Rodeo Reimagined: Could This be Hobby Horsing’s Next Leap?
PETA entities and animal protection group GAIA (Global Action in the Interest of Animals) have sent a joint letter to the Hobby Horse Federation urging it to add a rodeo discipline to hobby horsing. Such an event would highlight what the federation does best: entertaining audiences with human athleticism and creativity that doesn’t saddle animals with suffering.
Hobby horsing is a sport that simulates equestrian events like show jumping and dressage, using a hobby horse instead of a real horse. It’s a creative, global phenomenon that proves horses need not be forced into dangerous and frightening stunts to dazzle and excite audiences. Should the federation embrace a rodeo-inspired discipline, it will show the world that exposing animals to fear, pain, or harm doesn’t belong in modern sport.
The letter explains how in rodeos animals are deliberately provoked into unnatural and stressful behaviour through the use of flank straps and spurs and horses and bulls are often forced to buck violently in response to pain or pressure. This can cause serious injuries, including broken backs and necks, heart attacks, aneurysms, and even death. When horses become too old or worn out to continue, “retirement” is often a one-way trip to the slaughterhouse.
Rodeo participants have been videotaped choking calves and twisting their necks while slamming them onto the ground, injecting bulls with steroids to induce an aggressive response to harassment, using sharp spurs to make horses buck, and zapping horses and bulls with electric prodders so that the animals will charge in a state of panic out of a chute. Every reputable animal protection group denounces these events, and rodeos are illegal in the Australian Capital Territory, but continue to abuse animals in all other states and territories, including Queensland, which hosts the most events.
You can help the bulls, calves, and horses used in rodeos by never attending these events and, just like with all attractions that exploit animals, choose cruelty-free entertainment instead.
What's Wrong With Rodeo
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