Los Angeles rodeo clowns hide behind girls riding sidesaddle

And behind anyone else who ever once rode a horse or trained a dog

LOS ANGELES––Why are macho cowpokes and bull-riders,  many with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks,  abruptly playing up what they term in campaign literature “the rich cultural history of California rodeo”?

To translate,  rodeo promoters and participants are suddenly hiding behind the African-American and Latino farmhands their ancestors tried to lynch out of the cattle business;  gay rodeo fans;  and escaramuza participants,  who ride sidesaddle in pretty dresses,  performing synchronized riding routines at charreadas.

Conspicuously,  escaramuzas neither grab terrified calves by their dung-smeared tails,  nor often punch their horses in the head,  as do the male charros videotaped recently in Illinois by Showing Animals Respect & Kindness.

(See “Cultural” defenses for charreada & cockfighting crumble.)

Plastic barrels are not enough to save rodeo

Looks as if the self-proclaimed saviors of rodeo have discovered that clowns in plastic barrels are not quite enough to save them from democracy.

Enough of the public have by now seen enough of the alleged “sport” of busting up animals that the Los Angeles City Council’s Personnel,  Audits,  and Animal Welfare Committee on December 7,  2022 approved and sent to the full city council an ordinance that would ban the use of spurs,  flank straps,  and electric prods to make the animals used in rodeos perform.

Helping to push the proposed ordinance through the committee was a survey of 600 Los Angeles residents commissioned by Last Chance for Animals,  which found that 72% favor it.

Los Angeles City Council to consider the proposed ordinance in January 2023

The proposed ordinance is not expected to go before the full 15-member city council,  which has five newly elected members,   until mid-January 2023.

The city of Los Angeles,  unlike some of the surrounding suburbs in Los Angeles County,  has not been a major rodeo venue in decades––actually,  not since the rodeo industry,  led by film stars Will Rogers and Hoot Gibson,  crushed Amendment 21,  to ban rodeo,  by a 64% to 36% margin in 1928.

The campaign for passage,  led by the Oakland-based Latham Foundation,  was outspent many times over by rodeo promoters.  At that,  though,  Amendment 21 won the support of the PTA,  YMCA,  Women’s Christian Temperance Union,  and every major humane society in California.

It isn’t 1928 any more

Los Angeles today is the biggest city in the most populous U.S. metropolitan area.

Nearby Pasadena,  San Francisco,  just 380-odd miles north,  and Pittsburgh,  Pennsylvania,  nearly 2,500 miles east,  already have bans on the use of spurs,  flank straps,  and electric prods in effect.

Should the full Los Angeles City Council accept the Animal Welfare Committee recommendation to ban spurs,  flank straps,  and electric prods,  there may be ripple effects throughout the state of California and,  perhaps,  the U.S. as a whole.

Rodeo v. public hanging

That might accelerate the so far gradual demise of the rodeo industry which,  coincidentally,  emerged approximately parallel to the wane of public hanging as cheap popular entertainment,  at least for certain elements,  and enjoyed brief resurgences in the 1950s and early in the present century.

The relationship of rodeo to public hangings goes beyond just that a human can only be jerked into convulsions by a rope around the neck once,  whereas cattle may be jerked down multiple times,  week after week,  until their necks or their legs finally snap.

Keyword searches of www.NewspaperArchive.com quickly establish that lynchings in the ten westernmost states,  between the end of the U.S. Civil War and 1900,  were both usually well-attended and about 3.5 times more common than rodeos.

This coincided with the expansion of the open-range cattle industry across the western states.

Who got lynched?

Open-range cattle ranchers initially employed chiefly Latinos and Native Americans,  who were already there,  having earlier staffed the haciendas of Spanish settlers,  and were still there after the haciendas were occupied and appropriated by gun-slinging squatters,  chiefly after the Mexican War of 1846-1848.

After the U.S. Civil War of 1861-1865,  however,  came fierce competition for jobs from newly freed African-American ex-slaves with cattle-handling experience,  and even more,  from former Confederate soldiers who often knew little more than how to ride and shoot.

A closer look at Old West lynching accounts via NewspaperArchive demonstrates a tendency for the African-American victims to have been cowboys accused of rape,  for the Latino victims to have been cowboys accused of cattle rustling,  and of the lynch mobs to be composed primarily of former Confederates,  among whom an acknowledged goal––though seldom expressed in economic terms––was driving out competitors of other races and cultures.

Bull-baiting

In time,  as the rural West and the cattle industry in particular came to be more racially segregated than the rural South ever was,  rodeo came to replace lynching as a weekend “sport” of idle cowhands.

Bull-baiting with pit bulls came west with the former Confederate cowboys at least as far as Texas and Oklahoma,  eventually reaching California,  where it was recently seen as an after-act at the California Rodeo Salinas.

(See SHARK video shows dogs baiting bulls at Calif. Salinas Rodeo 2019 and District Attorney will not prosecute alleged bull-baiting at Salinas rodeo.

Bill Pickett

Along the way,  the Texas-born African-American rodeo legend Bill Pickett (1870-1932) broke into rodeo circa 1884 by “inventing” bulldogging,  biting the lower lips of cattle and pulling them down  by his teeth in emulation of a pit bull.

While Pickett is today widely credited with inventing “steer wrestling,”  reality is that what he did was an animalistic stunt event,  like an “African Dodger” show,  in which participants paid to throw baseballs at the head of a black man deemed expendable.

Barred by racial segregation from participating in most other rodeo events,  Pickett went on to promote rodeos starring all African-American performers,  including his brother Ben,  before a bronco kicked him to death on April 2,  1932.

The “Bill Pickett” rodeo circuit persists today much as does the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team,  as a vestigial trace of “Jim Crow” segregation and racism.

Tools used daily by ranchers?!

The anti-animal-and-environmental advocacy organization Protect the Harvest,  founded by oil baron Forest Lucas,  appears to be playing the rodeo clown role in opposition to the proposed Los Angeles ban on spurs,  flank straps,  and electric prods,  beginning with the one-liner that “The tools used in rodeo are those used daily by our ranchers.”

Ranchers riding horses and using spurs over the past several generations have been scarcer than ranchers not using gasoline-powered three-wheelers and four-wheelers.

Roping cattle from horseback as a routine ranch procedure ended with the use of herding cattle into squeeze chutes for branding.

This was an adaptation from the use of squeeze chutes to load cattle into train cars,  introduced between 1865 and 1895,  as railroads pushed their way into every corner of the West.

Long before diesel locomotives replaced steam engines,  roping cattle had become a skill seen mainly at Wild West shows.

Who’s in the barrel?

Flank straps,  used to make steers and horses buck,  have never been a tool of ranching,  since ranchers’ goal of moving cattle and horses is to get them to go quickly,  without bucking or balking.

Electric prods are routinely used in ranching,  and at slaughterhouses too,  but never to make an animal buck or bolt.

Also among the rodeo clowns in the plastic barrel is the Western Sports Industry Coalition.

This includes the Professional Bull Riders Association,  the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association,  the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo,  the Compton Cowboys (based in Los Angeles County),  the Indian National Finals Rodeo,  the American Quarter Horse Association,  the Women’s Professional Rodeo Association,  the National High School Rodeo Association,  and the Pacific Coast Cutting Horse Association.

Western Justice?

Also among the Western Sports Industry Coalition is an entity called Western Justice,  a common euphemism for lynching,  and the Union de Asociaciones de Charros del Estado California,   whose rules––if strictly observed instead of widely ignored––would all but end charreada as closely documented throughout the 2022 Illinois charreada season by Showing Animals Respect & Kindness.

(See Boone County “Mexican rodeo” bucks Mexican rodeo rules.)

Alleges the Western Sports Industry Coalition,  “There is much more behind this proposed ban in Los Angeles than the concern for bulls and horses.  The Los Angeles City Attorney was tasked to write an ordinance banning rodeo and ‘rodeo-like’ events based on language used in a Pittsburgh ban which contains over-reaching and dangerous verbiage.  Specifically, the Pittsburgh ordinance reads:

“635.04 No rodeo or rodeo related event shall be permitted in which animals are induced or encouraged to perform through the use of any practice or technique,  or any chemical,  mechanical, electrical or manual device that will cause,  or is likely to cause physical injury,  torment or suffering. The following devices are specifically prohibited at all events:  electric prods or shocking devices,  flank or bucking straps,  wire tie-downs,  and sharpened or fixed spurs or rowels.”

Agility dogs & cat shows

Pertaining exclusively to “rodeo or rodeo related” events,  the Pittsburgh ordinance has never been applied to anything else.

Nonetheless,  claims the Western Sports Industry Coalition,  “Should this legislation move forward, all animal activities are at risk. You have an agility dog?  No more agility.“

Has anyone ever seen spurs,  bucking straps,  wire tie-downs,  or “electric prods or shocking devices” used on agility dogs?

According to the Western Sports Industry Coalition,  “Dressage,  show jumping,  hunter/jumper,  barrel racing,  breed shows,  reined cow horse,  team penning,  team sorting,  lead-line classes,  dog shows,  field trials,  hunting,  police K9,  schutzhund,  cat shows,  horse units in parades such as the Rose Parade, would fall under this language.”

Has anyone ever seen spurs,  bucking straps,  wire tie-downs,  or “electric prods or shocking devices” used at a cat show?

How does this resemble rodeo?

In what respects,  other than in leaving horseshit behind them,  do most of these other events even remotely resemble rodeo?

“Livestock shows,  4-H,  and Future Farmers of America exhibitions would also be included as well as educational exhibitions,”  the Western Sports Industry Coalition contends.

Has anyone seen a livestock show,  4-H,  or Future Farmers of America exhibition at which sheep,  goats,  pigs,  or any other animals wore flank straps,  were handled with spurs,  or were roped and body-slammed?

Continues the Western Sports Industry Coalition,  “Training is exactly what the Pittsburgh ordinance was attacking when they used the words “practice or technique.”

“I plain roped their heads off”

The Western Sports Industry Coalition appears to have missed the last 150 years in the evolution of animal training technique,  including “operant conditioning” as developed by Edward Lee Thorndye,  1874-1949,  and B.F. Skinner,  1904-1990,  and all the variants thereof,  including “positive reinforcement training,”  and “clicker training.”

But the kind of “practice” the Western Sports Industry Coalition laments being prohibited appears actually to be what former Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association staff writer Gavin Ehringer described in “The Mud,  the Blood and the Poop:  A Rodeo Insider Takes You Behind the Chutes of America’s Cowboy Sport, ”  published by the Colorado Springs Independent on August 19,  2004:

“As a calf roper once confided to me, ‘Yeah, I accidentally killed and injured lots of calves when I was learning.  I mean,  I plain roped their heads off till I really learned how to handle them and not hurt them.’”

Many others have observed and described rodeo performers doing similar,  but seldom so vividly.

Whiplash

The Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association,   the Western Sports Industry Coalition  reminds in another rodeo clown one-liner,  claims a “99.9 % safety rating in the sport of rodeo,  making it safer to be a rodeo animal than a person driving a car.”

Contradicting that claim are now many thousands of hours of videotaped rodeo performances collected by Showing Animals Respect & Kindness.

But even without that documentation,  the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association claim does not stand up to common sense.

What the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association contends is that only about one use of an animal in a rodeo in 1,000 results in an injury.

Do the math,  a subject the PCA apparently flunked before learning to use a simple calculator.

There are approximately 230 million licensed drivers in the U.S.,  who drive an average of twice a day.  This amounts to 4.6 billion automobile trips per year.

About three million drivers per year report whiplash injuries comparable to what a roped calf or steer suffers.

If one in a thousand automobile trips per year resulted in a whiplash injury,  the total would be 4.6 million whiplash injuries per year––and that is not even considering all the broken limbs,  concessions,  bruising,  and dragging injuries suffered by cattle and horses in rodeos.

The authentic “rich cultural tradition” of bull-riding

This is what the Western Sports Industry Coalition is really worried about:

“States like California,  Rhode Island,  and Nevada have passed laws that ban or tightly regulate rodeo events; and some city ordinances have followed suit like San Francisco and Irvine in California.  Even the rodeo at Western NRG Stadium in Houston,  Texas is consistently bombarded with protesters at their events. Protesters even made the local news at one event.”

If rodeo is not at least as violent as a public hanging,  the rodeo industry fears,  no one will pay to watch cattle being crippled and “cowboys” who mostly have never worked in the cattle industry falling on their butts,  or their heads,  after flank-strapping,  spurring,  and electroshocking bulls and horses.

Without the violence,  bull-riding,  for instance,  would be no more exciting than watching a rural child in India or Southeast Asia following a Brahma bull up and down a rice paddy all day,  steering a plow and sometimes riding on the yoke.

That,  done for thousands of years,  is the authentic “rich cultural tradition” of bull-riding.

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