Bullfighting as dark tourism: cultural experience or anachronism?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
New research in the fast-emerging domain of tourism and animal ethics indicates that the instrumental and utilitarian use of animals in tourism is no longer accepted as a favorable norm. Some of this pressure is coming from the tourists themselves who are increasingly questioning the ethics of such uses. We test this premise through research on one of the most contested forms of animal-based tourism in the form of the Spanish bullfight. Our purpose was to gain a qualitative understanding of ethical issues related to bullfighting, as well as to offer insight for understanding factors that affect tourists' overall evaluation of travel experience at this attraction. The study is informed by a framework on animals as dark tourism attractions, with the central aim of investigating the attitudes of tourists toward bullfighting as one of several variables included in the framework. Emphasis was placed on looking for patterns in concepts and how they are communicated; understanding intentions of individuals; identifying propaganda and bias in communication; and understanding consequences of communication, particularly as it relates to a tourism destination's image. Employing a thematic analysis of 74 TripAdvisor posts, dated from May of 2014 through to November 2022, we found that the majority of posts reflected negative perceptions associated with bullfighting, including cruelty, unfair “fight,” and torture. In contrast, a minority of posts reflected positive perceptions, including culture, ceremony, pomp, and history. These findings have potential implications for the image of tourism destinations, such as Spain, as dark tourism attractions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".