Ten-year-old Franco-Mexican bullfighting prodigy Michelito Lagravere is no doubt relieved to be back in Mexico doing what he does best – facing sharp horns in the ring and away from the debate.

Lagravere’s tour in southern France earlier this month was sucked into the heated battle between French animal rights groups and the traditional sport of bullfighting, which has a small but passionate following in southern France.

Lagravere came by his love of bullfighting honestly — born in Mexico to a Mexican mother and a French bullfighting father, Michelito started playing torero as a toddler, with a dishcloth, and first faced off against a month-old calf when he was four. According to his father, he has already fought about 60 animals to the death.

Child toreros are all the rage in Mexico and are viewed by promoters as a way to draw jaded aficionados back to the ring. Four bullfighters between the ages of 10 and 13, including Michelito Lagravere (above), competed at last Sunday’s Concurso Nacional de Escuelas Taurinas at Guadalajara’s Plaza de Toros Nuevo Progreso. Photo by F. Sanchez.

Claire Starozinski of the Alliance Anticorrida filed legal complaints in towns where Lagravere was scheduled to perform this summer – his shows break French labor codes, which bar children under 16 from “jobs that endanger their lives, health or morality,” she argued.

Under pressure, local authorities cancelled two of Lagravere’s recent shows. The remainder went ahead as planned, and the cherub-faced boy with the bowl cut hair was showered with accolades.

In France, children aren’t allowed to become professional bullfighters until age 16, according to the National Observatory of Bullfighting Cultures. Mexico’s loose laws regulating child bullfighters, meanwhile, attract young matadors from around the world, with accidents often sparking international media furors.

Last year, 14-year-old Spaniard Jairo Miguel suffered a punctured lung after being gored by a bull in an Aguascalientes ring, well into his second year fighting in Mexico.

In Mexico, Lagravere is not so unusual. The trend seems to have taken off in the late 1990s, when famed Spanish bullfighter Julian Lopez Escobar, “El Juli,” debuted in Mexico at age 14. In 2005, Rafita Marabal, then eight years old, also started facing off against young bulls and calves, who still outweighed him by several hundred pounds.

“I’m afraid like all fathers are afraid for their children,” Michelito’s father Michel Lagravere told Angela Doland of the Associated Press. “It’s more dangerous than chess, if that’s considered a sport. But I don’t think it’s more dangerous than horseback riding and riding competitions. I think he has a really great career ahead of him.”

Michelito Lagravere performed at Guadalajara’s Plaza de Toros Nuevo Progreso just last Sunday as part of a national competition of bullfighting schools.