Branded

My proposed rodeo ban is sorting sides in a small town

by Allie Irwin

A bunch of booted cowgirls clicked their spurs together at the podium and begged the town council to bring back their rodeo. I’ve been trying to make sure that doesn’t happen ever since.

Yesterday I presented the Yucca Valley town manager with a proposed ordinance to prohibit rodeo tools and techniques. The ban has a small precedent here in California but will not be met with many cheers in this neck of the desert.

I am on the minority side of this battle, as usual for all things animal and environmental and generally good and true in this town.

My team jumped into gear this summer when locals began lamenting the loss of the Grubstake Days rodeo – a once annual event sponsored by the town’s chamber of commerce and now dormant due to lack of funds.

The pro-rodeo group is forming a nonprofit to sponsor a rodeo on Memorial Day weekend 2027, with or without town funding, come hell or high water. My goal is to proactively get a ban in place.

The competing campaigns set off a firestorm on social media, and it’s been brutal and not a little scary.

This is a small town, with a population of about 22,000 in Yucca Valley and 70,000 for the Morongo Basin collectively. And it’s very divided.

For rodeo, the Pro and No camps split along political lines, and I didn’t anticipate the degree of hate that accompanies culture wars to play such a part. My mistake. Go back to LA, they wrote on repeat – except I never lived there, have never lived in any city, and have been here for 16 years. My belief in animal rights has nothing to do with any of it. And that’s just the start of the conflation.

Rodeo fans lean right.

Every public comment requesting that the town support a rodeo has been given by a white woman or girl claiming an event held in conjunction with an annual festival is part of their heritage.

Parents clutched their cowboy hats and cleaved to the mantra of tradition. They sent their little girls to the mic to read essays about how caring for their horses teaches them the value of dedication and sacrifice, builds their character and confidence. How attending rodeos strengthens their family and community bonds.

Spare me.

They are being indoctrinated into the heritage of hate. Beginning with the use and abuse of animals and expanding to the same self-reliant-outsider-under-siege myth currently doing double duty on issues of immigration, public lands, gun rights and reproductive rights, for example.

Unsurprisingly, a quick tour through the public profiles of the neighbors telling me to go fuck myself showed invocations of God and country through slogans, flags and Bible verses threaded between grievances about freedom. I saw videos of off-road vehicles tearing up protected desert, photos from the gun range, and all manner of praise for the president and his men.

Animal rights activists lean left.

I guess we’re all cliche categories – my own social media yelling at everyone to leave animals alone and begging them to go vegan with me. Outrage over a million injustices. Memes about ecocide and the end of the world.

I’m making fun of all of us, but not this: the cruelty toward animals and the cruelty leveled at me for my dissent come from the same place.

The language is modeled by their politicians and their parents; it’s a masterclass in bullying. Eating animals, using them for sport, entertainment, research, products, financial gain – that’s just the default. It’s unconsidered, unconscious and unacceptable.

These are people who do not recognize the inherent violence in eating animals. Rodeo is a performative celebration of cattle ranching, an industry that uses living beings as commodities to be bred, worked and slaughtered for profit.

Rodeo takes branding, roping and breaking, and turns those injustices into sport and entertainment. And they amplify the pain. Ranch horses are not broken to ride using flank straps, and ranch hands don’t ride bulls.

I had an opportunity to walk Yucca Valley’s town manager through a proposed ordinance that prohibits the tools of torment that make rodeo what it is. The prohibition of spurs, flank straps, ropes, prods and brute bodily force effectively bans bareback riding, saddle bronc riding, bull riding, calf roping, steer wrestling and mutton busting in their current forms.

The meeting went well. We’d met before – I led three street protests and spoke at six months of council meetings during our campaign for new leadership at the town’s animal shelter last year. (We won, eventually.)

The good news is that the town wants no involvement with rodeo; the bad news is that it’s likely to award a special use permit for one, should there be an appropriate application. The manager understands it is our goal to proactively prevent that, and his job is to bring the request to the council. The best outcome: the proposed ordinance gets agendized, the manager makes a staff presentation, there is council discussion and public comment, and the council takes a vote. And we take it from there …

Yucca Valley isn’t a special case. It is a franchise of a national story, maybe coming to a town near you. Follow the campaign.