These Christmas Cookies Will No Longer Be Named After a Bull Slaughtering Festival

Would you be willing to eat a biscuit if doing so signified the bloody death of an animal?

What if it wasn’t so much that every time you took a bite of said biscuit, an equal-sized chunk simultaneously disappeared from a bull, but more that you were implicitly endorsing and promoting the senseless killing of said bull? Would you still buy that sumptuously flaky biscuit, knowing all that?

If you were reaching for a delicious box of El Toro Vega polvorónes, you may have to ask yourself these very questions. Or at least that was the case until recently.

After all, the 150-year-old, Valladolid-based Dulces Galicia, maker of the biscuits, only recently caved to growing demands that they change the name of their iconic shortbread-style El Toro Vega cookies.

For those of you who may have never spent an entire glorious month traversing Spain with a mouth full of polvorónes, the etymology of El Toro Vega shortbreads derives from Valladolid’s Toro de la Vega festival. The centuries-old event—the festival is believed to date back to the 15th century—has come under pressure in recent years, thanks to its twist on the bullfight. As part of the festival each year, lancers chase a bull through the streets of the town of Tordesillas, with the aim of killing the bull in a pretty damn brutal manner.

Dulces Galicia’s director, Carlos Galicia, says that although he is none too pleased with the name change, he feels that “the quality of the sweet is the most important thing of all with customers asking for it year after year.”

The week before this year’s Toro de la Vega festival saw an estimated 100,000 Spaniards taking to the streets of Madrid in protest. Couple that staggering number with the fact that Dulces Galicia has been facing building pressure from retailers, and it’s easy to understand why they felt the need to roll out a new name before the lucrative Christmas sales period.

“We’ve kept the same logo and font, and have just axed the word ‘Vega’ so they are now called Polvorones El Toro,” explains Galicia.

Although animal-rights activists might scoff at Galicia’s claim that the call to change their polvoróne’s name is “unfair,” he might be onto something, if you believe thinkSPAIN’s claim that it was supermarkets and retailers who first suggested the “El Toro Vega polvorónes” moniker in the first place.

But times change, and naming a cookie after a bull-killing event is no longer considered cool. Going forward, these shortbread cookies will have nothing to do with the ancient but controversial practice of publicly killing bulls in Spain.