"Rodeo: An Animal History, Susan Nance deftly weaves together cultural, political, environmental, and western history with animal studies to re-examine the history of rodeo in the American and Canadian West. this ambitious book is an innovative and important contribution to the scholarship on animal studies and the history of the American West, as well as environmental, cultural, and political history."--New Mexico Historical Review "In Rodeo: An Animal History, Susan Nance explores a side of the rodeo left largely untold, that of the animal participants. While animal rights activists and some scholars in the humanities have examined animal treatment in the rodeo, Nance looks not just at that issue but also aims to tell the life stories of the animals themselves, thus elevating them to the same level of examination that the human rodeo participants have received over the past 100 years.In many ways this book is not just telling the history of rodeo and that of animals in the rodeo, it is also a call for change in how we treat and view animals, their lives, and their value."--Great Plains Research "Nance's history of rodeo animals reveals more than the lives of horse and cattle athletes. In tracing rodeo animals, Nance expands western historiography to better understand the constant presence of violence toward animals and humans. Rodeo animals reveal the importance of defining a western identity by the end of the nineteenth century.

Rodeos served as a proving ground for rural westerners to show their control of the land through controlling animals, to prove their individual strength and endurance through death-defying events, and to prove their distinct identity in opposition to urbanites through their continued support of rodeos."--Journal of Arizona History.