Every year, the residents of Calgary like to pretend they’re cowboys instead of middle managers at an oil company. They call it the Calgary Stampede and it feels like a city-wide Disneyland attraction. It’s really cute, though. Everyone dresses up like they’re ranchers or farm hands even though they make $250K/year. The police will even wear cowboy hats, which just makes them look like strippers. Country music stars belt out tunes about roughneckin’ good ol’ boys and everyone sings along forgetting in that moment that they live in a city with the worst urban sprawl in Canada. Nothing says down home country old times like working for a foreign-owned corporation amassing unparalleled wealth by digging up our natural resources and spewing toxic waste into the sky. Yeeeeehawww! Spit bucket! Barns!Amongst all the cattle wrasslin’ and rope twirling is something called a chuckwagon race where, as far as I can understand, they race carriages in circles until a horse dies. I could probably Wikipedia it, but that seems to be the gist of it. Last Thursday, three horses died and one was badly injured in a chuckwagon race. According to the Vancouver Humane Society, 50 horses have died in chuckwagon races since 1986. Which is to say that those competing in the Calgary Stampede chuckwagon races are REALLY good at it.Understandably, people are now calling for a ban of the “sport”. In 2010, six horses died, and two of them from fucking heart attacks. This race is so stressful for these majestic animals that they are dying a death generally reserved for the most unhealthy humans. That is, unless those horses had been recently divorced, overworked, eating mostly McDonalds, and smoking a pack a day. But I don’t know those horses personally, so who can say. Either way, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that chuckwagon racing should probably be banned.We vilify those that take part in dogfighting as cruel and inhumane. And while pitting two animals against each other to fight to the death is not exactly the same as a horse dying in a carriage race, when a competition of any kind consistently results in death, it’s not hard to draw a line. If the results of UFC fights looked more like Mortal Kombat do you think we’d be even discussing whether they should continue to be summoned to a mysterious island to protect the Earthrealm? Probably not. Though, that said, if dogs were killing each other with fireballs that they shot from their face I could be convinced of its entertainment value.Even if you remove the element of competition, killing anything for entertainment is bullshit. Bullfighting, for instance. Though widely banned across the world, a 2009 ban in the Catalonia region of Spain forced many cities to protect their blood lust by claiming cultural patrimony. Which is fair argument, I suppose, they have been slaughtering bulls since well before we decided animals had souls. But there’s no way that these playtime cowboys are going to try and claim it’s a tradition. You want to be entertained the way they did back in the old west? Go grab a fucking jug and blow into it.Earlier this year, HBO cancelled Luck, a horse racing drama, after three horses died during production. And that was a television show. They were only playing pretend! Let’s cut the shit and ban the real thing, the people that are being entertained by it are only playing pretend anyway.@cameronreed
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