Rehabilitated Bucking Horse Back in Top Form!

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With all the talk about Carrie Underwood giving lots of money to support animal rights groups recently. I felt it necessary to touch on this subject and really focus on the great animal care that does go on in the rodeo industry. This hot topic is very controversial and many of these animal rights groups are not only radical beyond belief but, well funded, and not very educated on the true facts about rodeo and the care that really happens behind the scenes. Well, that in itself will be a great topic for a future blog but, today I couldn’t help but feel the need to spread the good word about the great care rodeo animals do receive in our industry.

My colleague and good friend fellow PRCA Rodeo Announcer Steve Kenyon of Pro Rodeo Live recently sent me this interesting article about an interview with a PRCA Stock Contractor and one such story about going above and beyond in the care of one of his prize bucking horses and I feel the need to share it with you today.

Enjoy the read and leave your comments, or share your own personal story and, help spread the word about the great care that we do give the animals in our sport!

If you would like to know more about Steve, check out his website at ProRodeoLive.com!

 

The Brother Story – A conversation with JK Rodeo Company’s Jim Kenney

-Courtesy of Steve Kenyon

You already know that bareback rider Kaycee Feild set the arena record at the San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo in his event when he rode the JK Rodeo Company bucking horse Brother in the championship round for 93 points.

The horse Feild rode, Brother, is a many times WNFR selected horse who won the top horse award in San Antonio for the second time in three years a week ago Saturday.
And quite frankly, if Brother wasn’t making his living in the sport of rodeo, he might not be alive today.
He missed all of 2010’s rodeo season after a freak accident in the trailer after the rodeo in Odessa a year ago. We talked to Kenney about Brother and asked him to tell us his story.

I was taking the horses home after a performance in Odessa, somehow he got his foot hung in a slat and injured his pastern joint. We took some X-Rays and found that the cartilage has been damaged. I thought that he was ruined and he would have been if we hadn’t had the surgery we eventually had on him.

Kenney said he took Brother to Dr. Watkins at Texas A & M, who told him he had never worked on a bucking horse but that he had done several jumping horses.

I told him if he could do a jumping horse he could do a bucking horse, Dr. Watkins agreed and we went ahead and did surgery on him. They took the cartilage out of the pastern joint and fused that bone together to make one joint. It turns out there’s very little motion in a horses foot there, most of the motion is in the ankle. They put a plate in to hold the bones together where they had fused.They kept him there for 20 days, I brought him home and kept him in a 20X20 pen for another 120 days to keep him from running around. After that we turned him out in the arena and hecame up sound. Dr Watkins told me in April to lay him off for eight months, I decided to just wait and leave him off until Odessa this year.

Brother’s performance has been outstanding since his return.

They split second and third on him in Odessa, he was in the short go in Fort Worth and they were 86 on him there, he finished right behind another one of my horses, Molly. Then I took him to San Antonio and they set the record on him there.I didn’t know that procedure could be done, but I was very pleased that this horse was able to be rehabilitated to the point that he can buck. He doesn’t sore up, he’s not lame, he seems toget better every time he bucks.

Kenney said Brother is now 11 years old. He said the work they did on him was expensive, but in his opinion in was well worth it.

Dr. Watkins said that 85 to 90 % of the horses he worked on he could get back to performing the way they were before the surgery. And most of them were older than Brother. I just knew that he has done a very good job for me, and I was going to do everything I could to save him. If that surgery wasn’t available he wouldn’t have made it.

Now, the way things are going, it looks like Brother’s got a great chance to return to the Wrangler NFR this December.

 
You’ll be able to hear more of our interview with Jim Kenney next week on the Pro Rodeo Report, in conjunction with WebTalkRadio.net. We’ll focus on the livestock of Pro Rodeo in the program that will be uploaded next Monday.

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