Moorcroft, Wyoming just had its 9th annual chicken roping event at Dewey's Bar and Grill. This event is so absurd that it might be the last one left in the state known as "Like no place on Earth."
Not a species is safe from human exploitation…this is horrific, despicable, and outrageous. But hey, at least they’re good people 🙃 they just don’t know any better lol great work exposing this, can’t be easy sitting idly by, among monsters, while this happens.
"Otherwise good people" yup. Humans will exploit anyone and everyone as much as they can, exploitation and cruelty have no limits. Being around people like this is definitely tough, basically being around a bunch of hardcore bullies and abusers.
It took enormous courage to go to that terrible place and sit among such people, but now the documentation is in the public domain for good. For more on chicken roping, including the one we got cancelled in New Mexico in 2000, please visit http://www.upc-online.org/entertainment. The sponsor of that event admitted they could not guarantee that no chickens would be harmed by being roped.
And we dare call ourselves Homo SAPIENS (sic), the single most destructive and only SELF-destructive species on the planet, to the detriment of all others.
From a Wyoming steer wrestler: "Women should not rodeo any more than men can have babies. Women were put on earth to reproduce, and are close to animals. Women's liberation is on an equal to gay liberation--they are both ridiculous." (--in the book, "RODEO: An Anthropologist Looks at the Wild and the Tame," by Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence, University of Tennessee Press, 1982. RECOMMENDED READING!)
I don't know that chicken roping can be called a "way of life." But it's certainly part of the life of a lot of people in that part of the world, whose moral education is severely stunted. There's a frightening neediness about all these people, a craving for a kind of sensation that will entertain them for a bit; but the sensations are cheap and tawdry (belt buckles, some prize money), even destructive, to self (drunkenness), and of course to others, the helpless frightened captive animals. And they apparently lack all faculty for self-questioning, and wondering, "Why in the world am I doing these mean and stupid things?" it's not easy to see how one can even begin a civilized conversation with such people.
Dewey's Place, the bar in which this cruelty is held, calls roping chickens and other animals a way of life: "This is Wyoming this is what we do, we play with the animals and then we eat them."
The Power over a defenseless creature at their feet, the infliction of fear and pain and suffering, all of it is euphoric for them. "We play with the animals before we eat [kill] them." This is an assertion of unabashed sadistic pleasure. Locals who deep down maybe don't like this type of activity will join in or say nothing out of fear that they could be "next": victims of their neighbors. I think the most primal emotion of people in these situations is chronic FEAR of one another.
Thank you for this travelogue to the Great Plains' heart of darkness. Having driven through Wyoming many times I think I can safely say that nowhere in the US is the beauty of nature more starkly juxtaposed against the squalor of humanity than there in the cowboy state. Unfortunately, the benighted natives you encountered, prancing around in their primitive regalia of oversize hats, garish belt buckles and pointy-toed boots while practicing their savage customs at the local water hole, have not a clue about what demons they actually are. On the plus side, Wyoming is the least densely (human) populated state in the continental US.
Least densely populated, and least populated absolutely. And yet the few-and-far-between people of Wyoming have as much representation in the Senate as the tens of millions of Californians and New Yorkers. So the deplorable attitudes of the "benighted natives" count for a lot, alas. "Deplorable" is an adjective that got Hillary Clinton into some difficulty, we know, but damn, it's quite accurate. Same thing with "benighted."
By way of intersectionality, Wyoming was where young Matthew Shepard was beat up, strung up on a fence, and left to die. And it is the setting of Annie Proulx's monumental story "Brokeback Mountain," the enamored-but-miserable heroes of which happened to be otherwise engaged in the maxi-toxico-manly brutalization of hoofed animals for a living.
Another sub-human way of being a ''special'' kind of monstrous POS towards other creatures, towards those who care among us, and to the whole planet !!!🤬😩💩👹
Not a species is safe from human exploitation…this is horrific, despicable, and outrageous. But hey, at least they’re good people 🙃 they just don’t know any better lol great work exposing this, can’t be easy sitting idly by, among monsters, while this happens.
"Otherwise good people" yup. Humans will exploit anyone and everyone as much as they can, exploitation and cruelty have no limits. Being around people like this is definitely tough, basically being around a bunch of hardcore bullies and abusers.
It took enormous courage to go to that terrible place and sit among such people, but now the documentation is in the public domain for good. For more on chicken roping, including the one we got cancelled in New Mexico in 2000, please visit http://www.upc-online.org/entertainment. The sponsor of that event admitted they could not guarantee that no chickens would be harmed by being roped.
-- Karen Davis, President, United Poultry Concerns www.upc-online.org
.
And we dare call ourselves Homo SAPIENS (sic), the single most destructive and only SELF-destructive species on the planet, to the detriment of all others.
From a Wyoming steer wrestler: "Women should not rodeo any more than men can have babies. Women were put on earth to reproduce, and are close to animals. Women's liberation is on an equal to gay liberation--they are both ridiculous." (--in the book, "RODEO: An Anthropologist Looks at the Wild and the Tame," by Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence, University of Tennessee Press, 1982. RECOMMENDED READING!)
I don't know that chicken roping can be called a "way of life." But it's certainly part of the life of a lot of people in that part of the world, whose moral education is severely stunted. There's a frightening neediness about all these people, a craving for a kind of sensation that will entertain them for a bit; but the sensations are cheap and tawdry (belt buckles, some prize money), even destructive, to self (drunkenness), and of course to others, the helpless frightened captive animals. And they apparently lack all faculty for self-questioning, and wondering, "Why in the world am I doing these mean and stupid things?" it's not easy to see how one can even begin a civilized conversation with such people.
Dewey's Place, the bar in which this cruelty is held, calls roping chickens and other animals a way of life: "This is Wyoming this is what we do, we play with the animals and then we eat them."
The Power over a defenseless creature at their feet, the infliction of fear and pain and suffering, all of it is euphoric for them. "We play with the animals before we eat [kill] them." This is an assertion of unabashed sadistic pleasure. Locals who deep down maybe don't like this type of activity will join in or say nothing out of fear that they could be "next": victims of their neighbors. I think the most primal emotion of people in these situations is chronic FEAR of one another.
I am never shocked at the xo level of humanity’s ability to css as use immense suffering with no regard for animals as sensitive and sentient.
Thank you for this travelogue to the Great Plains' heart of darkness. Having driven through Wyoming many times I think I can safely say that nowhere in the US is the beauty of nature more starkly juxtaposed against the squalor of humanity than there in the cowboy state. Unfortunately, the benighted natives you encountered, prancing around in their primitive regalia of oversize hats, garish belt buckles and pointy-toed boots while practicing their savage customs at the local water hole, have not a clue about what demons they actually are. On the plus side, Wyoming is the least densely (human) populated state in the continental US.
Least densely populated, and least populated absolutely. And yet the few-and-far-between people of Wyoming have as much representation in the Senate as the tens of millions of Californians and New Yorkers. So the deplorable attitudes of the "benighted natives" count for a lot, alas. "Deplorable" is an adjective that got Hillary Clinton into some difficulty, we know, but damn, it's quite accurate. Same thing with "benighted."
By way of intersectionality, Wyoming was where young Matthew Shepard was beat up, strung up on a fence, and left to die. And it is the setting of Annie Proulx's monumental story "Brokeback Mountain," the enamored-but-miserable heroes of which happened to be otherwise engaged in the maxi-toxico-manly brutalization of hoofed animals for a living.
These people are no more than your average redneck psychopaths…why are we even allowing this to happen to the voiceless?
Please read.
https://substack.com/@curiosityunlocked/note/c-69076124?r=yn8c0&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Another sub-human way of being a ''special'' kind of monstrous POS towards other creatures, towards those who care among us, and to the whole planet !!!🤬😩💩👹
Good article!
Why are even allowing these redneck psychopaths to abuse these voiceless creatures? Why is this even legal? Time to make a big change,