Effect of Animal’s Experience and Rodeo Procedures on Behaviour of Bucking Horses at a Large Commercial Rodeo in Canada

Abstract The use of animals in rodeo performances exemplifies the debate of trained performance vs. coerced abuse in human-animal interactions, particularly for roughstock or bucking events. The debate suffers from a lack of scientific evaluation to represent the animals’ experience and to inform discourse. The current study evaluated 116 horses over 3 yrs at the same rodeo in the Bareback, Novice Bareback, Saddle Bronc, and Novice Saddle Bronc events. Behaviour of humans and horses were continuously recorded during active loading and while horses were held in chutes prior to performance. Behaviours displayed were combined into composite scores for horses and handlers with increasing scores reflecting increasing behavioural vigor, suggested to be related to escape/fear in horses. Overall, 71.5% of horses balked during loading, of which 36.8% balked more than once. During loading 83% of balking events had a human located in front of the line of movement and the odds of a horse balking increased with increasing number of handlers (P = 0.04). For every exposure to the rodeo below the median of 3 performances, the odds of balking during loading increased by 1.1 (95%CI: 1.1-1.3; P =  0.04), odds of higher animal loading behaviour scores increased by 1.1 (95%CI: 1.1-1.3; P =  0.06), and odds of higher animal behaviour scores while being held in the chute increased by 1.2 (95%CI: 1.1-1.3; P