WHEN ONLY THE BEST WILL DO
By Maureen Panno

There is one thing that people do at a rodeo. I'm not talking about the women chasing or checking out the cowboys, although that does happen a lot. I'm talking about people scoping out the livestock. You know what I mean; which calf looks the cutest, which horse looks like it'll put a cowboy in orbit just for the heck of it, which bull looks like a 2000 pound tornado ready to annihilate anything in its way. There's more to it than that, a lot more. One has to invest a lot of time and money in order to be a stock contractor.

Jim Zinser, of J Bar J Rodeo, puts it this way, "It takes a real hearty horse to make a bucking horse and stay that way. They have to have a lot of heart - it's got to be bred into them to do that. When you've got a line of horses that have 2 or 3 generations behind them, that's where your pedigree really starts coming out. There's no guarantee in anything, but you can just about go the bank on it."

"At the Great Lakes Circuit Finals last November, there was a bronc that the rider went 87 points on. I've got 3 younger brothers to that one that buck just like him. They even look like him, markings and all. They just aren't as big as him because they're younger."

"The horses that we take to any events of any size or caliber, they're 6 years old. We let them grow up where their bones are mature and that helps eliminate the possibility of injury to them. I've rodeoed for 36 years and I've had only one horse break a leg." As for the animal activists, "They just want people's money. If they knew what we put into it, the care, no stock contractor is going to allow their animals to deliberately get hurt in any way, shape or form."

Jim's ranch is located near Clare, Michigan. "It's kind of split up. There's probably better than 500 acres of our own and we lease about twice that."

Feeding the livestock is an expensive undertaking in itself. "We feed about 3000 rolls of hay each winter." And that's just in the winter, folks. "We spread out each roll so they (the horses) won't kick and fight over it. Our family handles everything during the winter. During the summer we have a lot of helpers because of the traveling and all."

Just because you have a good breeding program in place, that doesn't mean that every horse born will buck. One thing is a guarantee, though. They'll have an ornery streak a mile long.

"There have been some people who have tried to break a few of them that didn't buck. But they"ll either kick you, bite you, paw at you, or do something. They still have that in them even though they don't buck."

Some people tend to think that the livestock gets stressed out if they're in a truck trailer too long. Just as with people and dogs, some are good travelers, others are not. "The horses get used to traveling around the country. The people who haul cattle, they'd much rather haul rodeo stock. They load right on, they know what they're doing. You can get into terrible situations with regular livestock that don't want to load. Whereas, with rodeo stock, they just go on and load 2 at a time. You learn not to put two that don't get along together near each other. We try to protect them."

There is really only one thing you need to keep in the back of your mind the next time you go to a rodeo. If you know that J Bar J is going to be the stock contractor, it won't just be a good rodeo; it'll be a great one.