Whoa! Legless Bronco Busting

Legless Bronco Busting!!!

Hang on to your hats ladies and Gentlemen! Here’s the latest in Rodeo events, the newest, the wildest, the craziest yet, its LEGLESS BRONCO BUSTING!!! That’s right we said it, you heard it, Legless Bronco Busting. The new event that’s sweeping the rodeo circuits from Texas to Oklahoma, Wyoming to Oregon, Colorado to, well you get the picture. It’s everywhere. Are you bored with the same old wild mustang bucking horses that come out and jump around the arena for a while doing stupefying flying leaps and incredible horse-like acrobatics while trying to unseat its rider. The spectacular has become boring. You’ve seen it all before and you’re tired of it. So all that’s left is to head to the refreshment stand and drink some beer to break the boredom. Better to go hammer back a dozen longnecks then watch the same old Crow hop, sidestep, Sunfish, swap ends, flip over backward, bite you in the loading chutes, tired old antics of conventional buckers. If that’s where you’re at then this newest of the new events Legless Bronco Busting is right up your alley.

What’s wrong with the old stuff? Why do we need a new event? Well that’s easy. If you’ve been to a World Championship rodeo, say like the one in Vegas or Tucson with all that prize money and seen the same old dusty world champion cowboys riding the same old tired world-class bucking stock. Staying on for 8 seconds, throwing their hats in the air, wearing those big fancy belt buckles, lip packed full of Skoal, you know that deep down you’d like to see something fresh, something new, something that puts the shine back on your chaps. Well Legless Bronco Busting is just the ticket.

A little history about the event. Bronco busting has been around since way before Gene Autry or Roy Rodgers. It goes way back. Back even before Lash LaRue. Some say it was the first event ever held and prepared the world for what we now know as RODEO. Don’t know if I’d go that far, but it has been around for a long time. Way before TV anyway. But it’s gotten a little stale. The Boomer generation, which has practically ruled the world ever since they came into being, is getting a little long in the tooth. Aging, getting old. Some of them are way into their late 60’s 70’s and even their early 80’s and they still want to rodeo. They still want to ride the big rides. They still want to go the saloon for a shot and a beer and a fistfight. They want to chase, or at least shuffle, after those long-legged but buxom cowgirls that hang out in those smoky, whiskey infused places. They want to win those big belt buckles to complement their wide suspenders. They’re not done yet, not by any means. But what to do? They can’t even crawl up the sides of those loading chutes to board a bronc let alone stick on anything but a toilet seat for 8 seconds.

That’s where the genius of modern technology comes into play. Science in other words,  the same stuff that brought you global warming. You all heard of genetic modification, or the cloning of that sheep, Dolly. That’s all done with science. You put some DNA into the hopper, usually about 6 or 7 pounds depending on what you want to make, dial-up what new  animal you want, flip the 440 electrical switch and stand back as out pops a new sheep or goat or in this case a new kind of horse. That’s the secret right there to this newest of new rodeo events. A Legless horse. They made a legless horse! Cool beans, right? Well to be accurate the horse isn’t totally legless, that wouldn’t work, those suckers are heavy, no, it’s just a horse with radically shortened legs. Like only 6-8 in. long not counting the hooves. Using a mix of DNA from Lipizzaner stock out of Austria, known for it’s jumping ability, some Percheron stock out of France for its wide back, some Black Forest Horse, also called the Black Forest cold blood or Schwarzwälder Kaltblut, because it’s the rarest horse in the world and the guys doing this had a lot of money, and last but not least some DNA from a few broomtails out of the west Texas hill country because there was some left in the bottom of the bucket from another experiment.

What they got was the Legless horse, the meanest, orneriest, most unforgiving bucking stock on practically no legs. Now boomer cowboys can march up to the chutes, park their walker next to the gate, sort of lean over the back and fall on. It’s like getting on a Roomba that eats hay. The chute door opens and they hang on for dear life as the horse wallows and pitches and jumps dizzyingly into the air, leaps are often as high as 6-8 inches before slamming back down to earth in a bone-jarring crash, twirls slowly, rears back and does its damnest to throw that octogenarian rider into the next county. As you can see in the image above it’s a wild ride. Dust is flying, the horse is trying to rear up, it’s rolling and leaping, the ride is terrifying. So much so that you can see the rider clutching one of the stanchions of the chute gate thinking to save his life. Disqualifying for sure, but better than dying. No score for him today.

There it is folks, Legless Bronco Busting, the newest most electrifying rodeo event to come down the road since *Horse Spinning. Watch the PRCA circuit for its inclusion in its next major rodeo and don’t be surprised if it becomes a world-wide sensation. I know I will be.

*http://www.bigshotsnow.com/horse-spinning/

We See By Your Outfit…

WeSeeByYourOutfit2714

We see by your outfit

That you are a wild duck

You see by our outfits

That we’re wild ducks too

We see by our outfits that we are all wild ducks

If you get an outfit you can be a wild duck too…

Many times in the dark unrelenting cold of a gray winters day, when the bone chilling water pulls all of the heat out of your webbed feet, you need a little something to pick you up. To help you maintain some perspective on why you’re a duck and why you’re still here on the Yellowstone river when everyone else has gone south to stick their feet in the warm sands of the winter migration site on the Gulf coast or maybe Maui. It can get pretty depressing to have your rump stuck in freezing cold water all day.

Ducks are not known for their singing voices, in fact if you’ve ever heard a bunch of them trying you know immediately that it is not their thing. It may sound a little like Rap but better, but they will never be mistaken for meadowlarks. What they’ve had to do to compensate is convert old western songs like “The Streets of Laredo” as they have done here, to a sort of talking blues style of singing that relates to duck stuff. Kind of like the gandy dancers did while they worked laying those rails as they built the railroads of America.

Sometimes the larger bull ducks, the one with deeper voices, will do old show tunes like “Old Man River” from Show Boat in the style of Paul Robeson, or the smaller ducks with higher voices will do stuff from “Cats” or “The Pajama Game”, but the Teal boys, the green-wing and blue-wing, like the ones in this image, and often the cinnamon are strictly western singers. They like the old classics, the ones they heard while watching old cowboy movies from the 40’s and 50’s. Guys sitting around a campfire singing lamentable songs to ease the strain of moving a herd along. Gene Autry is a big favorite with these fellows. I’ve even heard of some of the Teal boys sporting tattoos with “Gene is My Hero” and “I Winter at the Melody Ranch” under some of those feathers.

That’s what is going on in the picture above. The boys are singing to this stranger who just drifted up and can no longer feel the webbing in his feet, trying to give him some support and reason to hang in there, even though he’s making eyes like he’s going to break and run any minute for that warm southern clime. So the next time you’re driving along and pass a small ice-rimmed pond with a couple of ducks in it, stop and listen for a moment. You might just get serenaded.