The bullfight of the Nîmes festival still without spectators

Nîmes.- The bullfighting businessman Simon Casas admits that “this year they seen a reduction of 10%, or 4.500 individuals, from 2008 numbers, in the number of spectators attending the festival bullfight. Although in the rest of the arenas of France and Spain, an even bigger reduction in audiences, of 30%, has been registered in the same period. Bullfighting supporters blame these numbers on the bad weather, the economic crisis and on the swine flu pandemic and try to invent ways “to pull it up by its bootstraps and find a way to restore interest in the bullfight” : to lower the ticket prices, or to convince the “big killers” to reduce their fees. However these attempts fail because they ignore the fact that the principal reason for this fall is simply that the bullfight is not of interest anymore, nobody enjoys the unnecessary pain of an innocent animal and, we are glad to report, the sensitization against this type of spectacles is a growing factor.