All posts in Calgary Stampede

Chuckwagon carnage: Three horses die and Calgary Stampede blames the lead horse!

by David Climenhaga on July 14, 2012 in animal cruelty, Calgary Stampede with 12 Comments

A chuckwagon race at the Calgary Stampede in 1957. Canada’s greatest city? Below: One resident of Canada’s greatest city camps it up for the occasion.

“Autopsy shows lead horse in chuckwagon accident died of ruptured aortic aneurysm,” shouts a headline in yesterday’s Calgary Herald.

So… what? The Calgary Stampede’s going to blame the chuckwagon crash that killed three horses Thursday night on “equine error”? Shoulda seen a vet, that dumb hoss…

Have you noticed that in such situations it’s usually the driver that gets blamed? If a passenger jet skids off the runway with fatal results, it’s pilot error. If a bus plunges into a ravine, it’s the driver’s mistake. If a kid piles an ATV into a tree, well, he was inexperienced and wasn’t wearing a helmet. Not our fault! It’s reassuring to consumers, and, more important, may limit the liability of the company that serviced the jet in China, sold the ATV, or whatever.

But in Calgary, during a Stampede chuckwagon race, it would violate the unwritten laws of Cowtown to blame the driver – at least if he’s a macho man in a Stetson hat and a pair of high-heeled boots with jingly spurs – so this time the poor horse will have to take the rap.

Still, you’ve got to admit, blaming the “mishap,” as the Herald’s stenographer neutrally put it, on a horse is a new one.

What’s next for the Herald’s headline writer in Hamilton, Ont.? “Autopsy shows crippled rope-calf had congenital trick knee”? Nope, here’s the Herald’s actual alternative headline: “Record attendance Thursday at Calgary Stampede; Centennial year drawing in the crowds.” Now that’s the Herald we know and love! When in doubt, count Stampede gate receipts.

There’s scant satisfaction in saying “I told you so,” but as was predicted in this space on May 25, and again on July 5, horses were certain to die cruelly at the Stampede this year, as they die every year and will continue to die every year, as long as the Stampede insists on treating animal cruelty as a suitable spectacle for entertainment.

There’s really no getting around this obvious interpretation any more. The wagon driver’s no doubt sincere on-air tears for his horse, which he described as a pet, won’t do it. The Stampede’s pathetic excuses certainly won’t do it. Nor will the Stampede’s meaningless promises to improve its “Fitness to Compete Program.”

When a Stampede spokesperson says, “the Calgary Stampede, and the people who bring their animals to the Stampede, care deeply about the welfare and well-being of those animals,” you’re entitled to laugh out loud. It’s all stuff that’s found on the floor of the Stampede cattle barn.

This is about money. The money you can generate in substantial amounts by holding exciting events. The money you can make in prizes pushing your horses hard around the tight corners of the chuckwagon races.

And if animals are put in danger to generate the excitement required to make money, well, too bad, Durango. That’s the true attitude of everyone involved in this disgrace.

Our sour prime minister goes around telling the world that Calgary’s the “greatest city” Canada. Well, I’ll give him this: it’s a pretty enough town in a suburban sort of way, and the streets are clean. But every year at Stampede, “Canada’s greatest embarrassment” would be closer to the truth.

Meanwhile, Calgary City Council is considering a ban on shark fin soup at the city’s Chinese restaurants. I’m certainly not saying this isn’t a worthy cause if the trade in sharks’ fins is endangering the species worldwide. And no one’s saying horses are an endangered species – except every year during the Stampede.

Just the same, Calgary’s aldermen – as they still insist on calling themselves – would do better if they turned their minds to cleaning up their own back 40 first.

Real men don’t kill horses for fun. It’s time for the Calgary Stampede to man up and end this practice.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Is nothing sacred? Turbulent pastor jumps to the front of Calgary’s Stampede Parade!

by David Climenhaga on July 8, 2012 in Alberta Politics, Calgary Stampede, Media, Religion with 8 Comments

Pastor Artur Pawlowski and members of his flock march at the head of the Calgary Stampede Parade on Friday. Below: Pastor Pawlowski with Alberta Solicitor-General Jonathan Denis. Below that: Pastor Pawlowski with Prime Minister Stephen Harper. All photos grabbed from Facebook pages belonging to Pastor Pawlowski or his Calgary Street Ministries.

Artur Pawlowski, Calgary’s most turbulent priest, managed to march with his eccentrically dressed supporters right at the front of the 100th anniversary Stampede Parade on Friday.

This should be news, because the normally omnipotent Calgary Stampede Board didn’t particularly want Pastor Pawlowski to be there – in fact, last year they tried to get a court injunction to prevent him and his flock from protesting along the parade route.

Don’t expect to see or hear much coverage of this oddity, however, because the Calgary media have an unwritten policy of never saying anything even mildly controversial about the Stampede when its gates are open to paying customers. Publicly speaking ill of the Stampede is considered sacrilege in what used to be known as Cowtown, even if that means journalists must take with good grace the obvious disdain of Parade Marshal Ian Tyson.

Alert readers will recall Pastor Pawlowski, the noisy street preacher who has been accused of breaking Calgary bylaws more than 70 times over the past few years, as the man who prompted a particularly intemperate Sun News Network commentator to call Mayor Naheed Nenshi an “anti-Christian bigot” when city police stopped the preacher from conducting a private religious ceremony inside city hall. Never mind that Mr. Nenshi had nothing to do with police being called to that particular disturbance back in December 2011.

At the Stampede Parade on Friday, Pastor Pawlowski and members of his Calgary Street Ministries appear to have showed up moments before start time with their Canadian and Israeli flags. The Calgary Police let them join the fun, right at the front so it could be said they weren’t technically part of the event. Perhaps the officers didn’t want to be called the “boys with the billy clubs” again, or anti-Christian bigots, an accusation that is thrown around with cheerful abandon in the Alberta of 2012.

This sets an interesting precedent for other unauthorized groups that may want to join future Stampede parades, but never mind that just now.

A little way back down the parade route along with Premier Alison Redford and Mayor Nenshi came one of Pastor Pawlowski’s apparent supporters, Alberta Solicitor-General and Justice Minister Jonathan Denis. It’s not clear how Mr. Denis felt as the province’s chief law enforcement officer about Pastor Pawlowski’s unauthorized presence at the head of the parade.

But notwithstanding the pastor’s frequent problems with the law – mostly tickets for noise bylaw violations when conducting services in public – Mr. Denis, the MLA for Calgary-Acadia, was not inclined to ignore Mr. Pawlowski’s support during last spring’s tight-fought provincial election.

Just before the election, Pastor Pawlowski delivered a little succor to Mr. Denis’s Progressive Conservative party, which was being strongly challenged by the far-right Wildrose Party led by Danielle Smith, who casts herself as a defender of Christian values.

According to an account by Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid, Pastor Pawlowski spotted a photo of Ms. Smith at a Hindu ceremony, where she was clad in traditional Indian garb and said to be asking for blessings from the gods. “The pastor erupted,” Mr. Braid wrote just before the election. “Smith will not have his vote, he wrote, because she ‘crossed the line from being tolerant of other people and their beliefs to actively participating in their idolatrous practices.’”

Not long after the election, the Solicitor General wrote the pastor a letter thanking him for organizing a June 17 event called the Calgary March for Jesus.

“March for Jesus is an opportunity for believers to publically (sic) profess their faith in Jesus Christ, give him glory, and make known what he has done for us,” Mr. Denis wrote under Solicitor-General Department letterhead on June 20. “As a supporter of the March for Jesus, I thank you and all the organizers who made this event a success.”

It remains to be seen if Mr. Denis will write another letter to Pastor Pawlowski thanking him for his contribution to this year’s Stampede Parade.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Big money speaks quietly to the recalcitrant Calgary Stampede on its 100th anniversary

by David Climenhaga on July 5, 2012 in animal cruelty, Calgary Stampede with 3 Comments

Cowboys in the aftermath of a bad chuckwagon spill at the 1937 Calgary Stampede. Below: Chuckwagon races as they’re supposed to appear; Stampede Programming VP Paul Rosenberg; Bell Canada logo of yore.

Money talks, and what money is saying now, the day before the 100th opening of the Calgary Stampede, is that Canadians are turning away from animal cruelty as entertainment.

Sometimes a whisper is louder than a shout, and the big money was barely whispering on the topic of harm to animals at the Calgary Stampede, which opens for the 100th time tomorrow. But rest assured those sibilant sounds from the upper reaches of Bell Canada’s corporate office in Montreal are being heard clearly in the boardroom of the Stampede Board as the “Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth” marks its centennial.

The Calgary Herald, which like its namesake city is nowadays all hat and no cows, briefly reported yesterday that the Canadian telecommunications giant had quietly pulled its support from all rodeo events at the Stampede.

This is not the biggest deal on God’s green acres, seeing as Bell Canada has merely switched its support to other Stampede events that aren’t seen by large numbers of Canadians as being openly cruel to animals, but it’s a sign of the times and of what’s to come.

It does not mean that such events as the unquestionably exciting chuckwagon races, which every year are responsible for the deaths of at least a few horses, or calf roping, a particular bête noir to certain animal rights groups, will stop at once. Count on the Stampede Board, the Calgary rodeo’s powerful governing body, to find alternative sponsors as long as it can.

But Bell Canada’s sponsorship decision marks the beginning of the end of these events because it shows public disapproval can bite when it’s tied to something that has the potential to cost the corporations involved in these affairs money. And when that money – or, rather, the lack of it – threatens to trickle down to the corporate bottom line, things start to happen.

So while Bell Canada was very careful not to say anything that suggested customer email campaigns like the one organized by the Vancouver Humane Society had anything to do with its withdrawal of support for the rodeo events, it is said here you can be confident that’s at least part of the story behind the sponsorship switch.

Bell Canada can be forgiven for not making the point explicit, and possibly for easing out of the Stampede instead of just marching away, spurs a-jingle-janglin’. The company may not wish to suffer a noisy counter-boycott from some rodeo boosters, or to have its executives’ mothers’ virtue abused on-air by publicity craving right-wing television commentators.

Just the same, this perceived success is likely to embolden opponents of the Stampede’s most egregious events to extend their campaign to other companies that sponsor activities widely perceived as needlessly cruel to animals.

For its part, the Stampede would prefer to dismiss the campaign as an effort by “animal activists who may be just as interested in the fund-raising possibilities that a campaign of this nature offers” and a few misguided bloggers.

In a post on the Stampede’s website yesterday, Programming Vice-President Paul Rosenberg compared the strong feelings of many Canadians about “the participation of animals in exhibition, competition and education events” to the debate between vegetarians and the rest of us who eat meat. He took a subtle dig at the Vancouver Humane Society for not operating an animal shelter, and promised to continue practicing “strong animal care,” whatever that means, at the Stampede.

As for the Herald’s brief and not terribly informative report on Bell Canada’s sponsorship decision, it trotted out the familiar refrain that rodeo is a Western cultural icon. The annual 10-day event, it said, “is a celebration of cowboy culture that features the rodeo and chuckwagon races.”

There’s a good case to be made, however, that the story the Stampede is all about the cowboy’s trade, a vital part of our Western culture and all that, ain’t much more than an entertaining yarn to be spun around a campfire.

As a real farmer commented on this blog in response to a recent post on this topic, “the Calgary Stampede was an exercise in urban nostalgia 100 years ago and it was a perverse distortion of the reality of ranching then and still is today.”

“Those calves used in roping used to come into the local auction markets in September mostly broken and crippled,” the commenter wrote. “Now they disappear. People who actually make their living raising cattle never resort to yipping, yelling or horseplay. A few oil-fueled start-ups do it for a few years while blathering on about free enterprise, while taking advantage of government supplied community pastures, support programs, and any other welfare they can grub up, before they flip the land and move on – good riddance to bad rubbish.”

The Stampede Board, made up largely of powerful business figures to whom too many Southern Alberta politicians all but owe their souls, will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th Century, let alone the 21st. That might be a useful project on which someone can practice his or her otherwise obsolete lassoing skills!

But it will happen, as long as money keeps talking as Bell Canada quietly did this week.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

The 100th Calgary Stampede: real men don’t kill horses for fun

by admin on May 25, 2012 in Alison Redford, animal cruelty, Barcelona, bullfighting, Calgary Herald, Calgary Stampede, Calgary Sun, Catalonia, chuckwagon races, Stephen Harper, Vancouver Humane Society with 10 Comments
A chuckwagon race in 1924 – then and now, unquestionably exciting and unquestionably cruel. Time for it to stop. Below: Alberta Premier Alison Redford and Prime Minister Stephen Harper, both looking fashionably butch in their cowboy duds.

There’s no doubt about it: chuckwagon races are as exciting as hell. There’s also no getting around the fact they’re cruel to horses.

With the 100th anniversary of the Calgary Stampede almost upon us – the “Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth” marks its centennial on July 6 – it’s time once again to turn our attention a popular event that uses pointless cruelty for entertainment.

For, sure as shootin’, a horse will die in a Stampede chuckwagon race this year, as horses die pointlessly every year for the entertainment of the humans who pack the Stampede grounds to witness the thundering excitement of the races.

Unlike other rodeo sports, which may be cruel in the sense they’re uncomfortable for the dumb beasts involved, chuckwagon races are particularly dangerous for horses because of the nature of the creatures themselves and the tactics used by wagon drivers to cut off competing rigs. The resulting spills are exciting – and deadly for the animals.

Last year, only two horses died in the Stampede’s chuckwagon racing competition. The year before, six were killed at the Stampede, four directly attributable to chuckwagon racing. There are always some – since 1986, well over 50 have been killed.

When it happens, the people who protest this cruelty will be dismissed as sissies and do-gooders. Professional chuckwagon racers will say how very, very sad they are. The deaths will be ignored by the Stampede’s organizers, and by pretty well everyone else in political Calgary. Politicians of all stripes who should know better will show up at the Stampede looking fashionably butch in their Western Stetsons, chaps, spurs and Cuban heels.

Not one of them will say anything negative about the fate that awaits the wagon horses, because that would be tempting fate and, in the case of Conservatives like Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Alberta Premier Alison Redford, the rage of the people to whom they owe their success, if not their souls.

Learned treatises will appear in the comments section of blogs like this explaining that horses love to run, and if they could talk would surely tell us they’re good with the risk of being whipped around the track for the entertainment of the good people of Calgary. What’s more, there will also be some sharply angry comments about how the Stampede is all about the cowboy’s trade, it’s a vital part of our western culture, and people who don’t like it can go to blazes, yadda-yadda.

Readers will forgive me the appropriately western metaphor, I’m sure, if I say that at least as far as the chuckwagon event is concerned, this is all bullshit.

You can make a case for calf roping as a worthwhile cowboyin’ skill. You can make a case for riding belligerent broncs, bulls and steers as not being all that dangerous for the beasts – although a horse died in 2010 doing that too – and fair to boot in the sense the riders are taking bigger risks. You can argue persuasively that both emphasize riding and roping skills still relevant to the Western agricultural industry.

But no such case for the relevance of chuckwagon races can be made. Racing sandwich trucks and taxicabs around the track through an active pedestrian crossing would have more relevance to the state of the cattle industry in Calgary today – which hasn’t even been entitled to call itself Cowtown since the last cattle auction decamped for Strathmore in 1989.

Tell me: what is the relationship between the agricultural industry of 2012 and racing lightweight wagons (too small to carry even sandwiches and coffee) hauled by four horses accompanied by mounted outriders around a track, using demolition derby tactics to keep competing rigs from passing?

None of this will get much coverage in the chickenhearted Calgary media, of course. In 2009, both the Calgary Herald and the Calgary Sun refused to run paid advertisements that the Vancouver Humane Society wanted to place claiming calf roping is needlessly cruel.

Commercial newspapers like the Herald and the Sun and their broadcasting equivalents are always going on about the vital role they play in local democracy as they come hat in hand to taxpayers for disguised subsidies such as favourable postage rates, tariffs on cable distribution of broadcasts and lower funding for the CBC. But when an actual topic of debate arises in their community that is opposed by a wealthy and powerful group, they won’t even allow the proponents of an opposing view to buy an advertisement expressing a reasonable opinion!

As I have said in this space before, everybody in Alberta knows rodeo activities are cruel to animals, everybody in Alberta knows chuckwagon races are dangerous for horses and nobody in a position to do anything about it cares enough to do it.

Most Albertans let this go on because they also don’t care, because they enjoy the races, because there’s money to be made doing it – about $1 million in prizes for the racers at the Stampede alone, according to the Wikipedia – or some combination of all three.

The Calgary Stampede ethic emphasizes the courage and masculinity of its participants. But real men aren’t cruel to dumb beasts for no reason but entertainment and money.

This is a barbaric and pointless activity that should be an embarrassment to every Albertan who thinks of himself as a real man.

This is why bullfighting is dying out in the macho Hispanic world.

According to the U.K.’s Independent newspaper, polls last year in Spain showed that more than 60 per cent of Spaniards now express disapproval of bullfighting, with an accompanying “drastic drop” in the number of bullfights. “Even in the bullfighting heartland of Andalusia, the number of fights fell by 50 per cent between 2007 and 2010.”

In Catalonia, the regional parliament banned the bloody spectacle in 2010 and the ban took effect on New Year’s Day this year. The last bullfight was held in Barcelona on Sunday, Sept. 25, 2011.

The Stampede Board should man up like the Catalonians and declare its centennial rodeo the venue for the last chuckwagon race in Calgary. It’s time.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.