Rodeo - Act of animal cruelty?

Yesterday I attended my first rodeo at Frontier Days in Charlotte, Michigan. It was an interesting and somewhat stereotypical spectacle. The crowd was almost completely all-white and many people of all ages were wearing cowboy hats. The only diversity was an African-American couple running one of the booths outside the rodeo stands, and a few Mexican-Americans walking around the fair grounds. When I asked the spectator next to me, who helpfully answered a lot of questions for me, about horse gentling vs. the bucking bronco method on display in front of us, he derisively said that gentling is something "the animal activists" were pushing.

First came entertainment from the country singer DeWayne Spaw. On the side of his trailer is written the name of his latest album, "Money, Gun and The Bible." Is this his order of priorities in life? Funny how the three are interrelated. I can't get over the name Spaw. Somehow it conjures up an association with "spawn," but I digress.

Next came the opening ceremony, replete with the requisite thinly-veiled Christian prayer and a parade of horses with the riders carrying flags for various producers of such all-American products as Dodge trucks, cowboy hats and US smokeless tobacco.

Bull-riding followed. A cinch is placed around the bull's genitals to further anger it before it's released into the pen with a rider on it's back. No wonder it bucks so much.

The same thing is done to the horses that also try to buck their rider off, for a similar reason. At least some of the men wore helmets rather than the omnipresent cowboy hat, plus a neck brace under their shirts.

The dirt was re-groomed by the dry-land version of a Zamboni: A John Deer tractor pulling a dirt grader. Three barrels were placed for the all-female barrel racers. These women take turns racing their horses past a laser beam start/finish line, around each of the barrels, and back across the finish line.

Next came something new..."Mutton Bustin'," consisting of 5-7 year olds hanging on for dear life to the back of a sheep. Neither human nor animal were really endangered here, as the human kid simply fell onto the soft dirt after a few seconds of the sheep frantically trying to run away from all the commotion and ditch the sudden weight on their backs.

To cap it all off was another round of bull-riding...an act of pure machismo that appears to have no place in the real world of cattle husbandry.

I left with the impression that a rodeo consists mostly of tormenting animals for the entertainment of rodeo-goers, and a lot of fake patriotism.