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Bulls on parade
By Zöe Williams
williamz@mscd.edu

Spending January in Denver is enough to send me to a commune in Oregon seeking refugee status. While Colorado has made giant leaps from its Old West reputation, the arrival of the National Western Stock Show sends the state drifting back toward Kansas.

The National Western Stock Show’s website is flagged with a logo inviting visitors to “Come meet the most magnificent creatures on Earth,” alluding to a disingenuous reverence for the animals that are paraded, sported and sold throughout the event. The fate of the animals involved in the stock show is one of great suffering and disrespect, all in pursuit of profit and entertainment.

Animals such as cows, pigs, goats and various birds exhibited at the stock show are judged for the meat they will produce for human consumption while being paraded in front of a panel of judges and then piled into a truck and shipped to slaughterhouses for the “carcass phase” of the event. They are not treated as living beings, but as products for human pleasure. The safety and welfare regulations in place only mandate that animals have water in their pens and are not handled by devices that cause swelling, pushing the demented imaginations of handlers to craft ways to ensure that the last days of an animal’s life are truly miserable.

Rodeos are the most brutal display of inhumanity at the stock show. Cows, horses and calves are subjected to electrical prods to make these domestic and human-friendly animals act wild. Flank straps are tied tightly at the base of the rib cages of horses and bulls to make the animals struggle to free themselves from the painful treatment. This is what puts the “buck” in bucking bulls and broncos. Horses have broken their backs, necks and legs during this “sport.”

Rodeo viewers get excitement out of animals fleeing, struggling and eventually suffering excruciating and potentially fatal pain.

The stock show is an open display of how we cruelly take what we like from nonhuman beings without consideration or remorse. Each cow, chicken, pig, horse, duck or other animal involved in the stock show is a living, breathing and feeling creature, victimized by our passion for the pain of the powerless.

What can be said of a culture that not only condones but celebrates this sadistic and macabre exhibition of the human capacity to cause immense suffering to the innocent? Is this really a sign of a decent civilization?