First, the rodeo world. Steer wrestler Wade Sumpter is awesome. As of this writing, the Fowler, Colo., cowboy has won RodeoHouston ($50,000), Reno Rodeo ($10,966) and the Calgary Stampede ($112,500). The Calgary money doesn’t count toward the world standings, yet he’s got a $46,000 lead in the world standings with over $111,000 won. My family’s got a place outside of Fowler and Wade is my brother’s age. They became close friends and through my brother, I got to know Wade. Let me tell you, the success he’s having couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

There are always a few surprises in a rodeo season, and in the team roping there are two teams almost no one would have predicted to be in the top 10: Jojo Lemond and Martin Lucero and Luke Brown and Monty Joe Petska. Apparently these young headers paired with veteran heelers are on to something.

Next, I want to applaud the rodeo community. MSNBC.com recently reported on animal rights protestors at Cheyenne Frontier Days. As a follow-up to the story, they ran a poll basically asking if rodeo is cruel. We here at MyHorse.com sent out an alert to our readers to respond to the poll to make their opinions known. I’m happy to report that as of this writing, an overwhelming 89% of respondents said rodeo is NOT cruel. If you’d like to see the results or if you didn’t vote yet, here’s the link. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25725545/

Finally, a quick update on Deuce. The chiro came for a follow-up appointment and she was very encouraged. His back showed a lot of improvement—he’s still stiff in some places—but she’s confident we’re on a pretty quick (2 weeks) road to recovery.