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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: May 2007

Rodeos kill children too

 

TUCSON--Tucson police chief Richard Miranda on March 19, 2007 announced that the Pima County Attorney's Office will not charge anyone for causing the February 22 death of five-year-old Brielle Boisvert during the 82nd annual La Fiesta de los Vaqueros rodeo parade. Three years younger than the minimum age for parade participants stated on the entry form, Boisvert was thrown from her horse and trampled by a bolting team of horses who were pulling a wagon.

The parade is promoted as the longest in the world using no motor vehicles--and has had serious accidents before, though no previous fatalities. "At last year's parade," recalled Associated Press, "Mayor Bob Walkup bruised an arm and his wife Beth suffered a concussion and whiplash when two runaway horses slammed into a 150-year-old buggy."

Boisvert was the youngest human rodeo fatality since Braeden Chamberlain, 9, of Benalto, Alberta, fell off a steer and was trampled at a rodeo camp for children in February 2005. The youngest person killed at a rodeo in 2006 appears to have been Stuart Mazanec, 17, who was dragged and then crushed by a horse after his first-ever ride at a rodeo clinic in Byers, Colorado.

The ANIMAL PEOPLE files indicate that two or three minors per year die in rodeo events--which typically involve only eight to 10 seconds of action.