Rodeo is a rough and tumble sport. It was born on the wide open rangelands of the West, but through the years it has been transformed into an entertainment package that knows no geographic boundaries. Despite that change, it remains a sport where the potential for injury to animals is high, but surprisingly the actual incidence is low. While the number of horse owners involved in rodeo has grown by leaps and bounds, there still are many people who don’t know anything about the sport except what they see on television.

In this article, we want to take you behind the scenes and talk to the people who rodeo for a living, and those who just love the sport. Many changes have been made over the decades concerning the care and welfare of the animals involved in rodeo, and those changes have made a difference in not only the injury rate for competitors (bucking stock and roped stock), but in the equine partners of the cowboys and cowgirls who compete.

Rodeo is unique in the world of sports in that there are no guaranteed contracts for the contestants. In fact, contestants have to dig into their own pockets for entry fees. All they earn is what they are good enough to win.

Along the way, they can be sidelined with injuries that range from groin pulls and fractures to paralysis, as occurred a couple years ago to Jerome Davis, one of the sport’s top bull riders at the time