Over the weekend my wife and I went with my parents up to Harrisburg for a rodeo. My dad has always been a fan of bull riding, and for the last three years we’ve gone to see the show. It’s always a gamble going into one of these events — so much depends on the bulls, the riders, the rodeo clown, et cetera, on whether or not it will be a good show. Fortunately this year’s show was pretty good. I’d posted some pictures on Twitter during the show, but I also filmed some of the action (using my phone, so the video is a bit raw). I thought about showing some clips of the actual bull riding, but ultimately it’s not as exciting as the clip below. Called Bull Hockey, two pairs of barrels are set up like goals, and two teams (people from the audience, not actual cowboys) are trapped in there with a bull. The idea is to get the bull to pass through your goal as many times as you can. The team with the most points at the end wins some kind of cash prize. As you can imagine, it’s not quite the safest game in the world.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfUoI2lN4Go[/youtube]
I grew up with a lotta bull riders in Arkansas. It was a big thing. But I never got involved myself. I like to have my ribs in place.
As a stubborn British Ultra-Leftist I am instinctively against Bull Riding or Bull fighting.
But hey I would try it just for the adrenaline rush, so I guess that makes me a hypocrite. Damn you hypocrisy.
I don’t know much about bull fighting — is that where they actually KILL the bull? That’s not right. But bull riding … if it’s an issue of animal rights, most of the major rodeos treat their bulls EXTREMELY well. I can’t speak for all of them, of course, but I know the one I went to treats the animals like kings.
I’m no expert on “sports” involving bulls, but I think this could be classed as bullfighting; if you take the term literally then I believe it can be classed as Bullfighting, because the Bull is really fighting against the people, it doesn’t know any better. Granted the bull is definitely much less volatile than the ones you see on “Bravo’s When Sport goes Bad”.
I get your point about the Bulls being well treated and I understand that, but really Bulls have been around for millions of years, they don’t need our help to survive, they can survive Natural Selection easily, so why do we need these “sports” really? What value do they have in a civilised society?
Sorry if I sound rather confrontational, but I’m just interested. Plus I said I would try it, so maybe I’m a massive hypocrite.
Oh yeah and I think that describing my political leaning as “Ultra” left might have been a bit of a hyperbole on my part.
Bullfighting always refers to the Spanish sport that involves slowly bloodletting and killing a bull while wearing a fancy outfit.
Bull-riding is just like horse-riding except that it never ends well…for the rider.
Ah, finally putting that Harvard education to work