On this day in vegan history · April 30, 1991
The Canary Islands Quietly Legislate Bullfighting Out of Existence
A regional law that never once uses the word bull closed the door on bullfighting in the Canary Islands, two decades before Catalonia tried the same fight in the open and lost it in court.
The facts
- Signed
- April 30, 1991, in Santa Cruz de Tenerife
- Law
- Ley 8/1991, de 30 de abril, de protección de los animales
- Signed by
- Lorenzo Olarte Cullén, President of the Government of the Canary Islands
- Published
- Boletín Oficial de Canarias no. 62 (May 13, 1991); Boletín Oficial del Estado no. 152 (June 26, 1991)
On April 30, 1991, Lorenzo Olarte Cullén, then president of the Government of the Canary Islands, signed Ley 8/1991 into law in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Its Article 5 bans using animals in fights, fiestas, spectacles and other activities that involve mistreatment, cruelty or suffering, wording broad enough to cover a bullring without ever naming one. The law's preamble talks at length about cockfighting instead, a tradition it lets survive under new restrictions while predicting its natural disappearance. Bullfighting had already gone quiet in the islands well before 1991, and this law made sure it had no legal way back. Catalonia later banned bullfighting outright in 2010, naming bulls directly, and Spain's Constitutional Court struck that ban down in 2016; the Canary Islands' broader, quieter law was never challenged the same way.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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Catalonia became the second autonomous community in Spain to ban bullfighting after the Canary Islands did so in 1991.
Wikipedia, "Ban on bullfighting in Catalonia"
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
It is a working example of a ban that succeeded by writing cruelty out of the law in general instead of picking a public fight over one tradition by name, a path that held up in the Canary Islands while Catalonia's more direct ban was overturned within six years.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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