Fair’s Animal Abuse: It’s Not Sporting

Each year the Orange County Fair is replete with animal exploitation and abuse, but this year it subjected the animals to new lows of indignity with milking contests and fashion shows. This kind of “bread and circuses” approach is insulting to both humans and animals.

The worst, of course, is the rodeo, which Jill Lloyd justifies as “accepted sport.” Yet bear-baiting and cockfighting were once “accepted” sports (so-called).

There is nothing sporting in roping a speeding animal and yanking or jerking it backward--a practice that must lead to injury and broken bones, regardless of justification as good, clean fun.

There is nothing sporting about whipping a horse into a frenzy by poking, prodding, slapping and otherwise irritating it so it can come bursting out of a gate in hopes of gaining freedom from torment.

There is nothing sporting in bulldogging, where man, who is supposedly smarter than the animals, pits himself against an animal of great dignity, power and beauty who has done nothing to him.

Where is the sport in all this cruelty, abuse and anachronism? God deliver the animals from the maniacally yelling (Yaaahooo!) “sportsmen” who think cruelty, abuse and exploitation are the American way.

PATRICIA DURBIN HOTZ

Costa Mesa