Vegetarian Rodeo...goes to the rodeo

Vegetarian Rodeo By Patrick Reetz

So at the beginning of this summer, around my ninth month of living in Fresno, I decided it would be best for my psychosocial well-being if I would just get over my contempt for this shabby excuse for a city and accept my position in the universe with a smile and expand my personal and spiritual self by interacting with the natives.

I’d like to think that this was the reason I decided to attend the annual Clovis Rodeo, but it was really because this hot chick asked me to go with her. “Expanding my horizons” be damned.

See, as many of my close cohorts know, my skinny, white, libertarian ass is from Los Angeles and has never been exposed to such oddities as rodeos and tractor pulls and other various forms of entertainment the local Fresnicks enjoy. You can imagine the cognitive strife that ensued when my world of soy burgers, peace signs, PETA donations, Beatles music, yoga and appreciation for Michael Moore movies clashed with, well, Clovis. Take, for example, this inappropriately loud dialogue between myself and a kind soul who was only trying to explain why the horses buck like they do.

“ Holy Buddha! What the hell?! No! They don't... No! They can't... Not around their THINGS!”

“ Well, yeah,” said the girl in pigtails and a cowboy hat. “They just tie a rope down there, pull it tight, and then the horses jump around.”

It took at least four more overpriced albeit highly coveted cups of Coors Light to drown out the horrible memories of that atrocity. Sadly, more was to come. They released youth cattle into the large dirt area and had teams of two ropers lasso the calves and then jump down and hog-tie the things. I decided to not even ask how they got the little creatures to run so fast.

Surely, I felt, these people were barbarians of the worst kind. Flat-out savages not fit to participate in the human world in which civilized individuals reside.

I was sure that at any point I’d likely slip as the alcohol took effect and yell out something as ill-timed as “You redneck hillbilly bastards! You only enjoy these horrible events because your outdated sense of reality is scarred by years of oppression of thought, ignorance, and a social need to establish dominance over something, but because you have no hold on your own fate you take it out on these helpless animals that this god of yours who you fearfully and superstitiously worship supposedly created!” Luckily for my own well being, I didn’t let that one slip out.

As unlikely as it is for most people in this town to go against such long-standing traditions, I’ll throw out a fairly informative Web site anyway. www.bucktherodeo.com

Maybe there are at least a few humane people in this city.

— This columnist can be reached at collegian@csufresno.edu