A few weeks ago, I wrote about Zeb Lanham, a “bull rider” who pled guilty to felony domestic violence for beating his pregnant girlfriend last November. Among other injuries, he left her with a broken cheekbone, which was placing pressure on her brain. I also highlighted 16 additional cases of interpersonal violence and/or animal abuse (above and beyond the cruelty-as-entertainment regularly found in rodeos), committed by those involved in the rodeo and associated businesses, which I pulled from SHARK’s website. Criminal acts perpetrated by “cowboys” are so common that SHARK has even devoted a section of their website to detailing these cases: CowboyCriminals.com

SHARK has begun collecting these stories in a series of short video documentaries, “Rodeo Cowboy Criminals”. They expect to produce at least a dozen such installments, linking the cruelty committed in the ring with the violence these career animal abusers carry into their personal lives. Such interpersonal violence includes assault, domestic abuse, child abuse, rape and murder. And animal abuse and environmental injustices, naturally.

Here’s Part 1, along with a description of the video from their latest newsletter. (The video runs 7 1/2 minutes and includes some images of animal cruelty.)

SHARK has posted the first of a long series of videos that will expose a deeper, darker corner of the Rodeo Mafia than ever before. The video is “Rodeo Cowboy Criminals, Part 1.”

Based on the records of rodeo connected criminals already in our possession, the series is likely to run a dozen or more video exposes’. The crimes range from animal abuse to child abuse, to racial crimes to rape and murder. This is a grisly job, but someone has to do it.

Perhaps the most disgusting aspect of these Cowboy Criminals is that many of them are still involved in and embraced by the rodeo industry.

“Rodeo Cowboy Criminals, Part 1″ looks at three dastardly criminals. Zeb Lanham we reported on in our last update. Lanham beat his pregnant girlfriend so badly that she had to be airlifted to adequate medical care. Larry Lancaster is a child sexual predator, which is of course sickening and repulsive all by itself. Worse yet, Lancaster ran a rodeo school and was a sponsor of high school rodeo! Jimmy David Brazile is also a child predator. This sixty year old predator repeatedly had sex with a sixteen year-old girl, and then had the incredible nerve to tell the girl’s father that he had sex with the girl to show her that it wasn’t a big deal!

SHARK’s “Rodeo Cowboy Criminals” series will show the link between those who abuse animals and human abuse. I hope you’ll take a few minutes to look at this important new effort to expose the cruelty of rodeo.

I’m thrilled that SHARK is making the connections – between interpersonal violence and animal abuse, between the oppression of humans and that of non-human animals, and between misogyny, racism and speciesism. These are not isolated incidents of hate and violence; rather, they’re all part of the same fabric of oppression, privilege and othering. We need to keep connecting these dots.

You can follow SHARK’s progress on their You Tube channel, and send them an appreciative email (or support their work with a donation) here.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Animal Abuse, Animals & Women, Animals as..., Intersections, Videos, entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.