Ok, so maybe there is some cruelty in Rodeo... but to whom?

While I was in college in Ohio, my family moved from Maryland to Texas... but they didn't change their name so I found them. My younger sister married a cowboy. So you might think I'd have been to a rodeo by now.

I've spent my whole career in animal welfare, much of it as a cruelty investigator, so you might think I'd hate the rodeo.

Turns out, neither thing is completely true. I just went to the rodeo for the first time in Houston in March.

I had always heard that rodeos were cruel, specifically:

• That horses and bulls buck because of items tied onto, around or through body parts in order to keep the animals frantic.
  
  
• The rodeo care of animals is questionable.


• Humans have a choice to participate and the animals don't so it's morally questionable to participate or support.

Well, at least these three things were not in evidence at the rodeo and I found out some things no one ever told me.

• The rodeo in Houston is staffed by volunteers; 22,000 of them.


• Money raised at the rodeo goes to scholarships for the kids who have raised competition animals and placed art in the auction.


• A great deal of money is raised by the student art in the auctions; hundreds of thousands of dollars.


• There are as many veterinarians on site as physicians, in case anyone gets hurt; cowboys, non human participants and spectators.


• The bulls trot back to their stalls on their own as soon as they buck their riders off, usually in less than 8 seconds. The bulls work once each night except for the championship culmination. Wait, 8 seconds of work per day for one month per year.......some of them must work at local rodeos on the side, right? If not that's about 10 minutes of work per year.


• No horse has been injured since the early 90's......of course until this year; I was comforted by the handling of the injured horse.

I was fortunate to have a real cowboy on hand to explain the scoring system for a few events. Do you know the cowboy and the horse or bull get the same points? What I mean is if the horse or bull works very hard at detaching the rider he gets more points, up to 50. If the cowboy works very hard at staying on the horse or bull, he can also get 50 points. A perfect score of 100 would be rare but there is no mistaking the contest is not about subduing the animal. In fact, one of the bulls has never allowed a rider to make it a full 8 seconds; required for any score for the man at all. This particular bull trotted happily back to his bed and breakfast after about 2 seconds. He knew the way and he was clear that his work was done. Of course he thought about rushing a few staff members on the way home but decided it just wasn't worth the effort. He was pretty tired after the full 3 seconds of work had taken its toll.

And yes, the calf roping was shocking. An average sized man (albeit a Texas grown average size) leaps from a galloping horse onto a moving steer and ties it up, in just a few seconds while his horse keeps his rope taught. Amazing. The steer is immediately untied and he trots back to his stall for a rest. Some of them were escorted by a man on horseback rather than allowed to trot around the arena more than once.

So bare back bronco riding was the event that resulted in the rodeo's first horse injury in over a decade. Just as the 8 seconds was coming to a close the horse, Trigger, sat back on his haunches and quietly slumped to the ground on top of his rider.  I watched as the rider (with a broken femur) was escorted out of the arena on a stretcher. So what were they going to do with the horse who was just as immobilized?

Same thing the human got. Veterinary staff and livestock handlers rushed to the side of the horse, gave him a tranquilizing drug, immobilized his feet and rolled him onto a horse sized stretcher, which was winched into a horse sized ambulance. It turns out the horse suffered a fractured vertebra in the lower back, not a survivable injury. This was tragic. The crowd was shocked and the announcers promised to report back the outcome as soon as it was known. I don't know what happened to the rider....they never said. I understand it was in the paper the following day.

My first rodeo left my ideas about animals as companions unchanged. Horses and dogs seemed to have co-evolved in a partnership with humans wherever our ancestors were found together. Domesticated animals seem always be the social, easy breeders and keepers, who don't compete with us for food or think of humans as food. The domestics we keep don't appear in nature except for horses, so we don't seem to have changed them much despite our epochs together.

But what I was told about rodeos appears to have been incomplete at best. I certainly don't consider myself an animal communicator but as an experienced animal caretaker I can say the animals at the rodeo were in peak condition; any dog show competitor knows that takes a lifetime of constant attention. And while some of the animals are quite young, making this lifetime commitment arguably less significant, and some have been produced for food and fiber, there was no sign of disrespect for their lives or actions that could in any way be considered cruel or even insensitive.

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