by Mia Taylor
Last updated: 1:25 PM ET, Tue July 16, 2024
Luxury tour company Palace Tours is discontinuing the sale of itineraries that include Spain’s tradition of running with the bulls.
According to an announcement from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the Florida-based tour company is dropping ticket sales for tours involving the activity.
While running with the bulls is still listed on the tour company’s website, there are no tour dates currently posted.
More than 60,000 of [PETA's] supporters who were opposed to the activity had reached out to Palace Tours to express their feelings about it being offered.
Reached for comment, Palace Tours President, Supinder Singh, confirmed that the company has indeed ceased offering itineraries featuring running of the bulls activities. But Singh said the decision had nothing to do with pressure from PETA.
"Palace
Tours and its team always was and is totally against torture of animals
and does not condone any harm to any living being and it doesn't need
PETA to teach the difference in right and wrong," said Singh.
The tour company president added that he felt PETA's tactics in pressuring Palace Tours to drop the activity were heavy-handed.
"Palace Tours has always been committed to taking decisions keeping in
mind the business, as well as the greater good of the communities where
it does business," Singh added.
The running of the bulls festival, Singh continued, "provides business to the local community in
and around Pamplona and has its roots in the history and culture of the
region. Many homes in Pamplona depend on income from this festival. Not
everyone has to like it and approve of it and it is not fair to paint
everyone involved as a villain in this festival."
But Singh stressed that the company is "totally against torture of animals and does not condone any harm to any living being."
Singh said there were
many factors that led to the company's decision to discontinue running with the bulls offerings in its itineraries.
"From the tour not
aligning with our core business of luxury trains and tours and experiences,
to the fact that the ROI was not able to justify our spending in
sustainability efforts in the area, the decision was taken that we stop
selling the tours during San Fermines and focus on our core luxury
products - especially the luxury trains around the world," Singh said.
Meanwhile, PETA issued its own statement on the decision saying “Palace Tours did the right thing by dropping ticket sales."
“Global support for Spain’s gory spectacle is at an all-time low, and PETA is calling on other travel companies to follow Palace Tours’ lead,” PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman, said in a statement.
During the running of the bulls, bulls are chased by crowds through Pamplona, Spain's streets and herded into the bullring, where lances are driven into each bull’s back and neck before others plunge banderillas—sticks with a harpoon point on one end—into the bull’s back, inflicting acute pain.
Eventually, when the bull becomes weak from blood loss, a matador appears and attempts to kill the animal by plunging a sword into its lungs. The bull may be paralyzed but still conscious as his ears or tail are cut off and presented to the matador as a trophy and his body is dragged from the arena.
The practice has been protested for years, often led by PETA and the Spanish NGO AnimalNaturalis.
“Bullfighting is the long ritualized execution of bulls and many tourists who come to the bull-runs don’t actually realize that the same bulls they’re running down a couple of streets with are later killed in the bullring that day,” Chelsea Monroe, PETA senior digital campaign officer, said in a 2022 report from Associated Press.
“They’re stabbed over and over again for 20 minutes until they’re dead,” said Monroe. “We want the tourists to know that their money is supporting this really cruel industry.”
However, as the Associated Press also reported in 2022, protests of the annual event, which takes place at the beginning of July, have not impacted enthusiasm for the spectacle. During the annual running of the bulls, Pamplona's population of 200,000 swells to some 1 million as tourists arrive from all over the world to take part in the nine-day bull running festival.
The festival is dedicated to Pamplona's city saint San Fermín and it is said to back to the end of the 16th century.
Each day of the festival includes an “early morning ‘encierro,’ or run, which sees thousands of people running like mad to avoid six bulls as they charge along a winding, cobblestoned route to the city’s bullring,” per AP. “The six bulls are invariably killed in bullfights each afternoon during the festival.”
While bullfighting continues to remain popular in Spain, Associated Press reports that the movement against it has gained significant momentum in recent years.
Palace Tours is not the only company to recently drop activities or offerings that involve animal cruelty. Airbnb, Booking.com, and The Travel Corporation have all removed captive wildlife venues from their offerings in recent years.
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