Effect of animal’s experience and rodeo procedures on behaviour of bucking horses at a large commercial rodeo in Canada

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 < 0.001) indicating that increased exposure to the rodeo decreased the odds of balking or vigorous behaviours prior to the rodeo performance. The scoring of the vigour of horses’ behaviour prior to the rodeo was not related to the judges’ scoring of bucking performance nor to the event. When reactive behaviours were observed in the bucking chute in association with an activity most were associated with preparing the horse for performance. Horses also showed spontaneous behaviours with no association with activity. The results of the role of experience and potential performance-related anticipatory behaviours is likely indicative of horses’ habituation to rodeo versus learned helplessness. The association of increased experience with the rodeo and decreased behavioural vigor, in combination with no association with animal performance score, supports further research on the role of training methods and exposure to rodeo environments in promoting positive animal welfare at rodeos.