Animals that suffer or die at the Calgary Stampede get lots of headlines, but there’s a research program aimed at mitigating problems before they happen.
“We are working with the Calgary Stampede on improving the safety of chuckwagon horses,” researcher Renaud Léguillette said at a media event Friday.
He’s a professor at the University of Calgary’s faculty of veterinary medicine.
“We validated a test that allows us to measure how the heart muscle is dealing with the effort of the races, then we can red-flag a horse that would have a little bit more cardiac stress,” he explained.
Some of the research for those tests is being conducted at the university’s W.A. Ranches, a 19,000-acre working research ranch about 30 kilometres northwest of Calgary.
The program is in its third year, after two successful pilot years.
“This year, we do it on all of the chuckwagon horses at the Calgary Stampede,” he said.
“The vast majority of these horses are doing really well, in terms of fitness, preparation, cardiac stress. We are really looking for the needle in the haystack, the very, very few horses that may be in trouble. Those are like a handful out of the 500 samples we do. My interest is really helping the horses do well in the races.”
Another animal welfare professor and director of W.A. Ranches has been working with the Stampede for about 14 years.
“For the first two or three years, we worked on developing animal welfare policies, audits, assessments,” Ed Pajor said.
That research led to concrete change.
“We’ve done projects with summer students looking at providing water to the animals at the Stampede. Historically at a rodeo, animals are not given water before they compete and not given water after the event, either, because they are put on their vehicles and taken back to wherever they are being kept,” Pajor said.
“We asked the Stampede if we could test providing animals with water, would they actually use the water? It turns out that after the event, they all take a drink, and now the Stampede, all the pens that hold animals after the events, all have water available.”
An animal rights organization would like to go further than water for thirsty animals.
“Calgary Humane Society fundamentally opposes high-risk rodeo events like chuckwagon racing, calf roping and steer wrestling, as historically they result in the highest number of animal injuries and deaths,” director of public relations, Anna-Lee Fitzsimmons, said in an email statement Friday.
“While other organizations may wish to intervene to change rodeo and the Calgary Stampede through protest or other advocacy means, CHS has found it can best protect the interests of the animals involved by working with organizations that put on such events.”
That’s music to the ears of researcher Léguillette.
“Those horses are prepared almost like Olympic athletes. They have diet programs, fitness programs, training programs, and they are monitored very closely,” he said.
“They monitor their tendons, legs, ligaments, joints, cardiac and respiratory. So they are really like athletes in a serious training program.”
He added, because the specific focus of this program is the welfare of chuckwagon horses, the researchers have little competition.
“This research is very unique because rodeos are not a worldwide activity. But what’s really interesting is that these results are applicable to many other disciplines or regulatory bodies,” Léguillette said.
The results from the Calgary Stampede have been used by the Hong Kong Jockey Club to develop a cardiac prevention program.
Meanwhile, Pajor says next year the research will really hit the ground running.
“What we hope to do is develop the tools this year and then use it next year to evaluate new animal-welfare assessments,” he said.
“We will look at a number of behavioural indicators the animals demonstrate, environments they are kept in, how they are moved, injuries and health statuses of the animals.”
This Calgary Stampede, which runs for 10 days, starts July 5.