What happens at rodeos is unlawful, and it's long past time that the Government and the National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee showed some concern for the law by acting urgently to enforce it, writes Cat MacLennan
Animal welfare regulators should stop trying to defend the indefensible and start applying the law.
In 2018 I wrote a report titled The legal status of rodeo in New Zealand which concluded that rodeo as it operates is unlawful. This is because events such as calf roping, steer wrestling and bull riding are in breach of the Animal Welfare Act’s prohibition against ill-treatment of animals.
Similarly, the electric prods, flanks straps, ropes and spurs used to force animals to enter the rodeo arena and to provide a spectacle for onlookers by repeatedly bucking, breach the basic requirements of the legislation for animals to be handled in ways that prevent injury and reduce pain or distress. They also contravene the act by preventing animals from displaying normal patterns of behaviour.
My paper was published by the New Zealand Animal Law Association and was launched at Parliament, with Associate Agriculture Minister Meka Whaitiri, who has responsibility for animal welfare, in attendance.
As a result, Whaitiri asked the National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee to provide her with advice on rodeos. Specifically, she requested advice about the use of flank straps, electric prodders, tail twisting, rope burning and the welfare of animals used in rodeo - particularly the young calves subjected to calf roping.
The National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee (NAWAC) responded with a letter to Whaitiri stating that flank straps, electric prodders, tail twisting and rope burning were already covered by regulations. That is: NAWAC utterly failed to do what the minister had requested. Instead of providing advice, the committee simply stated the current position.
On top of that, it recommended self-regulation of the industry - again, a cop-out.
However, the committee also provided a report to the minister titled Rodeo events: How do they impact the sentient animal? That paper stated that all except one rodeo event taking place in Aotearoa raised either serious or moderate concerns about their impacts on animals.
Quite plainly, the committee’s own report concluded that the rodeo events which occur each summer are in breach of the law.
The obvious outcome should have been that NAWAC and Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) would move swiftly to remedy that situation and ensure compliance with the law by banning the most harmful devices and events in rodeo.
But no.
2018 came to an end.
2019 passed.
And 2020 was nearly over. And the regulators charged with protecting animal welfare and enforcing the Animal Welfare Act took no action.
Accordingly, in December 2020, I wrote a new draft rodeo code and forwarded it to NAWAC. Section 70 of the act allows anyone to draft a new code of welfare and send it to NAWAC for consideration. Codes of welfare set out specific details about how animals are to be treated.
The act requires NAWAC to consider any draft code forwarded to it. After six months, in June 2021, the committee wrote back to me saying it had decided to reprioritise its review of the rodeo code from a timeframe of five to 10 years, to one to two years. A sub-committee was set up to analyse my draft code and NAWAC agreed to initiate a review of the rodeo code and use my document as the starting point.
The reply made it plain that NAWAC, without my draft, would have been satisfied to wait for five to 10 years before initiating a review, despite knowing since 2018 that rodeo breaches the Animal Welfare Act.
This month, two animal advocacy organisations, the New Zealand Animal Law Association and SAFE, announced they had filed court proceedings against NAWAC and the Minister of Agriculture for their failure to act on rodeos.
NAWAC and MPI should now act immediately to ensure the Animal Welfare Act is applied to rodeos. This means banning devices such as electric prodders and flank straps, and prohibiting events that cause harm to animals, such as calf roping, steer wrestling and bronc riding.
The experience in other jurisdictions is that, once these devices and events are prohibited, rodeo dies out because rodeo organisers cannot get animals into the ring without shocking them, and can only force them to “perform” by frightening and hurting them with cruel flank straps.
There is no need to wait for a lengthy code review process or for the outcome of court proceedings. Both the Government and NAWAC know that what occurs at rodeos is unlawful.
It is long past time that they showed some concern for the law by acting urgently to enforce it, rather than waiting for animal advocacy organisations to do their jobs for them.
* Cat MacLennan is an Animal Agenda Aotearoa convenor
