By the age of five, he weighs nearly two thousand pounds and is built like a clenched fist: all hoof and horn and fast-twitch muscle. His spine twists and rolls, leaving the rider with no balancing point, no center of gravity. His front and back ends start to uncouple, jackhammering the ground independently. He spins one way, then the other, charges forward, and jerks to the side. But the older he gets the crueller and less predictable he becomes. At first, he just charges around the ring and jumps up and down. Watching old videos of J31, you can see him learn as he goes. They not only refuse to be ridden they find ever more inventive ways to cast people off. Their brains aren’t wired for submission. Their mounts may try to shake them off at first, but the contest is an unequal one, and they tend to knuckle under eventually. People have sat on ostriches, orcas, alligators, and water buffalo, straddled giant tortoises, and set toddlers on St. Horse, mule, donkey, camel, llama, yak, and elephant-the bigger the animal, the more likely we are to climb on top of it. This hasn’t kept us from trying to ride them, of course. They find it strange and distressing-an attack or a violation, an act of dominance. ![]() “It just freaked him out,” Sumner said.Īnimals, as a rule, don’t like to have other animals on their backs. By the time the boy pulled free, the bull had nearly gone over the fence. ![]() He leaped up and spun around, bucked forward and kicked back, his legs so high behind him that he almost flipped end over end. He was flopping around on J31’s back, trying to dismount, when the bull suddenly went crazy beneath him. The kid who was riding him got his hand caught in his rope. Then one Sunday afternoon at a small arena outside of Okeene, Oklahoma, something in the bull snapped. “I was thinking, Dude, you’re going to have to step up your game plan or you’re going to be going to McDonald’s,” Sumner told me. Sumner took him to a few scrubgrass rodeos in northern Oklahoma, but didn’t see much fight in him. His owner, Phil Sumner, named him J31-he wasn’t sure the bull would live long enough to earn a real name. Half Charolais and half Brahman, he was still long and bony at age three, but liable to turn fat and ungainly if his breeding held true. The most dangerous bull ever ridden, by some accounts, began as a scrawny yellow calf in 1988. They’ll lie down in the chute one day and try to gore you the next. They can start out shy and skittish, then suddenly turn ornery. ![]() Rodeo bulls, like the boys who dream of riding them, are unpredictable creatures.
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