Cruel Teneriffe (1895)

AUTHOR: Lovell, Mary Frances

KEYWORDS: animal welfare, bull fighting, blood sports

Twain, Mark. “A Dog’s Tale”
---. Mark Twain’s Book of Animals
---. The Pains of Lowly Life
Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Loveliness
---. Trixy
White, Caroline Earle.
Woolman, John.

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

The article consists in large parts of excerpts from a letter reporting on cruelty towards animals in Spain, particularly in the context of bull fighting. Lovell asks readers to donate to the Department of Mercy of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union so that it can extend its work to places such as Spain by translating and distributing books and pamphlets. In addition such blood sports as to bull fighting, cock fighting, and dog fighting, the report mentions the following instances: a horse “mercilessly beaten about the head until actually the head was misshapen with the swelling,” with the tongue “in two and hanging out of his mouth” (col. 3); dairy cows “clubbed and stoned, beaten and kicked, until several of them died” (col. 3); a crowd at one of “the bull and horse slaughter hells” that “dug out [the animal's] eyes with knives and beat and stabbed him to death” (col. 3); “a free entertainment to the better classes 'of pulling the heads off live ducks'” (col. 3). The report also contains this particularly gruesome account:

A yoke of oxen are fastened to an empty cart of the ordinary two-wheel kind used here, and as many men as can get near the poor animals keep alongside, running and goading them to agony with the terrible long steel spur in the end of a pole or stick, the spectators keeping up in a mob with yells and shouts, while one man keeps in front of the poor oxen. The trick of the affair is that this man shall thus keep his position at the head of the animals. A blind lane is chosen, stopped by a wall or something at one end. Into this the poor animals are driven at a furious gallop, and encountering the wall, fall into a heap along with the heavy cart. The man is supposed to be agile enough to escape, and is looked upon as a hero. It is no matter if the legs of the poor animals are broken by the collision; that is only to be expected, and they are slaughtered on the spot for a further spectacle for the crowd of children, boys and girls, to see, and the meat is sold at a good round price, it being an honor to eat of it (col. 3).