The obvious pun here is making my typing fingers tingle so I’m going to get this out of the way early …. This is bull.

This photograph is doing the rounds on Facebook and was sent to us by a friend of SMD.

The image is real – the story is …… bull!

The photograph is real, the story that accompanies it, that the image is of Columbian bull-fighter turned animal activist Álvaro Múnera Builes, having a mid-ring epiphany is false.

Bullfight blogger FISKEHARRISON says that it is in fact Spanish matador, Francisco Javier Sánchez Vara, and he is most likely “crossing himself or he might be wiping away a bead of sweat, but whatever he is doing, the reason he is sitting down in the path a dying bull as it walks along the barrier has nothing to do with despair.” 

In addition the quote that comes with the photo;

“And suddenly, I looked at the bull. He had this innocence that all animals have in their eyes, and he looked at me with this pleading. It was like a cry for justice, deep down inside of me. I describe it as being like a prayer – because if one confesses, it is hoped, that one is forgiven. I felt like the worst shit on earth.”

comes from an article by Antonio Gala Velasco in the Spanish newspaper El País in 1995, NOT Múnera.

We’re calling it DEBUNKED!  Thanks to Kellee from NSW,  for sending this one our way.

*We’re not getting involved in any pro or anti bullfighting discussions, we’re just dispelling a myth!*