Horses Are Fighting Back: If Bucking Broncos Can Learn To Body Slam The Shit Out Their Riders Like This, The Rodeo Might Be Screwed

In 2015, I graduated from college in Bowling Green, Ohio and took a job selling construction trailers in Fort Worth, Texas. When I first moved there, I expected living in Texas to be like living in whole different world. I thought the ground would all be dust. The side of the roads would be lined with cactus. The bars would all be saloons with double-swinging batwing doors for entrances, where men with 10-gallon hats and Yosemite Sam mustaches would celebrate Cowboys' touchdowns by firing their Smith & Wesson revolvers into the ceiling.

Ok I'm exaggerating a bit. Still I was expecting to experience at least a modicum of culture shock. But I really didn't at all. When I moved into my studio apartment in downtown Fort Worth, I came to realize it's just like any other large U.S. city. There were more cowboy boots. The friends I made all had cowhide rugs underneath their coffee tables. I picked up saying the word "y'all". You could still smoke in some of the bars there. But the only major difference that affected me was the ridiculous number of stray dogs there. I couldn't last 6 months without taking one home. He just kept showing up to my work and I couldn't stand to let him keep living outside. But all in all, the city of Fort Worth was just like anywhere else. Any person with a halfway open mind and the slightest bit of social skills would fit in perfectly fine. Now if you drive west out of the city a bit, that may be a whole different story. But as far as Fort Worth proper goes, I was a little disappointed in it's lack of cartoonish Texas clichés. 

But then one weekend by buddy took me to the Fort Worth Stockyards. That's when I learned Fort Worth keeps all of their stereotypes in a 98-acre area of land just north of downtown. It fucking rules. 

It's one big stretch of road that is to forever be the Wild West. It's super touristy. But still, it's everything that a small dumb child from the midwest imagines Texas to be. Twice a day cowboys emerge out of thin air for a cattle drive and herd their majestic long-horned steer down the street. There's live music and dancehalls where people do the two-step. Places like Billy Bob's Texas, aka "The World's Largest Honkey Tonk", a 100,000 square foot building where I once saw Merle Haggard perform just weeks before he died. There's a Livestock Exchange Building. Authentic steak houses where they slow-smoke barbecue and will serve you an entire cow on a single plate for $26. More general stores than you can count on two hands (probably). And best of all, every Friday and Saturday night at the Cowtown Coliseum, there's the Stockyards Championship Rodeo. 

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Well actually, the best part of the Fort Worth Stockyards is that there are no open container laws. So you get to experience it all with a drink in your hand. But needless to say, every time a friend or family member came to visit me, I'd take them directly to the stockyards for the most stereotypically Texas day possible. And I always took them to the rodeo. I only lived in Fort Worth for a year, but my trips to the rodeo may have been in the double digits. I loved it. The rodeo is actually a whole different world. There's bull riding, bronco riding, barrel racing, the event where they let a calf loose and a cowboy chases him down on horseback, catches him with a lasso, then jumps off his horse and ties the calf's legs together. During intermission, call all the kids down to participate in the calf and mutton scramble. Which was possibly my favorite event of the night. You don't often get a chance to cheer for an 8-year old kid to get Ray Lewis'd by an adolescent bull (linebacker Ray Lewis that is, the calf doesn't get a knife)

(Sorry I couldn't find a great example, but those calves and sheep got going pretty fast sometimes)

Naturally, in every rodeo event, I was cheering for the animal. I feel like that's fair. The cowboys know what they're signing up for. As fun as the rodeo is, it's hard to not feel a little bad for the animals. If people are going to unwillingly rile up and agitate a thousand pound animal and fuck with it for their own amusement, they run the risk of getting obliterated by said animal. 

But back to the initial video of the cowboy being body slammed by his horse. Cowboys are damn lucky most bulls/horses haven't learned the body slam trick yet. That's an expert level rodeo animal maneuver. If word spreads across the rodeo animal community that the body slam is a viable option, the cowboys are screwed. The rodeo is screwed. Nobody is getting on the back of a pissed off animal if there's good chance that animal is going to do a quarter backflip. That's a thousand pounds landing directly on top of the rider as he's falling neck first into the dirt. If that bronco teaches the body slam to his animal friends, that might be the nail in the coffin for the rodeo.

From the animals perspective, you could make a feel good animated movie out of that. If you played your cards right, you could probably get PETA to fund it. Think about it PETA. Those animals don't want to be in the rodeo. Look how angry they are when they're bucking. Now picture this. There's a lovable group of talking cartoon broncos, bulls, calves and sheep who are being forced to perform at violent & painful rodeos every weekend. But one day, there was a fed up bronco who'd had enough, and he body slammed an evil blood-thirsty meat-eating cowboy into a coma. The cowboys chalked this up as a freak accident, and retired the bronco as he was deemed unsafe to ride. But in his retirement, the bronco rallies his friends and teaches them that the body slam is their ticket to salvation. From there, bulls and broncos are slamming cowboys left and right. They're dropping like flies. They start quitting the rodeo to go work construction until eventually there are no riders left. The rodeo is forced to shut down forever and the animals get to happily live out the rest of their lives standing still in a barn (or whatever it is bulls and horses want to be doing)

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Except I'm pretty sure in that case they would just immediately make the bulls into steaks. But that could add a whole new layer to the movie. I'm sorry, I don't know why I just created a pro-PETA/anti-rodeo blockbuster hit. I'm just saying… if the animals got smart… learning to utilize the quarter backflip body slam could really put the rodeo in a pickle.