No thank you very much

No thank you very much

Mar. 13, 2001

It's The Pitts
By Lee Pitts

The sport of riding cutting horses is the latest craze to attract the "beautiful people" like super-model Christy Brinkley and Hall Of Fame quarterback Joe Montana. A large herd of not-so-good-looking dudes has also thrown their new cowboy hats into the arena. This has driven up the price of Quarter Horses, alfalfa hay and all things equine. I understand completely why the sport has attracted the rich and famous: because money can buy a lot of blue ribbons and trophy buckles in cutting.

I made this discovery a few years ago when I was given the opportunity to ride a world-class cutting horse in Texas. It rapidly became apparent that the steed was not only smarter than the steers but also much more intelligent than the idiot currently at the controls. I swear that horse could turn on a biscuit and never break the crust.

The role of the cutting horse is to anticipate every move a bovine makes and respond accordingly. The job of the rider is to basically sit there and hold on for dear life. You’re pretty much on automatic pilot. A good cutting horse can make any dude look good, not that Christie Brinkley ever needed any help in that department.

Just because a person dons a Stetson and sits on a horse does not make him a cowboy. This point was driven home recently at a cutting horse event run amuck. A cattle feeder I know contracted to provide cattle for the occasion staged at a fairgrounds in the middle of Oregon's high desert. I'm sure he never would have rented the cattle out if he thought there was any possibility the cattle would be scattered over half the state because someone failed to close a gate that separated the fairgrounds from a sizable BLM allotment. Making a bad situation worse was the apparent lack of any cross fences between the scene of the crime and Canada.

The company supplying the cattle has a one man Delta Force known as Maurice for situations like this. Unfortunately, those participating in the cutting were eager to help and demanded Maurice accept their offers of assistance. Now, cutting gentle cattle in an enclosed arena is one thing but gathering spooky cattle from the brush is quite another. Making matters more difficult was the fact that several parties were trying to avoid responsibility for letting the cattle loose in the first place and wanted to do everything in their power to make amends. This included arranging for a low-flying spotter plane to locate the cattle and convey their position by radio to a bunch of drugstore cowboys mounted on pampered horses that had never seen sagebrush and juniper before. They turned out to be more useless than a four card flush.

Originally Maurice had planned to simply gather the steers at his own pace and in his own time-tested manner. But every time he spotted more than three head of cattle together in one location he would soon be overrun by several cutters in full war paint charging in his direction as fast as bad news. Which is pretty much what the weekend cowboys turned out to be.

Yes, those parrot mouthed, cow hocked, stumpsucking knotheads put on quite a show that day. And that was the riders. Their sugar-eating cutting horses looked even more lost. But it was not the horses’ fault. They had been trained to simply harass cattle and this job called for a horse that could actually gather them up. Maurice surveyed the bleak landscape and saw lathered up, over-heated horses broken down all over the desert. Some creatures just weren’t meant to play outside, it seems.

My friend, Dan, heard about this fiasco as it was occurring and called up Maurice on his cell phone to offer his help. As you might expect, Maurice was not in a good mood. In response to yet another offer of assistance Maurice replied, "There’s two things currently I don’t need more of: another fat cowboy on a hobby horse or a fat horse being ridden by a part-time cowboy."

The last I heard they’re still short some cattle and lawyers have been retained.