Maybe to pull this a bit back on topic (although the discussion of the responsibilities of serving alcohol at church functions is a good discussion to have), I thought I’d give my impressions on animal treatment at rodeos.
I spent many years as a participant in rodeo, and attended many more as a spectator. Rodeo animals fit into two categories, ones owned and brought to the event by the competitors and ones owned and brought to the event by a stock contractor. The first group would consist of the horses used by the barrel racers, steer wrestlers and ropers. These animals are typically well cared for, and abuses, while not unheard of, are pretty rare. I know of only one case where a team roper was abusive of his horse, causing serious injury.
The stock contractor is responsible for providing the bucking bulls, bucking horses, steers for the steer wrestling and team roping and calves for the calf roping. They usually arrive with one or more large trailers, the kind you typically see cattle hauled in.
First, the bulls. People seem to focus their outrage at rodeos on how the bulls are treated, although I think that’s a bit misplaced. One thing about bulls, they are really amazing athletes.Most bulls need little or no motivation to buck off a rider. The strap that people see on a bull is tied at about the equivalent place of where some younger guys wear their pants…kind of low, right at the hip/leg crease. If you’ve ever seen a guy with his boxers up and his pants super low, and wondered why that feeling of wearing his pants there didn’t just drive him nuts, you can understand why the strap works. It’s annoying and ticklish and the bull is basically bucking to kick it off, like you might try to shake a pair of low pants off. Sometimes a ‘hot shot’ is used to get the bull out, but it’s not usually necessary. The riders also wear spurs to help their grip, but the bulls hide is very tough. Now, of course, the bull would probably rather just be hanging out in pasture, but I’ve only seen one bull that was ever injured (tail got caught in a gate), and most appear healthy and well fed. If the stock contractor goes to the big pro rodeos, he or she has probably spent a fortune on the bulls, and they are pretty well cared for.
With the bucking horses, it varies quite a bit. The top stock contractors are spending a lot on horses specially bred for rodeo and care for them well. Other contractors buy either failed racehorses or whatever they can get at the auction, try them out in rodeo and if they don’t buck, they go back to auction where they typically go to slaughter. One of the problems is that horses just aren’t as durable as bulls. Outside of the draft crosses that are bred for rodeo, most horses legs just don’t seem to do well with that level of pounding. Jumpers and eventing horses that have comparable stress are usually wearing protective leg gear and have their feet cared for by farriers, but rodeo bucking horses don’t get these protections. In my years of rodeo, I’ve seen more bucking horses seriously injured than their riders.
It’s the treatment of the calves that always caused me the biggest problem. Even back when I was participating, I found the calf roping event was hard to watch. The calf is roped around the neck by a rider on horseback, then the horse stops and the calf is jerked down. The rider dismounts and picks the calf up and throws it back to the ground (the calf has to struggle back to it’s feet before the rider gets there so it can be thrown down again). Then the calf’s legs are tied and the rider waits for a number of seconds to make sure it can’t get loose. The calf then is released and is allowed to stagger off. Perhaps it’s because of the fact that they are so young (it’s kind of like watching kittens get kicked) or perhaps because you know that, unlike the bulls, they aren’t valuable to the stock contractor and will likely be gone pretty soon, but to me it was the event that first made me question rodeo. Calf roping is an event where the animal suffering is very real and in your face, and it is hard to find the entertainment value in it for me.
I would rather see a rodeo than a drunk driver and the heartache it can cause. I am not against alchol as a fund raiser either, My point is that people are more important than animals :thumbsup
r fish.
