BODACIOUS

Tomorrow marks the fifth anniversary of the death of "The World's Most Dangerous Bull":

Originally called J31, Bodacious came to prominence in the early nineties as champion bull riders were routinely thrown to the ground, and many seriously injured and sent to hospital emergency rooms. The 1800lb cross breed Charbray bull known for his distinctive coloring as the "Yellow Whale" made unique moves that rodeo athletes had never before seen and were defenseless to protect against. Only six cowboys were able to complete their rides in 135 attempts.

Tuff Hedeman, often called the best bull rider ever, was one of the few to stay on Bodacious for a full eight seconds. But in 1995 Hedeman saw the terrifying side of "Bo" when he suffered a major face smashing, and required emergency reconstructive surgery after a brutal encounter with Bodacious at the Professional Bull Riders Finals. Hedeman drew the bull again at the National Finals Rodeo in 1995, and chose not to ride him. Hedeman called Bodacious "the badest bull there has ever been." It was that same year that world champion Scott Breding sustained serous injuries and became the last cowboy to attempt a ride on Bodacious. A day after the Breeding accident, during the final round of the NFR, owners Sammy and Carolyn Andrews decided to retire the bull "in the interest of cowboy safety."

Bodacious seemed to really enjoy his job smashing cowboys' faces and probably found retirement a bore. Rest in peace big fella.

Update: Here's some Bodacious bullshit:

Bodacious himself, like most rodeo bulls, was held in rodeo pens for hours in intense heat, pummeled by rodeo staff, and endured 5000-volt electric cattle-prod shots to the testicles, all in an effort to rile him up so as to make him appear "wild."

According to the Primus song later written about his life, Bodacious stepped onto the national stage in 1993, when bull-rider Tuff Hedeman rode him for a full eight seconds to claim some sort of backwater cruelty championship. Bodacious must have seemed, to an observer doubtful of good in the world, resigned to the average bovine life of pain marked by periodic humiliation beneath denim-clad torturers. In old age, he would most likely be sold to a beef processing plant and eventually be eaten in fast food meal deals dished out to the same fat morons who laughed at him at the rodeo.

If you were a bull in such a situation, you would probably be so scared and sad that you’d just flail and cry until the big bad cowboy man fell off you. You would never speak up for yourself, let alone all your fellow bovine-kind. Bodacious, on the other hand, somehow found it within his heart to speak through action. The message, like a volcanic eruption up from the Hell to which we think we condemn the Other: "Get the fuck off me." Not only did Bodacious buck his legs up behind him, as cowboys and bestial torture fans expected, but he also began to whip his thick head and neck backward to catch cowboys on their lunges forward and smash their stupid, evil faces into mush. Didn’t see that coming, did you, boys? Thought that the spirit of justice was yours to manipulate, did you? Take a horn to the eye, you bastards, because freedom rises–right into your God-damned faces.

Equipped with his special reverse-neck-bucking move, Bodacious was a new bull when he was slotted to face Tuff Hedeman once again in the bull-riding championships in 1995. "Tuff" wasn’t so tough after all; Bodacious smashed his face into a bloody pulp, as virtue demanded. Try to conceive of the retaliatory significance of Bodacious’s act, a bull fucking up a human face: the destruction of that physical structure which manifests the vicious human intellect, the structure which most clearly differentiates humanity from its long-snouted "inferiors." The next time Hedeman was scheduled to face Bodacious, who thoroughly demolished 129 of 135 cowboys faced, "Tuff" backed out. Instead, another rider, Scott Breding, put on a face mask and took Hedeman’s place. Bodacious blasted through the face mask and shattered Breding’s eye socket. Bodacious was "retired" by his owners (as if being attacked and infuriated is a constructive bovine career as opposed to just eating grass, having sex, and sitting around looking cool) "in the interest of cowboy safety" by his supposedly compassionate "owners" Sammy and Carolyn Andrews.

Gimme a Bodacious burger, double onions.

Update II: A hearty thankyou to Tim Blair for the link. The most visits ever, to a story about a bull. Screw the politics, it's animal stories for me.

Update III: Ed notes in comments that Red Rock, with 312 thrown riders in a row, is rated the most successful rodeo bull ever.

Update IV: You've read about a big bull, now read about a big bullshitter.