Dear Sirs:

I have delayed writing this letter, having heard of the severe flooding in Arles. I am sorry for that misfortune which had befallen your city.

I have led annual tours to Paris, the Loire Valley, and Provence since 1976: each year, we have included your city during our week in Provence. In all, over these twenty-seven years, I have brought more than one thousand Canadians to visit Arles, to enjoy its ambience, to appreciate its history, to view its monuments. Yours is a city which has so very much to attract tourists!
On October 19th, I brought a group of forty-four Canadians and Americans to Arles, expecting to have a rich and rewarding day there; I had prepared them in advance for all the rich marvels that Arles has to offer. Inste ad, however, we found bloody bull-fights -- in truth, bloody bull-slaughters -- taking place in your famous Arena.

I cannot tell you how incredulous, how disgusted, how sickened, how disillusioned was our American-Canadian group that a city such as Arles, apparently civilised, permits such cruelty in the name of "sport". The barbarism of ancient Rome is still being encouraged by modern Arles. Such a spectacle would never be permitted, I have learned, in other areas of France: it is truly a disgrace to you, to your city, and to the district of Provence!

The purpose of this letter is to inform you that, until this barbarism is renounced and banned within your city, all my future tours to Provence will boycott Arles. I shall, moreover, advise all my many contacts in the travel industry that they, too, should re-route their tours in such a way as to avoid Arles. I shall describe in detail what your city offers as "sport".

For the few hundred barbarian-minded individu als who enjoy the spectacle of injured animals being teased, tormented, and then butchered, you are, I am sure, losing thousands of people like those on my tours who are disgusted and sickened that you permit such spectacles. None of those on my tour would ever consider returning to Arles, having learned what happens in your famous Arena! We are disgusted by Arles, by Provence, by France for permitting and even encouraging this sort of display!

The baffling fact is that your city has so much else to offer: why do you permit this cruelty? In virtually all the nations of the West and indeed in the rest of France, this sort of "sport" is regarded as criminal! Why do you permit it?

I shall, at any rate, bring no more tours to Arles; and I shall do my best to alert other tour leaders to do the same.

Yours very truly,

Hugh R. L. MacDonald
MacDonald Tours
The City Council of Arles
The Provence Bureau of Tourism
The Bureau of Tourism of France