Rodeo: An Animal History by Susan Nance

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rodeo: An Animal History by Susan Nance Elyssa Ford Rodeo: An Animal History. By Susan Nance. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. ix + 285 pp. Illustrations, notes, works cited, index. $36.95, cloth. In Rodeo: An Animal History, Susan Nance explores a side of the rodeo left largely untold, that of the animal participants. While animal rights activists and some scholars in the humanities, such as anthropologist Olga Nájera-Ramírez and interdisciplinary scholar Laura Barraclough, have examined animal treatment in the rodeo, Nance looks not just at that issue but also aims to tell the life stories of the animals themselves, thus elevating them to the same level of examination that the human rodeo participants have received over the past 100 years. Nance is not new to this model of storytelling, with a previous book on elephants in the circus and a current project on the exotic animal trade, where she also places animals, their lives, feelings, and experiences at the centers of those industries. Telling the life stories of animals is always difficult as they rarely are included in documentation, and little beyond their names and general statistics are recorded. Nance focuses on cattle and horses, the primary participants in rodeo, with three chapters on each. The book is structured both categorically and chronologically. The latter reveals how rodeo, its events, and its treatment of animals have evolved over time. Nance astutely notes that much of this change comes from external pressure from early humane associations and more modern animal rights activists to urban communities increasingly uncomfortable with this presentation and use of animals, though sometimes criticism also has come from within the rodeo world. Despite these changes, Nance notes that often it has been superficial, such as removing an event but really only altering its name or implementing rules that banned certain practices. In reality, events like steer busting, when removed from programs in the early 20th century, still appeared in other formats. Similarly, rules that banned the use of spurring, quirts, and spikes in bucking-horse contests did not mean those practices disappeared. Nance also critiques the specialized breeding of bucking horses and bulls as part of this process. When more physical prodding was banned, the book outlines how breeding programs artificially created animals developed to jump, buck, and roll in a manner pleasing to the cowboys, appropriate for a competitive arena, and molded to create an enthusiastic audience response. In her discussion, Nance follows the arguments of many animal rights activists who present the distress of the animals involved, but what Nance adds to the conversation is her incorporation of the history of the mythic, heroic West and how that has molded our understanding of certain rodeo animals and has made allowances for their use and abuse in the rodeo. This is done most effectively in the chapter on bull riding. While other events have been attacked by animal rights activists as cruel, bull riding escapes much of this, in Nance's view, because the bulls are seen as part of what she calls the "myth of consent" (144) in that they appear [End Page 222] to happily buck and then once the buzzer sounds they just as happily trot out of the arena. Further, because of the threat of injury and death to the riders themselves, it is seen as a fairer contest. In many ways this book is not just telling the history of rodeo and that of animals in the rodeo, it is also a call for change in how we treat and view animals, their lives, and their value. Yet, as Nance notes in the chapter on bull riding, when rodeo idolizes bull riders as "a certain kind of reckless western manhood" (175) where it is okay and even celebrated that the human riders will be injured and sometimes die, it is unsurprising that little concern is directed toward the animal participants. Elyssa Ford Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Northwest Missouri State University Copyright © 2021 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln