OTTAWA – Calf-roping, bronc-riding and steer wrestling is all right by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council.
The Humane Society of Canada took a shot at getting rodeos banned from Canadian TV last year by complaining in July that OLN’s broadcast of the Calgary Stampede promoted violence against animals.
The national specialty services panel viewed 16 hours of rodeo coverage of July 9, 10 and 11, 2005 and disagreed with the complainant, the CBSC announced today.
The Panel also said the Humane Society was chasing the wrong chuckwagon anyway since the panel "considered that the bulk of the Humane Society’s complaint dealt with its concerns with rodeo itself (a matter for bodies with jurisdiction over issues relating to animal welfare) rather than the broadcast of rodeo events," says the decision.
"The question for the CBSC is whether those broadcasts included content in contravention of the rules… In dealing with the broadcast of calf roping, steer wrestling, saddle bronc riding, bareback riding, bull riding and chuckwagon racing, the panel said: [T]he issue is whether the broadcast ‘sanctions, promotes or glamorizes violence’ against animals. In this respect alone, the panel considers that the complaint fails. It finds no glamorization, promotion or even valorizing of violence against the animals. None of the rodeo events is a bullfight or approximation thereof. None of the events has a hunter-hunted format. There is no goal of injury to either the human or the animal contestant. At best, there is a test of wills between the cowboy, on the one hand, and the calf, the bronc or the bull, on the other," says the release.
