Rodeo: An Animal History by Susan Nance (review)

Rodeo as a sport and longstanding constellation of American cultural iconographies is receiving a serious scholarly reappraisal. Just last year, Rebecca Scofield's Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West (University of Washington Press, 2019) re-evaluated various human histories and impacts of rodeo by carefully analyzing its fringes and margins. Now, historian Susan Nance presents a fresh accounting of rodeo from its very center. Her focus, on the overlooked and under-analyzed equines and bovines without whom there would be no rodeo, makes this book, Rodeo: An Animal History, true to its title. Following a formula that she employed in her history of elephant exhibitions, Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), Nance here provides a thorough business history of rodeo—infused with environmental history and insights from animal welfare science—to reconstruct the histories and experiences of animals involved in rodeo. She ranges from rodeo spectacles themselves to a mosaic of the ranches, feedlots, and slaughterhouses of the beef industry; rodeo schools; breeding farms; and thousands of rural backyards across the United States and Canada, without which rodeo could not happen.

Nance's broad central argument is that rodeo is a resiliently effective mediator of the entwined social and environmental changes that accompanied western American settler colonialism and the often dire consequences of those changes on people, land, and animals. "Rodeo's animals," she argues, "become surrogates for the trials of rural life in the West and the violence of its history" (6). By paying attention to the environmental and animal histories of rodeo, Nance shows that "rodeo has been both a stubborn celebration of that rural quarrel with the land and a coping mechanism for dealing with the limits of people, animals, and the land" (15). Throughout, Nance foregrounds the oppositional mentality embedded in western settler histories and how it plays out in rodeo culture.

Her analysis spans the long century from early cowboy tournaments of the 1880s to the formation and success of the Professional Bull Riders tour in the 1990s and 2000s. In six chronological chapters, Nance relies on a formidable collection of archives, including myriad organizational records and periodicals. She also provides a thorough bibliography of source material pertaining to rodeo, animals, and their diverse allied subjects. Each chapter focuses on a particular equine or bovine rodeo participant, whose stories reveal the back stage, as it were, to readers. Nance pairs readings of human historical records with on-the-hoof accounts of what animals experienced, and her account is straightforward about the brutality that animals and humans experience. The difference, she asserts, is that humans involved in rodeo and rodeo-adjacent pipelines choose to put themselves in the difficult and dangerous positions that construct the complex web of considering oneself "western" or rural. Animals do not.

Nance grounds her analysis of human-animal rodeo relationships in the concept of the "myth of animal consent," a phrase she borrows and expands upon from the writer Jonathan Safran Foer. As Nance shows, this concept frequently manifests as an acknowledgement of animal intelligence and consciousness, characteristics that animal welfare and rights advocates have long considered a reason to care for animals. However, in rodeo and its allied conduits, it also serves as proof that nonhuman animals are making informed and free choices about their actions. This absurd logic, Nance explains, appears in totemic rodeo clichés like animals who "love to buck" and in pervasive narratives about animals that are glad to perform in rodeos because they know the alternative is the slaughterhouse.

This twisting of animal intelligence into a myth about their consent accompanies Nance's analysis of many layers of rodeo performance, from race and masculinity to environmental degradation and economic pressures to which rodeo responds and adapts. Even for those who are used to thinking of rodeo as a problematic space for human and other animals, a sobering thought surfaces: improving the lives of all species in rodeo performances...