Reviewed by:

• Rodeo: An Animal History by Susan Nance
• Jeannette Vaught

Rodeo as a sport and longstanding constellation of American cultural iconographies is receiving a serious scholarly reappraisal. Just last year, Rebecca Scofield's Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West (University of Washington Press, 2019) re-evaluated various human histories and impacts of rodeo by carefully analyzing its fringes and margins. Now, historian Susan Nance presents a fresh accounting of rodeo from its very center. Her focus, on the overlooked and under-analyzed equines and bovines without whom there would be no rodeo, makes this book, Rodeo: An Animal History, true to its title. Following a formula that she employed in her history of elephant exhibitions, Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), Nance here provides a thorough business history of rodeo—infused with environmental history and insights from animal welfare science—to reconstruct the histories and experiences of animals involved in rodeo. She ranges from rodeo spectacles themselves to a mosaic of the ranches, feedlots, and slaughterhouses of the beef industry; rodeo schools; breeding farms; and thousands of rural backyards across the United States and Canada, without which rodeo could not happen.

Nance's broad central argument is that rodeo is a resiliently effective mediator of the entwined social and environmental changes that accompanied western American settler colonialism and the often dire consequences of those changes on people, land, and animals. "Rodeo's animals," she argues, "become surrogates for the trials of rural life in the West and the violence of its history" (6). By paying attention to the environmental and animal histories of rodeo, Nance shows that "rodeo has been both a stubborn celebration of that rural quarrel with the land and a coping mechanism for dealing with the limits of people, animals, and the land" (15). Throughout, Nance foregrounds the oppositional mentality embedded in western settler histories and how it plays out in rodeo culture.

Her analysis spans the long century from early cowboy tournaments of the 1880s to the formation and success of the Professional Bull Riders tour in the 1990s and 2000s. In six chronological chapters, Nance relies on a formidable collection of archives, including myriad organizational [End Page 360] records and periodicals. She also provides a thorough bibliography of source material pertaining to rodeo, animals, and their diverse allied subjects. Each chapter focuses on a particular equine or bovine rodeo participant, whose stories reveal the back stage, as it were, to readers. Nance pairs readings of human historical records with on-the-hoof accounts of what animals experienced, and her account is straightforward about the brutality that animals and humans experience. The difference, she asserts, is that humans involved in rodeo and rodeo-adjacent pipelines choose to put themselves in the difficult and dangerous positions that construct the complex web of considering oneself "western" or rural. Animals do not.

Nance grounds her analysis of human-animal rodeo relationships in the concept of the "myth of animal consent," a phrase she borrows and expands upon from the writer Jonathan Safran Foer. As Nance shows, this concept frequently manifests as an acknowledgement of animal intelligence and consciousness, characteristics that animal welfare and rights advocates have long considered a reason to care for animals. However, in rodeo and its allied conduits, it also serves as proof that nonhuman animals are making informed and free choices about their actions. This absurd logic, Nance explains, appears in totemic rodeo clichés like animals who "love to buck" and in pervasive narratives about animals that are glad to perform in rodeos because they know the alternative is the slaughterhouse.

This twisting of animal intelligence into a myth about their consent accompanies Nance's analysis of many layers of rodeo performance, from race and masculinity to environmental degradation and economic pressures to which rodeo responds and adapts. Even for those who are used to thinking of rodeo as a problematic space for human and other animals, a sobering thought surfaces: improving the lives of all species in rodeo performances...

审核人：

• 牛仔竞技表演：苏珊·南斯（Susan Nance）的动物史
• 珍妮特·沃特（Jeannette Vaught）

牛仔竞技运动是美国文化偶像中的一项运动和悠久的历史，正受到学术界的认真评估。就在去年，丽贝卡·斯科菲尔德（Rebecca Scofield）的《外星人：美国西部边缘的牛仔竞技表演》（华盛顿大学出版社，2019年）通过仔细分析其历史和边缘重新评估了各种人类历史和牛仔竞技表演的影响。现在，历史学家苏珊·南斯（Susan Nance）从一开始就对牛仔竞技有了新的认识。她专注于被忽视和分析不足的马匹和牛，没有他们就不会有牛仔竞技表演，这本书使《牛仔竞技表演：动物史》一如其名。遵循她在大象展览历史中采用的公式“有趣的大象：动物管理局和美国马戏团的业务”（约翰霍普金斯大学出版社，2013年），南斯（Nance）提供了牛仔竞技的详尽商业历史-结合了环境历史和动物福利科学的真知灼见-重建了牛仔竞技所涉及的动物的历史和经验。从牛仔眼镜到牛肉行业的牧场，饲养场和屠宰场的马赛克，她的作品不一而足。牛仔学校；养殖场；以及美国和加拿大各地成千上万的农村后院，否则就不会发生牛仔竞技表演。

南斯的广泛中心论点是，牛仔竞技是伴随着美国西部定居者殖民主义而交织在一起的社会和环境变化以及这些变化通常对人，土地和动物造成的可怕后果的有弹性的有效调解人。她认为，“牛仔的动物成为了对西方农村生活的考验及其历史暴力的代名词”（6）。通过关注牛仔竞技场的环境和动物历史，南斯表示“牛仔竞技既是对农村与土地争吵的顽固庆祝，也是应对人，动物和土地极限的应对机制”（15 ）。自始至终，Nance都着眼于西方定居者历史中所蕴含的对立心态，以及它在牛仔竞技文化中的表现。

她的分析跨越了漫长的世纪，从1880年代早期的牛仔比赛到1990年代和2000年代职业牛车手巡回赛的成立和成功。在六个按时间顺序排列的章节中，Nance依赖于庞大的档案馆藏，包括无数的组织[End Page 360​​]记录和期刊。她还提供了有关牛仔竞技表演，动物及其各种相关学科的原始资料的详尽目录。每章都针对特定的马或牛牛仔竞技表演者，他们的故事向读者揭示了它的后台。南斯将人类历史记录的阅读与对动物所经历的野蛮叙述相结合，而她的叙述很简单地说明了动物和人类所经历的残酷性。她断言，不同之处在于，参与牛仔竞技表演和牛仔竞技表演相邻管道的人们选择将自己置于困难和危险的位置，从而构成了将自己视为“西方”或农村的复杂网络。动物没有。

南斯以“动物同意的神话”的概念为基础，分析了人类与动物的竞技关系，这是她从作家乔纳森·赛弗兰·佛尔（Jonathan Safran Foer）借用并扩展过来的。正如南斯（Nance）所表明的那样，这一概念经常表现为对动物智力和意识的认可，这些特征是动物福利和权利倡导者长期以来一直将动物视为照顾动物的理由。但是，在牛仔竞技表演及其相关的管道中，它也可以证明非人类动物正在对其行为做出知情且自由的选择。Nance解释说，这种荒谬的逻辑出现在像“喜欢反抗”的动物的图腾牛仔竞技陈词滥调中，以及在乐于在牛仔竞技中表现出色的动物的普遍叙事中，因为他们知道替代品是屠宰场。

Nance对牛仔竞技表现的许多层面进行了分析，从种族和男性气质到环境退化以及牛仔竞技做出反应和适应的经济压力，这使动物智力变成了关于它们同意的神话。即使对于那些习惯将牛仔竞技场视为人类和其他动物有问题的空间的人来说，也有清醒的思想浮出水面：在牛仔竞技表演中改善所有物种的生活...