Hi @FiveKnights
At PlayStrategy we don’t condone animal cruelty. However, we are not planning to change the icon for Spanish Draughts due to the bull's iconic link to Spain

If the USA or UK had a dog as its national animal, and they were killing them around 7000 each year (www.peta.org.uk/blog/bull-killings-in-spanish-bullrings-decline-by-56/) and have them participate in more than 16000 events (animalequality.org/news/breaking-blood-fiestas-cruelty-in-spain/) for a meaningless bloodsport, would you have the national animal there as well?

We have flags for Brazilian and American/English. I don't see why make this exception for Spanish draughts.

Hi @FiveKnights

If you put into an image search engine 'icons of Spain', you will get many collages of different things that are linked to Spain, and a bull appears prominently in the large majority, if not all of these collages. Furthermore, in an aesthetic sense* the bull makes a good choice as an icon in our context as we use monotone icons at a small size.

* (I'm not talking about the definition of what the bull represents here)

I do remember the Spanish crest, as seen on the national flag, was considered as an alternative, but I recall that less than half of the group that worked on the icons at that time could recognise the Spanish crest. Flags can also be divisive politically sometimes. It was also decided that the detail of the crest could be lost and hard to distinguish at the sizes we use the icons at.

Another thing to consider when choosing icons is to try and make the icons stand out from each other. If we reused the flag concept too many times it may become difficult to distinguish one flag icon from another. We don't use a flag icon for Russian and instead use another symbol that people association with the country.

Finally, its just not a productive use of PlayStrategy resources to redesign an icon for something that already exists. However, remember that PlayStrategy is an open-source project and we will consider Pull Requests (PRs). The icons are stored in this font file: github.com/Mind-Sports-Games/lila/blob/master/public/font/playstrategy.woff. So if you (or any other user) wishes to create a different icon, we will consider your PR, and can put the suggested change to a vote in the forum to see whether the consensus is that an improvement is being made.