Cows

My brother went to see a bullfight in Alicante. He seemed quite surprised that it was bloody - I wondered what he'd expected. Personally I am totally opposed to bullfights. Arguments about art and heritage cut no ice with me. I'm a bit ambivalent about some things that some people consider to be animal rights issues though - animals in zoos being a good example.

It's a bit the same with bull related events here in Spain. There are lots. Some are plain barbaric, they are simply the abuse of animals by humans reduced to their most savage but others aren't, in my opinion, quite so bad. There are some bull events that worry me no more than people keeping their dogs inside all the time or the donkey rides at the seaside. I'm sure you've seen Sanfermines on the telly where all those people run in front of half a dozen bulls in what's called an encierro, and which I think we call bull running. I don't care about it one way or the other. I'm not interested in seeing it but I don't worry that it happens either. I cannot say the same about the events where bulls are or were cut to pieces with lances or brought down by thousands of darts in their body.

Now in sunny Pinoso we have a bull related event, though they're actually bullocks rather than bulls. The locals always refer to them as vacas, cows. The bullocks are introduced into a big fenced area where anyone over the age of 16 can choose to join them. On the stupid side of the fence there are a number of islands and obstacles which give a semi safe haven for the humans when they have a bullock close behind. Lots of people sit atop the sturdy fences that surround the arena, or indeed on some of those islands and obstacles, to watch the action but there are probably as many people in the makeshift cafes or chiringuitos dotted around the site having a drink and natter. Traffic between the food and drink stalls and the arena is non stop.

Yesterday evening I went to the venue a good half an hour before the event was scheduled to start. I was going to take some pictures of the chiringuitos and their customers. I had no intention of taking any pictures of the event itself. Inside one of the chiringuitos a bloke asked me if I'd take a picture of him and his mates. I did. Then he asked if I'd take some more inside the ring, he explained, and this made me feel reasonably stupid, that he and his chums were the team that made the event work. They were the animal handlers. Perhaps if I'd read the legend on the red shirts they were wearing - Vacques el Pinos: Organizacion - I'd have caught on earlier.

Whether I'd misunderstood or whether the plans changed in the couple of hundred metres walk I have no idea, both are equally plausible, but I was taken to the pens where the bullocks are kept before the event and told to take photos to my heart's content. Given that all of the potential pictures were either directly into bright sun or of bullocks behind sturdy and close spaced bars in dark interiors that wasn't quite as good an opportunity as it may sound. The blokes were being pleasant to me but they were also getting things ready. I felt out of place and my Spanish showed the strain. Anyway, eventually, they suggested that I could use a viewing platform on top of the pens to watch the action and that's what I did.

The process for letting the bullocks in and out was really clever. The animals started in individual pens. There were also two paddocks and a passageway that led to the arena outside. One of the paddocks was empty and, in the other, were two animals with big horns. From their colour I recognised them as mansos or cabestros. Manso in Spanish means something like calm or docile. When you watch the Sanfermines bull running there aren't six bulls; there are twelve. Six of them are these mansos. The idea is that these non aggressive animals know the ropes and they lead the way for the fighting bulls showing them where to go.

So when it's time for a bullock to do its stuff a pen is opened by opening a door, the door opens against a wall so that it forms a barrier that the bullock can't pass and behind which the door opener can hide. It's the same on the gate that leads from the pens into the passageway, the doors are opened, whilst the handlers are shielded behind the metal gates. The bullocks take the obvious path - out into the arena. The bullocks then chase around the arena for a while every now and again giving someone a scare and occasionally catching someone and giving them a bit of a going over. I was on the phone with my camera hanging limply by my side as I watched a young man get thrown about three metres into the air, twice, pushed around on the floor a bit before the bullock was finally distracted away. He was fine. The bullock was fine too.

After a while it's time for the bullock to come in. A door was opened from the paddock where the mansos were so that they could trot out into the arena. The bullock saw them and came over to join them at which point the mansos ambled back into their paddock. The bullock followed and, as soon as he was inside a door, the door was closed behind him using a pulley system. At the same time another two gates were opened allowing him to pass from one paddock to the empty one which was where each successive participant ended up. A lot sweatier and probably scared and confused but basically no worse for wear. I was standing next to some bloke who later introduced himself as the cattle breeder who had supplied the animals for the event. He was from Xalo and even though he was shouting in Valenciano to the red shirts I suddenly realised that the mansos were actually mansas, that is to say they were cows not bulls. That's presumably why the bullocks were interested in following them. All together very informative interlude.

There are lots of pictures in the August 2018 snaps section which you can access by clicking on this link or on the tab at the top of the page if it's still there!

Undressing and covering oneself in fake blood

I'm feeling a bit Sanjay Gandhi today - not because I've won a dodgy car building contract - but because I've been part of an enforced sterilization program. I didn't even offer a free portable radio.

Britons who live here are often very vocal in their complaints about how animals are treated in Spain. On a big scale the bullfights which kill horses and bulls in front of cheering crowds give them obvious ammunition. These sort of things no longer go unnoticed by lots of ordinary Spaniards either. Many Spanish people have no time for these hangovers from bear baiting times. Every time that the people of Tordesillas arm themselves with lances and sit astride their horses ready to cut down a bull they are harried by protestors. It's the same in Coria where the bull is peppered with little darts and then has his balls cut off. They no longer throw a live goat from the church tower in Manganeses de la Polvorosa to be caught in a fire fighter style blanket having bowed to public pressure. In Carpio del Tajo the they have not used live geese in their festival for over thirty years - nowadays the geese that they wrench the heads off, as they ride by on horses, are already well dead. Half naked protestors daubed with fake blood make it less comfortable for the bullfight crowds to get to their seats and so it goes on. Lots of the barbarism has been toned down but there are still plenty of spectacles which, at the very least, use the distress and suffering of animals as a form of supposed entertainment.

On a much smaller scale the expat rural Britons often have stories about puppies abandoned outside their homes, kittens thrown into rubbish bins and hunting dogs abandoned on the road when they are too old to keep up with the hares they are supposed to catch. Hunting, by your everyday Joe, is still very common in the countryside.Then of course there are, from time to time, stories in the British popular press about some donkey being terribly mistreated and most of us have a story about a horse, mule or dog tethered in the midday sun without shade or water.  On the other hand most Britons will add to that a story about other Britons who have abandoned dogs when they return to the UK as a reminder that Spaniards don't have the market cornered in mistreatment of animals.

Despite all of this apparent random cruelty there are lots of animal protection laws in Spain and they were recently beefed up which is probably why it's only in the recent past that people have started to be prosecuted. One of the reasons is that the perpetrators have made it impossible for the offence to be ignored. Post a video on YouTube or WhatsApp of setting fire to a cat and you can be pretty sure it will go viral. Shortly afterwards expect a house call from the Guardia. That was the case with a couple of twentyish year olds who had a whale of a time jumping on piglets and squashing and killing seventy of them in the process.

I remembered the piglet case from the news. There was another one about a bullfighter who had been mistreating a horse and as I Googled for the information I came across lots of newspaper articles along the line - "Guardia Civil shelves cruelty case", "Town Hall drops charges against man who arranged illegal dog fights" and so on. I wrote an article for the TIM magazine about catching song birds to eat and, there again, lots of the articles I read in my research talked about how the authorities turned a blind eye to illegal capture techniques. There is still an awful lot of acceptance of animal mistreatment in Spain though the idea that animals have no "rights" is far less prevalent than it once was.

Around here there are several animal rescue charities - lots are run by Britons. It's probably fair to say that dog rescue is the biggest area but I've been to both a horse and a primate rescue centre close by. Cats are often covered by the dog charities but Spanish thinking on cats is that, generally, they can take care of themselves. So whilst a loose dog will be hauled off to a charity for adoption or to the Town Hall dog pound nobody really takes much notice of the moggies unless they are being mistreated.

I may have mentioned that we took on a couple of cats recently. We got them from an association in Pinoso which is called Gatets sense llar del Pinós. The name is in the local Valencian language but it means something like Pinoso Kittens without a home.

Before we'd got the cats we had an occasional visitor to our garden, a big, mature, white, male cat. He was wary of us but semi approachable so we left out some dried cat food when we remembered. We hadn't seen him for a while but, as soon as we got the two rescue cats, he started to turn up regularly. There was a lot of screaming and bits of fur and cats refusing to come down from trees. The white cat even found a back way into the house so he could eat the food we'd left out for our two. We had a lot of fun with a hosepipe and I invested money in a water pistol. But Maggie had bigger plans. She borrowed a trap from Gatets; one can of Premium cat food and he was captured. And if you go back to the first sentence you will see who it was who got to take him to the vet where the castration was paid for by the local Town Hall via the Charity. I paid for the flea and parasite stuff though. He was obviously pretty sore and very wobbly as he came out of the carry box and made his way gingerly out of our garden.

Horny!

The bloke in this video is a mobile mechanic, a Brit, who works around here. Someone told us that he'd had a bad time with the cows during the Pinoso Fiesta but I only got around to looking today. Nice eh?

He got away with bruises and what not. Nothing broken, no long term physical damage.