It ain't MY cup of tea. My trainer bought my mare unbroken, and we spent hours grooming her and feeding her treats while we rubbed her all over with saddle pads, a saddle without stirrups, and pieces of a bridle. End result, I climbed on her and rode her off without a single buck. That's the way I prefer to do business.
But cowboys just don't have that sort of time to waste. They have a long day's worth of work and multiple half-broke horses to catch, saddle, and use. The Wild Horse Race tests those skills . . . say eight or ten cowboys have to ride out, and they have to cut ten horses out of the remuda, rope 'em, saddle 'em, buck 'em out and ride out. Most working ranches now use jeeps a lot for work, so the horses aren't worked as hard and you don't need to remount quite so often. But this is arguably based on real life. It's not my real life, probably not yours either.
But I'm not going to stand here not knowing the whole story and scream HANG 'EM HIGH! Things can go wrong that you don't expect - dealing with horses you can just count on it.
I dont know the film Flicka' so I dont know what scene they are trying to recreate and I'm an English rider so I guess we look at things a bit differently. (Admittedly, "I don't know nothin' about western riding.") But whatever happened to the ole' lasso?
I was just looking at the photo posted by Miss Target and I thought, that doesn't look like any rodeo I've ever seen. Since when do they use nice nylon halters? ;) At any rate, accidents do happen, tragic ones at that, you'd just think that next time they'd consider the break-a-way halter and, you know, imo wild mustangs don't belong on a Hollywood set.
You need a lot of experience to handle those rescues, something tells me that whoever was in charge might not have been up for the job.
I never thought I'd sound like PETA and maybe my love for horses exceeds my objectivity.