They have a license to kill, but they don’t think it’s enough. They want license to mistreat. They have, as they have always had, a perfect alibi: the defense of the rural world, which is also so mistreated. They are people who show little for the most just causes, but who are willing to pick up the mat to claim their presumed right to violence. The call is for next Sunday, March 20, and the march will be attended by ranchers, hunters, galgueros, breeders of bulls for torture. Going with farmers will disguise them as good people, as if watering tomatoes were the same as shooting, as if weeding chives was the same as nailing banderillas, as if sowing wheat was the same as sowing terror. They want to look like clean wheat.
Those with the shotgun and the chain and the hook and the rapier say they want “a living rural world.” The reality is that they demand that the abuse they exercise against other animals continue to be protected; the institutional and mediatic impunity enjoyed by their violence; the infamy of a herbivore being raised for the spectacle of its torture; the ecological and moral disaster that comes with the protection they demand so that pigs or chickens are their victims on farms, which are their hell and that of the land they pollute; the appropriation of the mountain and the roads, which they transform with their shots into places of high risk for the animals that are their cruel objective and for the dogs that they force to accompany them, which they use as if they were tools that do not feel the cold , the hunger, the blows, the fear, the loneliness to which they are subjected. And for anyone who crosses these paths, as happened to Nero a few days ago while he was on a hiking route with his family through the Sierra de Baza Natural Park, in Granada. He found one of those hunters who will be hoarse on Sunday for a “living rural world” and ended up murdered.
The lobbies of animal abusers, mainly hunting associations, will demonstrate in Madrid against the Animal Protection Law in defense of “traditions”. They want that the dogs of the rehalas, direct victims of their violence, are excluded from the protection of the law. They want the greyhounds, the podencos or all the dogs they use in their bloody hunts and hunts to continue chained, locked up in dungeons, receiving beatings. It is not enough for them that the Junta de Andalucía has declared this abuse of Cultural Interest, thus shielding it from the concern of the European Parliament, which has already addressed the Spanish Government and the Autonomous Communities so that the Treaty of Lisbon is complied with, where recognizes animals as sentient beings. Nor do they have enough with the public subsidies they receive, such as the 563,000 euros that the Artemisán Foundation, the visible head of the call for the March 20 demonstration, pocketed in 2020.
They, who are anti-animalists, anti-ecologists and anti-environmentalists, call the society of the 21st century a “green lobby”, the culture that defends the rights of animals, the one that warns of the critical situation of the environment, the one that aspires to a food transition that does not contemplate the aggressive and obsolete ways or methods of those protesters where there are also many gentlemen with bombastic surnames. To pretend that we are not still in the national shotgun they have attracted other small rural organizations to their slogans. But they continue. They despise the rights of animals, they despise the aspiration to an agroecological transition, they despise progress. They are not ashamed to mention Ukraine to support their fallacious speech: “The main function of farmers and ranchers, food production, cannot be relegated to the background, and situations such as the one that occurred after the invasion of Ukraine put it back on manifest,” they proclaim.
But what they call into question is not the dependency of the Spanish agri-food system on the importation of grain and fodder to feed the individuals they call cattle, since they despise the very concepts of sustainability, sovereignty and food security. What they want is that there are no environmental restrictions for their exploitation, which is mainly livestock. It is not the rural world that is in crisis due to the war in Ukraine, but the farmers, because Spain has become the largest pig farm in Europe and this industry is dependent on raw materials that come from Russia and Ukraine, although planting food for animals occupies 66% of the Spanish arable land. The exploiters of March 20 do not protest against this, because their real concern is the meager European Green Deal and what they want is more. If they could, they would make 100% of Spanish soil their hunting ground, their dog hideout, their macro, medium or mini farm, their bullring. That is the people who are going to demonstrate on March 20, with the cut off of the defense of the rural world. Grown by the triumphs of the right and the extreme right that are or that accompany them.
In front of them, the people who defend animals and advocate for a fairer food and social system have organized a TweetStorm so that their voice is heard on the network, since they do not have the economic means of the hunter, rancher and bullfighting lobby . The associations freefox and Lolita Raposa convenes an informative act on the same Sunday, March 20, in the Plaza de Callo in Madrid, under the slogan ‘Rural World without Animal Abuse’.
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