FIGHT IN BULL RING

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 986, 31 May 1930, Page 9

FIGHT IN BULL RING

GIRL LEADS BATTLING MOB OF PROTEST EXCITEMENT NEAR PARIS LONDON, Thursday. The Paris correspondent of the “Daily Mail” says the 10,000 spectators who attended a bull fight which had been arranged to take place at Melun, 25 miles south of Paris, in aid of scholastic charities, got far more excitement than anticipated. Five hundred men, women and girls, membdis of the League for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, tried to stop the spectacle, in spite of an announcement that the bulls would not be killed. The protesters rushed to the front rows, armed with police whistles. When the picadors appeared mounted on horses whose flanks were bleeding from spurs, the members of the league, led by a girl, scrambled into the bull-ring and linked hands, thus cutting off the picadors from the bulls in the enclosure. Pandemonium broke out. The spectators rose to their feet howling. There were free fights in the ring. FREE FIGHTS IN RING

The gates into the arena were opened and a squadron of mounted gendarmes charged the protesters, while foot police pulled them out of the arena, amid the cheers of the crowds. The protesters threw smoke bombs into the arena and fresh fighting began. Meanwhile an airplane which the league had chartered hovered overhead. The picadors and matadors rushed for shelter, and a bull seized the opportunity to charge a matador, whom the league members tried to thrust back into the arena while he was climbing the fence, to which he clung desperately. The gendarmes won the battle, after many heads had been broken, and the bull fight was concluded. It is expected that the affair will raise the question of the legality of bull fights in France.