Two blood sports — one pursued by macho types who risk their lives, the other by cowardly types who take no risk at all

The tragic deaths of three men in Spanish bull running have re-focused attention on a practice that is hazardous to humans and immensely cruel to animals.

Every year people are gored, fatally or otherwise while subjecting bulls to run through populated to run built-up areas, a deeply stressful ordeal. The bull’s suffering, however, doesn’t end with this contrived urban stampede.

Each participating bull is afterwards taken to an arena where it is stabbed repeatedly with lances prior to being teased by a strutting matador and then killed with a sword thrust between its shoulders. The once mighty bovine is ready to collapse from exhaustion before it dies.

To be fair to the Spaniards though, they have no monopoly when it comes to hurting animals for fun. In the Republic here we have our national sport of hare coursing. It doesn’t work in quite the same way as the Corrida of course.

The hare, unlike the bull, is a timid creature that runs away from humans and not towards them. None of the human participants in coursing fears the hare. They watch in comfort and safety as the animal is forced to twist and dodge to evade injury or an agonizing death.

Two blood sports: One pursued by macho types who are prepared to risk their own lives in their quest to bring pain and terror to a fellow creature.

The other, by contrast, attracts cowardly types who take no risk at all. At no point in the “game” are they in danger of being attacked by the animal that is at the butt end of their “sport.”

Both character types are a disgrace to humanity. Their callous and reckless attitude to the creatures with which we share this planet is one that, in a wider context, is taking our own species, and the precious world we inhabit, to the brink of extinction.

John Fitzgerald, Callan, Co Kilkenny