Cultural defenses of abuse prevail over cultural mandate to “Be kind to animals”
SAN DIEGO, SAN FRANCISCO––Samuel Johnson, author of the first dictionary of the English language, never saw and most likely never even heard of either San Diego or San Francisco, let alone saw or heard about either the San Diego Petco Park rodeo or the Chinatown live market in San Francisco.
This is because Johnson lived from 1709 to 1784; San Diego and San Francisco were founded by Spanish colonists in 1769 and 1776, respectively.
But we do know what Johnson would have thought of both institutions, and of the “city fathers,” both male and female, who allow rodeo and live market cruelty in the name of culture.
Johnson on August 5, 1758 initiated 103 editions of a column he wrote for the London Universal Chronicle weekly, among the first English newspapers, with one of the earliest and most vivid condemnations of vivisection published during his 75-year lifespan.
How would Samuel Johnson have defined a rodeo cowboy or live marketer?
It is no accident that the then-multi-faceted humane movement rose to visibility during Johnson’s career as a vehement journalistic opponent of slavery, defender of Native American rights, and advocate for animals, especially cats.
Eighteen years elapsed from Johnson’s denunciation of vivisection until on April 7, 1775 he defined patriotism as “The last refuge of a scoundrel.”
What Johnson meant by “patriotism” included any sort of cruelty or injustice perpetuated on the pretext of culture and tradition.
(From Instagram video)
Waco Kid
The second annual San Diego Rodeo at Petco Park, home of the San Diego Padres major league baseball team, is to be held in three installments, on January 10, 11, and 12, 2025.
The first edition, held over the weekend of January 12-14, 2024, featured an opening night incident in which a female rider was thrown from her horse, named Waco Kid, during a so-called “Indigenous Relay Race.” The horse ran full tilt into a metal barricade.
The horse “collapsed instantaneously as onlookers fell silent. The view of the horse was quickly blocked with a tarp, as the horse was slid into a trailer and trucked off the field,” described SanDiegoVille.
The stock contractor and the San Diego Petco Park Rodeo publicity team claimed afterward that Waco Kid survived and, apparently after a brief stop at the Helen Woodward Animal Center in Rancho Santa Fe, just north of San Diego, was trucked back to a ranch on property owned by the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara affiliated tribes of North Dakota.
Independent humane investigators, including Showing Animals Respect & Kindness founder Steve Hindi, have never been convinced of that, having never been allowed to visit Waco Kid to see for themselves.
Sheel Seidler
Sheel Seidler, 48, understood to be the instigator of the San Diego Petco Park Rodeo, has helped the Helen Woodward Animal Center to promote a “pets for the homeless and low income families” program at least since 2017.
A yoga and fitness instructor, of East Indian descent, Sheel Seidler met her late husband Peter Seidler, fifteen years her elder, in 2005.
According to a San Diego Union Tribune biographical summary, “Seidler’s grandfather, Walter O’Malley, moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles from Brooklyn in 1958. His mother and uncle, Peter O’Malley, owned the team until 1998. Seidler was part of the group that bought the Padres in August 2012, moved to San Diego and quickly became active in philanthropic causes such as working to alleviate homelessness.”
Sheel Seidler at some point became involved in “cutting” competitions [herding cattle using quarter horses], often held in conjunction with rodeos.
The first San Diego Petco Park Rodeo was in planning when Peter Seidler died on November 23, 2023, at age 63, after a multi-year battle with health conditions including type 1 diabetes and non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
Fight over estate
As well as promoting the second San Diego Petco Park Rodeo, Sheel Seidler is also now engaged in a lawsuit against two of her late husband’s brothers, Bob and Matt Seidler, seeking to win control of the Seidler Trust, the holding company for the Padres baseball team.
Her claims against the brothers apparently include racism, and hints that they may be planning to sell the Padres to interests who would relocate the team––a highly unlikely prospect, in view that the Padres are among the few major league teams to own their own ballpark, and actually drew more fans in 2024 than the New York Yankees.
Only the Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies attracted more.
The Peter Seidler Trust has responded to media that, “Peter had a clear estate plan. The plan specifically named three of his nine siblings, with whom he had worked closely for many decades, as successor trustees of his trust, and Peter himself prohibited Sheel from ever serving as trustee.”
St. Francis would not have approved
The two-year-old San Diego Rodeo has two aspects in common with the Chinatown live markets in San Francisco, now operating for about 175 years.
First, both are targets of protest by Action for Animals founder Eric Mills, of Oakland, California, who has documented, publicized, and sought legislation against both rodeo and live market animal abuse for more than 40 years.
Second, both continue through widespread acceptance of the last refuge of scoundrels.
Pro-rodeo and pro-live market politicians remain in office because much of the public continues to accept that cruelty to animals in traditional forms has a stronger claim to cultural primacy than “Be kind to animals,” taught by St. Francis of Assisi more than 500 years before San Francisco was named after him.
Undercover video
“Exclusive video obtained by DailyMail.com showed workers cutting open turtles while their legs were still moving, part-suffocating frogs then decapitating them alive, leaving fish out of water to slowly die, and bludgeoning other animals,” reported Josh Boswell and Shawn Cohen on January 4, 2025.
“The alleged acts of animal cruelty were documented by nonprofit organization Animal Outlook, which filmed undercover at three live animal markets in the California city in September 2024,” Boswell and Cohen wrote.
“The charity already called out similar conditions in 2022, and complains that the city has done little to stop it.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Non-enforcement of the law
California has had legislation specifically prohibiting many of the abuses documented by Animal Outlook since 2001, when a bill called AB 2479 cleared the statehouse, but then-San Francisco mayor Willie Brown and city administrator Bill Lee reportedly refused to allow then-San Francisco Department of Animal Care & Control director Carl Friedman to enforce the new law.
A succession of subsequent Department of Animal Care & Control directors and several generations of San Francisco SPCA leadership have likewise failed to enforce the 2001 law.
A San Francisco SPCA spokesperson told Boswell and Cohen that the SF/SPCA “has been trying to get SF/ACC to take action for over two years after documenting similar incidents in 2022,” Boswell and Cohen paraphrased, “but claimed the department has only issued one citation and repeatedly refused to inspect the markets when alleged abuse was occurring.”
“Inhumane” conditions “should immediately stop”
The San Francisco Department of Animal Care & Control “has previously expressed that its officers must witness cruel acts first-hand, while they are in progress, in order to take enforcement action,” the San Francisco SPCA told Boswell and Cohen.
“But when we subsequently called SF/ACC to report cruelty – a worker suffocating a frog in a plastic bag – the agency explained that no officers would be available to inspect for at least several weeks.”
Continued Boswell and Cohen, “Michael Angelo Torres, chairman of the [San Francisco] Commission of Animal Control & Welfare, told DailyMail.com that he believes the ‘inhumane’ conditions at the markets should ‘immediately stop.’
“As chairperson of the commission,” Torres said, “I unconditionally support doing everything that we, as a city, can and should do to immediately stop the inhumane conditions in these markets.”
But as ever, the political and economic clout of the Chinatown Merchants Association appears to trump that of the humane authorities.
The rich get richer by claiming descent from the poor
The political and economic clout of Sheel Seidler in San Diego so far seems similarly to trump any and all opposition to the San Diego Petco Park Rodeo, though the lawsuit between Sheel Seidler and the rest of the Peter Seidler Trust members might eventually change the dynamic.
Meanwhile, the San Diego Tourism Marketing District on November 1, 2024 voted 6-2 to allocate $150,000 to the Padres to help promote the San Diego Petco Park Rodeo through Facebook, Instagram and Google ads in Phoenix, San Bernardino County, Ventura and central California, plus text message ads to attendees at the 2024 National Finals Rodeo, held each December in Las Vegas.
Opposition to the allocation largely dissipated, indicated San Diego Union-Tribune writer David Garrick, after San Diego city council member Kent Lee “backed away” from a proposed rodeo ban “in the face of backlash from local tribes and others who say rodeos are a cultural practice long intertwined with black, indigenous, and Mexican American communities.”
Fabricated history
The latter contention is essentially a half-truth, since there is scant documentation of any such “cultural practice” before rodeo emerged out of traveling Wild West Shows as a commercial event in the early 20th century.
(See Charreada steer-tailing & horse-tripping defense flunks history, art, & logic and SHARK video shows dogs baiting bulls at Calif. Salinas Rodeo 2019.)
In San Diego specifically, the San Diego Humane Society, founded on March 10, 1880, prosecuted “overriding a colt” in the manner of the 2024 San Diego Petco Park Rodeo “indigenous wild horse race” as early as June 9, 1880.
The first record of a rodeo being held in either San Diego city or county appeared in the Oxnard Daily Courier of September 12, 1919, thirty-nine years later.
Where is the San Diego Humane Society now?
According to Garrick, as of November 1, 2024, the San Diego Humane Society “continued to pursue legislation that could restrict rodeo activities within the city limits.”
But San Diego Humane Society credibility has not been especially strong over the past decade.
First a newborn baby boy was killed on April 22, 2016 by a two-year-old pit bull named Polo, rehomed by the San Diego Humane Society six months earlier.
(See How did San Diego shelters respond after a newly rehomed pit bull killed a child?)
Small mammals transferred to python breeder
Then more than 300 guinea pigs, rabbits, and other small mammals were transferred on August 7, 2023 from the San Diego Humane Society to the Humane Society of Southern Arizona, but the following day were relayed to a python breeder.
(See 318 missing small pets: San Diego Humane vs. HS of Southern Arizona and Cold, hard evidence re small mammals missing from humane societies.)
Lost cat fight
Most recently, San Diego Superior Court Judge Katherine A. Bacal on December 20, 2024 ruled that “return to field,” as practiced by the San Diego Humane Society, unlike the practice of “trap, neuter, release,” violates California Penal Code section § 597s, which states simply that, “Every person who willfully abandons any animal is guilty of a misdemeanor.”
(See San Diego cat control trial verdict & L.A. shelter fine expose “no kill” failures.)
The San Diego Humane Society responded by announcing that it will do nothing to change procedures pending the outcome of an appeal.
The San Diego cat rescue charity Joanne’s Furry Friends in early January 2005 posted to Facebook that it urgently needed a home for a three-year-old previously spayed female cat whom the San Diego Humane Society allegedly advised the finder to release into a neighborhood where the cat had been attacked by other cats, despite the cat having no hind claws.
Multiple prospective adopters stepped forward.
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