The president of the Canarian Drag Federation, Santiago Cacho, regrets that “3,000 kilometers away some make judgments about traditions they are unaware of”. The cattle drag contest, which turns 33 this year, only includes four tests a year and a grand final. In each test, the maximum competition time is three minutes, so Cacho emphasizes that “a team can only compete a year for a maximum of 12 minutes.” In addition, he insists that races last an average of about 30 seconds, so most animals do not compete for more than two or three minutes each year. The best, capable of losing 20 seconds, compete for less than two minutes in 12 months.
Cacho does not hide his anger and regrets that a Valencian senator, «who has not bothered to ask us or to know this tradition, puts us in the same bag as the bullfights of Bulls». And he states that “once you’re done, you could worry about requesting a ban on mascletá (pyrotechnic displays typical of your community), due to the suffering that noise causes to animals.”
“Ranchers take care of their animals 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They do not want them to suffer or harm them, but they are work animals, weighing between 1,200 and 1,400 kilos, to which you have to put a nose (arigón in the Canary Islands) in the nose to be able to handle them safely. The humanization of animals does a lot of damage and it seems that if someone wants to treat a cow as a person, they respect her more than the farmer who raises her, feeds her, cleans her and makes her bed every day, ”explains Cacho.
The president of this federation defends respect for animals in drag competitions and recalls that the regulation itself prevents abuse and provides punishments for people who at some point may exceed themselves. He defends the key importance of competitions to dignify livestock labor and make possible the conservation of a breed that “without dragging or pilgrimages, would become extinct.” In his opinion, “there are animalists who behave like Taliban and do not propose any alternative other than to do what they consider appropriate.”
The cattle drag competition includes four tests a year, with a maximum time of 3 minutes, so these animals cannot compete more than 12 minutes each year
“Dragging is a traditional sport in which about 200 people participate in the Canary Islands. We have a children’s league in Tenerife and on La Palma we are integrating people with disabilities ”, emphasizes Cacho. In this sport, pairs of cows or bulls drag weights placed on a wooden corsa, “adapted to the physical characteristics of the animals.” There are six categories, three for cows and three for bulls, which, depending on their size, drag 600, 700, 900 or 1,100 kilos for 70 meters. There is a special category of 1,500 kilos that currently only has one team in Tenerife. “But we must bear in mind that two bulls can weigh about 2,600 kilos and drag much less than their body weight,” highlights Cacho.
María Eugenia Rodríguez, evaluator of the Canarian bovine breed and worker of the Canarian Drag Federation, insists that farmers do not harm their animals: «The rod used in competitions does not have a stinger, and is only used as a guide , and the arigones, which are placed in the nose, serve to control animals that have great strength, not to mistreat them.
