Preventing corridas with shaved horns
(Image by José Luis Blasco)
The forthcoming ‘Feria del Aficionado’ of festejos at San Agustín de Guadalix on May 6 and 7, organised by El Club Taurino 3 Puyazos, will be the first feria to officially gauge, by using a thermal image camera, whether bulls’ horns have been tampered with.
The process has been tried and tested (to date, unofficially) by a veterinarian at Zaragoza’s plaza de toros, José Luis Blasco, who has used the camera on over 400 horns and claims 99% reliability in detecting horns that have been manipulated.
At present, horn tests (if they occur at all) happen after bulls have been killed and taken from the bullring, with the result that fraud is only detected after the event - not much use for the spectator wanting to see animals with intact horns and paying for an entrada on that basis. This new system, however, can be used to identify fraud before a bull comes into the ring.
Señor Blasco explains that horns have two clearly differentiated sections: “There is the irrigated part that contains liquid blood […] and then the fibrous part of the horn, which isn’t irrigated. This fibrous part always constitutes at least one-seventh of the total size of the horn. Each pixel on the camera reflects temperature, so you see temperature differences across an image. You can see a clear difference in colour between the irrigated and non-irrigated parts of a horn. It shows to what degree the fibrous part exists. If it’s less than a seventh of the horn, the horn is not in its natural configuration.
”The camera costs between eight to ten thousand euros. It’s no cheap toy, but first class plazas should certainly use one.”
Alberto Palacios, a director of the Club 3 Puyazos, adds: “ We’re going to publish all the photographs and the report they’ll inform at the bullring. We’ll show a QR code at various points at the bullring that will give the aficionado access to this analysis and a document with all the data on the state of the horns. We hope this will serve as a precedent and that many other bullrings will adopt this practice.”