Animal rights activists have long complained about the big annual rodeo called the Calgary Stampede and one is calling on the public broadcaster CBC to stop showing it. The event which attracts about one million visitors to western Canada every July includes many activities such as musical shows, midways, blacksmithing competitions and more. But it is the rodeo that attracts the complaints.
Animals suffer ‘stress, fear and pain’
“Rodeos subject animals to fear, stress and pain just to entertain a crowd,” writes Peter Fricker of the Vancouver Humane Society in the Huffpost Living Blog.
Billed as the greatest outdoor show on earth, the rodeo features events like calf-roping and chuckwagon racing. The latter involves wagons pulled by a team of horses around a track and has proven to be particularly dangerous, for example, causing the deaths of four horses in 2015. Safety measures were put in place afterwards but were not enough to satisfy animal advocacy groups.
CBC called an ‘unthinking cheerleader’
Now Fricker complains that CBC “is acting as the Calgary Stampede’s public relations agency and unthinking cheerleader.” By broadcasting rodeo events, he says CBC contravenes its own program policy of reducing the risk of running disturbing or offensive program content. He notes rodeo coverage is broadcast live in the middle of the day with no warning to viewers about the nature of the content.
Fricker goes on to say CBC wrote to the Vancouver Humane Society defending its coverage as “popular with millions of Canadians.” But he says “popularity is not a measure of morality.”
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