 For the animals
The present-day Catalan Law of Protection of Animals condemns any kind of animal maltreatment, forbidding any spectacle where an animal is ill-treated or killed, with the exception of bullfighting. The Catalan Law of Protection of Animals therefore states that bulls and the horses used in bull-fights are not protected by the law and it denies them rights which all other animals are accorded.
The people who sign this PLI think otherwise. We see that horses and bulls are animal just like any other animals and we want the laws of our country to be a model of democratic spirit: the law must reflect the thoughts and the feelings of the members of the community.
We, the people who are working to promote this Popular Legislative Initiative and the people who have signed, believe that the bull is an animal, and therefore his condition must be regulated by laws that do not accept exceptions. It is not so much a matter of forbidding as of not allowing this type of violence.
We are not asking for the rights of animals to become equal to those of people, but neither do we accept that animals are reduced to objects or things.In fact we absolutely oppose the view that animals are objects.
Any person can see the difference between an animal and a thing: between a dog and a lighter, between a bull and a chair, or between a horse and a stone. And so we ask ourselves why the laws which regulate our society do not reflect this evidence. If each human being is capable of seeing this difference, why is this difference not reflected in our laws; laws which in theory represent our values?
Bullfighting in our culture ratifies the notion that an animal is a thing, an object which can be used to entertain us without taking into account its suffering, without showing it any respect.
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For the education of our children and the environment
Nowadays, with the threat of climatic change and with the ultimatum with which nature alerts us, we must respect the environment more than ever.
However how can we ask the new generation to respect the air or the water, or the mineral kingdom when we do not show even the minimum respect for those natural agents who most resemble us and with whom we share the Animal Kingdom? It is neither logical nor coherent.
Bullfighting is like an obstacle in the path of environmental education and it is a political irresponsibility that the necessary measures are not taken to remove the obstacle urgently.
For social evolution and the evolution of thought
Laws are like the books where the evolutions of rights in a given society are registered. Thus, a decision is made which is temporarily appropriate; democracy is, or should be, a synonym of evolution, and the judicial progress is usually preceded by the progress of thought and knowledge. Knowledge tells us that animals are sentient beings, with the capacity to suffer; science has proven this during the 20th century, and the 21st century corroborates this: all animals, the human being included, and unlike plants, have a nervous system. The nervous system allows an "individual" to feel pain and pain makes us suffer.This capacity to suffer makes all the animal species the same, including bulls.
What can we say of a society which, in the face of scientific progress, does not likewise advance juridically? What can we say then, about ourselves?
We, the signatories of this ILP, do not tolerate that our silence turns us into accomplices of the treatment of an animal as an object; we reject the injustice implicit in the mistreatment of animals and we are opposed to the annihilation of the human mind.
For ourselves and our dignity
Gandhi said that "the evolution of a nation can be seen in the treatment that its animals receive".We, the signees of this ILP, do not doubt this. We are not, nor want to be barbarians or savages, preserving ancestral traditions based on inflicting pain and death on peaceful herbivores.
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