2026-08-03
Mount Money: One Man Hauls, Four Men Ride
A finished bulldogging horse is expensive, hard to find, and hard to replace. Which is why almost nobody at an amateur rodeo is on their own. One man hauls the horse. Four or five men ride it in the same performance. Everybody owes him.
That arrangement is one of the genuinely good things about this event. It also generates most of its arguments.
How it works
Mount moneyis what a rider pays the horse's owner for the use of the horse. The common figure is around 25 percent of winnings, though it is negotiated rather than set by any rulebook.
Variations that come up constantly:
- Percentage of winnings — the standard. Win nothing, owe nothing.
- Flat fee per run — sometimes preferred when the horse is travelling a long way, or when the rider is new.
- Both — a small flat fee plus a smaller percentage.
- Nothing — friends, family, and people who have earned it. Also worth recording, so nobody has to guess later.
Why it goes wrong
Not because anyone is dishonest. Because of this sequence:
- A verbal agreement in a chute, three minutes before a run
- Four riders on the same horse, on different terms
- A payout that arrives days or weeks later
- Two people who each remember it slightly differently
Add a hazer share on top of the same run — because the hazer is owed too — and one cheque now has to be split three ways against two verbal agreements made at different times.
What a ledger actually fixes
The fix is not enforcement. It is a shared record:
- The agreement is recorded before the run — share percentage or flat fee, agreed by both
- When the run posts, the amount owed is calculated automatically
- Both parties see the same rows — not two copies that can drift
- Either can mark a settlement settled, with a note
We are explicitly not a payment processor. We do not hold money, we do not transfer it, and marking something settled is something a person does rather than something we verify. This is a ledger both parties trust, not an escrow — and that turns out to be enough.
One consequence worth knowing: if a payout gets corrected after the fact, the hazer credit and the mount money owed on that run move with it. That is the kind of thing that quietly goes unadjusted when it lives in someone's head.
The owner's side
If you are the one hauling, mount money is not really the point — it offsets fuel and it acknowledges what the horse is worth. The thing you actually care about is the horse.
Workload tracking matters here: how many runs your horse made across a weekend, and across how many different riders. Five runs in an afternoon with five different people on him is a lot of horse for one day, and it is very easy to lose count when you are running the chute.
That has real welfare value, and it is also just useful — a horse with a documented workload history and a run record is worth more when you sell him.
For anyone starting out
Do not be shy about riding somebody else's horse. It is completely normal in this event and it is how most people get started — a good horse under a beginner is much safer than a green one.
Just agree the terms before you get on, not after you win. Which is the entire argument for writing it down.