Is the end of rodeo nigh?
Despite another season of protests and antagonism, rodeo is not riding quietly into the sunset.
Apollo Taito has seen the numbers grow and the demographics change. Every animal welfare cause does this, he agrees – that shift from what the media sees as fringe to the mum-and-dad mainstream. Sow crates and free range have had their day; now is the time of rodeo.
Taito is the spokesperson for Direct Animal Action, a campaigning group that motivated more than 100 people to protest at a rodeo in Warkworth on New Years Day and another 70 in Whangarei on January 13. The third and final protest of the summer rodeo season was planned for Te Awamutu on Saturday.
He had noticed that many of those RSVPing are from the Waikato area, which is a change, and the range of people is broader. Older activists tell him that’s unusual.
‘‘I wonder if it’s the change in attitudes around circuses and places like Sea World,’’ Taito muses.
‘‘We have become aware of what was happening to get these animals to perform for us.’’
That points to the big questions at the heart of this. As we learn more about the intelligence and sensitivities of animals, what are the ethics of making them perform for our amusement?
Will we one day see all of this – not just rodeo, but horse and greyhound racing, even zoos – as disgusting and barbaric?
And if so, are rodeo’s enthusiasts fighting a losing battle? Partly true, says Michael Laws. ‘‘The difference this summer is that rodeo’s fighting back’’ he observes. That would make it a battle without the losing part.
The New Zealand Rodeo Cowboys Association (NZRCA) hired Laws, a former MP and exMayor of Whanganui, as its spokesperson last year.
Smart move. As the association’s president, Lyal Cocks, explains, Laws has both political and media experience.
He is thick skinned enough to endure 21 minutes of being patronised by Radio NZ host Kim Hill on a Saturday morning.
In essence, rodeo has a terrible image problem.
Yet it is also enjoyed by thousands – as many as 100,000 people may have attended New Zealand rodeos this summer, Laws estimates.
So the association contracted Laws and appointed Cocks around the same time. Rodeo people had been losing a public relations war against metropolitan journalists who Laws believes start with ‘‘hostile’’ anti-rodeo views and animal welfare groups like Safe who circulate slick, shocking, welledited videos of calves being roped or horses and bulls looking traumatised.
Heartstrings are tugged and people who would not know one end of a steer from the other become instantly persuaded that rodeo is cruel, heartless and inhumane. Calf roping, known as rope and tie, is the event that upsets people the most.
‘‘People see the link, a young animal like a baby,’’ Taito says. ‘‘They think of their pets and their children. That would be the main thing the New Zealand public would like to end.’’
Safe’s campaigns manager Marianne Macdonald points to the 62,000 New Zealanders who signed a petition in 2016 to ban rodeo.
Farmwatch and the SPCA, which has also taken a strong antirodeo line, collaborated with Safe on that.
In the same year, a Horizon Research survey commissioned by Safe and the SPCA found that 59 per cent of people wanted an end to animals in rodeo, 63 per cent wanted calf roping banned and 66 per cent wanted an end to use of flank straps, which cause animals to buck.
The SPCA reported that 68 per cent of people surveyed responded strongly to the statement that ‘‘rodeo causes pain and suffering to animals and it is not worth causing this just for the sake of entertainment’’. Nothing to hide? Five thousand in Wanaka, another 5000 in Taupo, several thousand in Te Anau.
Not protesters, but satisfied audiences – these are Cocks’ numbers. A sunny day out with the kids, a display of cowboy skills, some animals running around. What’s not to like?
Until Laws moved to Central Otago a couple of years ago, he had no idea that Otago and Southland are ‘‘huge rodeo places’’.
Across rural New Zealand, and mostly under the media radar, rodeo also pulls crowds in places like the Bay of Plenty, Northland and Waikato. ‘‘I was surprised because I had never been to a rodeo until six months ago.’’
He did some research. He sees himself as being on the side of facts rather than emotions.
Don’t believe me or the activists, he likes to say – believe the scientists.
So, calf roping? Look at the science. A report by the National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee (Nawac) that accompanied the rodeo welfare code in 2013 quoted low levels of injuries in calves.
There were as few as four injuries to 2273 calves during four years, according to an earlier report quoted by Nawac. Those are local numbers. A United States report from 1994 noted just one injury out of 915 calf roping runs.
Still, even within the committee itself, some thought calf roping should be banned. But, the report said, there was not enough evidence that ‘‘this event causes the calves significant pain and distress’’.
Laws notes that Green MP Gareth Hughes, who has promised to introduce a private members’ bill banning rodeos, has never been to one. Laws’ theory is that exposure to the actual event might contradict the impressions gained from one of Safe’s videos.
‘‘The reason [many activists] don’t want to go is if you observe the animals before, during and after, you realise a lot of the claims are specious nonsense,’’ he says. ‘‘If there was any element of animal cruelty, rodeos wouldn’t work. It would be so obvious to the watching audience that the audience would be repulsed.’’
A few politicians took up Laws and Cocks’ invitations over summer. NZ First MPs Ron Mark and Mark Patterson and CluthaSouthland MP Hamish Walker all went, with one of them telling Laws that ‘‘they haven’t seen more content-looking calves in a long time’’. And that was immediately after they had been roped and tied.
‘‘I could show you photos of the calves straight after the event and they don’t look very stressed to me,’’ Cocks says.
But the science will tell you there is stress. The University of Queensland’s Centre for Animal Welfare and Ethics concluded in a report in 2016 that ‘‘the repeat roping for the experienced roped calves on the day of the study produced an acute stress response’’.
While calves were also stressed simply by being marshalled by a rider on horseback without any roping, the study found that ‘‘calf roping causes stress to the animal’’.
Cocks, a retired Navy Commander and former Deputy Mayor of the Queenstown Lakes District Council, grew up around horses and animals. Perhaps because he is a dyed in the wool rodeo person, he gets more agitated than Laws when he imagines the end game of the activists.
‘‘The activists, they won’t stop at one event,’’ he insists. ‘‘They won’t stop at rodeo. Then they will start targeting fishing. They’ve already talked about the feelings of animals. What would you rather be, a fish with a hook in your mouth, being played for the enjoyment of some angler in the river, or a healthy young calf competing in the rodeo?’’
Rodeo has nothing to hide, Cocks stresses. Except from activists with cameras. Safe brought US anti-rodeo figure Peggy Larson to New Zealand in January – Laws notes that Larson got a ‘‘sweetheart interview with Kim Hill’’, compared to his grilling a week later. Larson also wanted to go to a rodeo in Otago for a Seven Sharp story, but was reportedly banned by organisers and had to sneak in incognito.
‘‘I have no problem with Peggy, I would have given her a complimentary ticket,’’ Cocks claims. The problem was the other activists: ‘‘I can’t trust them.’’
Safe relies on what it calls volunteer investigators to film rodeos. They pass the footage on to Safe and, if they think there have been breaches of the rodeo welfare code, it goes to the Ministry for Primary Industries. But Safe has heard that volunteers have been turned away or even given trespass notices this summer.
‘‘It’s definitely a sign that the cowboys are trying to hide what’s going on,’’ Safe’s Marianne Macdonald says. ‘‘They’re bullying animals for the entertainment of a minority.’’
Cocks confirms that the policy is now ‘‘encouraged’’ in all rodeo clubs: keep the activists and protesters with video cameras out.
Why? Because he claims they distort and sensationalise events.
A Safe video in which calves were replaced with dogs, to really ram the point home, annoyed the heck out of him. The clips are short and emotive, but Macdonald does not agree they are sensational: ‘‘It is very much representative of what goes on.’’
Of course they are tightly edited. A social media video can’t go on for hours. In the age of Facebook, activism needs to be punchy and shareable. Accidents and injuries Lyal Cocks sees himself as something of an enforcer. He was at a rodeo at Mataura in Southland this month and ‘‘disqualified people for competing incorrectly and increasing the risk of harming the animal’’.
Most rodeo people work with animals, he says, and ‘‘the last thing we want to do is hurt them or put them in danger’’.
There is a conundrum here. Does Safe think cowboys are ignorant, deluded or deliberately cruel? Or do they not recognise suffering?
‘‘They don’t think they’re doing anything wrong,’’ Macdonald says. ‘‘They just don’t understand much about animal behaviour.’’
In the US, it took an autistic woman, Temple Grandin, to recognise stress in cattle. Farmers had not known how to see it. There is something of Grandin in Peggy Larson, an older woman in a largely male world who looks at animals in a different way.
As a veterinarian, Larson knows that autopsies showed injuries to calves from rodeo events that were not picked up when the animals were alive. There are things we become used to not noticing.
But we are used to things changing. New Zealand rodeos used to have children riding around on sheep, as a novelty not a serious event, until the welfare code disallowed it. The skeletons of sheep are not as strong as cattle and ‘‘the potential to cause injury to the sheep is high’’, Nawac said.
‘‘It just wasn’t acceptable,’’ Cocks remembers. The sheep went but rodeo continued. Would taking calves and flank straps out of the picture really be so terrible? But this is where Cocks cites the slippery slope argument: calves today, the whole damn thing tomorrow.
But animals are sometimes injured and sometimes worse. A bull was euthanised after breaking its leg during a Wairarapa rodeo in February. An animal rights group said the injured bull lay in the ring bellowing for about 10 minutes before it dragged itself away.
It was a regrettable ‘‘freak accident,’’ Cocks told a reporter.
Breaches of the welfare code are not uncommon. In many cases, we only hear about them because of activists. Safe released correspondence from the Ministry for Primary Industries showing that eight rodeos were in breach of the code over the summer of 2014-15. The ministry investigations ‘‘resulted in educational outcomes’’ for the clubs.
During the summer of 2015-16, a group called Anti Rodeo Action NZ filmed 12 North Island rodeos and three South Island rodeos. The footage was passed on to the ministry, which prosecuted no-one but found some minor breaches of the code and said there was ‘‘room for improvement’’ by the NZRCA.
According to a ministry report also released by Safe, complaints included the calf roping going longer than it should, some bulls and horses not being let out when they were distressed, spurs being used when they should not be, animals being kicked or hit and a goad used 11 times on a bull in 30 seconds. In the same report, the ministry thought that negative publicity from activist footage aired the year before had caused some rodeo organisers to lift their game.
In 2017, the ministry investigated an allegation that someone used an electric prodder, banned under the code, ‘‘to cause short periods of pain to young calves under 12 months of age’’ during a rodeo in Northland. The person, an elderly volunteer with no criminal history, was let off with a formal warning.
In an email also released by Safe, the ministry was certain that the volunteer will comply in the future and find better ways of prompting calves. However, ‘‘the actions of this person are at the lower end of the scale in this type of ill-treatment offending’’.
Meanwhile, protests grow.