The controversy continues over a drafted ordinance to ban rodeos citywide. The debate has intensified as the ordinance is set to soon expire and has yet to be scheduled for a vote. The Northeast San Fernando valley’s large Latino charro and vaquero equestrian community disputes the cruelty claims citing their care for their horses and call the ban a threat to their livelihood and 500 year old cultural traditions.
Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez has drafted amendments to the proposed ban that would protect Native American Indian, Indigenous Rodeo, Mexican Charrería, and Escaramuza events.
Animal rights activists respond:
By Peggy W Larson
Animals should not be injured or killed for entertainment and that is what rodeo is. It bears no resemblance to ranching. I grew up on a cattle ranch in North Dakota and spent eight years as a ranch veterinarian there. My ranch clients did not ride bulls, speed rope calves or make their expensive horses buck. Rodeo is not an American “tradition.”
As a former bareback bronc rider, pathologist and large animal veterinarian, I have both the experience and autopsy proof that rodeo injures and kills animals. Dr. Robert Bay from Colorado autopsied roping calves and found hemorrhages, torn muscles, torn ligaments, damage to the trachea, damage to the throat and damage to the thyroid. These calves never get a chance to heal before they are used again. Meat inspectors, including Drs. Haber and Fetzner, who processed rodeo animals, found broken bones, ruptured internal organs, massive amounts of blood in the abdomen from ruptured blood vessels and damage to the ligamentum nuchae that holds the neck to the rest of the spinal column.
Dr. C. G. Haber, a veterinarian with 30 years of experience as a USDA meat inspector, stated, “The rodeo folks send their animals to the packing houses where I have seen cattle so extensively bruised that the only areas in which the skin was attached was the head, neck, legs, and belly. I have seen animals with six to eight ribs broken from the spine and, at times, puncturing the lungs. I have seen as much as two and three gallons of free blood accumulated under the detached skin.”
Animals and humans share the same pain and fear centers in the brain. The fear center is the amygdala. The pain centers are the prefrontal cortex and the hypothalamus. Animals feel pain and fear the same as humans!
As a former state criminal lawyer, we prosecutors have all had cases where criminals have abused and tortured animals before abusing or killing humans. What are we teaching our children when we cheer when a calf roper knocks down and drags by the neck a bawling calf? Kids cry at rodeos. Time to end animal abuse at rodeos.
Peggy W Larson is a veterinarian from Williston, Vermont.