, alongside the message: “Where do you want your taxes to go?”
Images are available here. Credit: Linas Korta
The initiative aimed to spark public debate on the allocation of public funds and question the legitimacy of subsidising events involving cruelty to animals while essential services, such as firefighting, suffer budget cuts. The issue is particularly pressing after the recent DANA storm in Valencia, which exposed the lack of resources for emergency response and the protection of human and animal lives.
A PACMA spokesperson stated: “While money is spent on perpetuating suffering and animal death, resources for emergency services are being cut. This is a matter of priorities and ethics.”
“Public funds should be used for protecting and improving lives – not taking them”, says PETA Vice President for Europe Mimi Bekhechi. “It’s time to end support for this blood sport and direct those resources where they can best be used to help humans and other animals.”
Every year, tens of thousands of bulls are killed in bullfighting events in Spain alone. In the bullring, assailants on horses drive lances into a bull’s back and neck before others plunge banderillas into his back, inflicting acute pain whenever he turns his head and impairing his range of motion. Eventually, when the bull becomes weak from blood loss, a matador appears and attempts to kill the animal by plunging a sword into his lungs. A knife is used to cut his spinal cord.
More than 125 Spanish towns and cities have declared themselves against bullfighting, and both Spain’s largest newspaper El País and TV channel Canal Toros have ended their coverage of it due to the change in public sentiment and a general lack of interest.
PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment” – points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow PETA on Facebook, X, TikTok, or Instagram.
Contact:
Sascha Camilli +44 207 923 6244; [email protected]
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