The bulls — 50 or so — come for the opening event in the Professional Bull Riders circuit, which this year runs Jan. 4-6. Cowboys on horses herd them up the ramps. The bulls soon emerge into a kind of animal-athlete locker room.
Bull riding is a big business, and a big-time sport. For the riders, it’s astonishingly dangerous; in 2018 one rider died at a Professional Bull Riders event in Brazil, and two others died at non-PBR events. The list of injuries on the organization’s site is long and disturbing, dominated by concussions, with the occasional fractured sternum, joint separation or severe facial laceration.
For the past 15 years or so, bucking bulls have been intensively bred like racehorses to make them harder to ride. Breeders use high-tech reproductive techniques and a detailed, computerized registry of 180,000 bulls and cows. Cowboys have continued to be bred the old-fashioned way.
The products of this intensive artificial selection have one job: to buck, spin and kick as hard and unpredictably as they can with a rider on board. If the rider stays on for eight seconds, he is scored for how well he rode, the bull is scored for how hard he was to ride and the scores are combined.
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Calves that don’t buck may end up at the slaughterhouse, but for those who do buck, it’s a sweet life, at least according to breeders. Matt Scharping, who owns Phenom Genetics in Minnesota, said, “If you’re born a really good bucking bull it’s like winning the bovine lottery.”
The lucky bulls are carefully fed, gradually exposed to the lights and noise of a rodeo environment to reduce stress and, if they prove successful, retired to lives as semen producers. Some are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The semen can sell for thousands of dollars per straw, about a tenth of a teaspoon.
J.B. Mauney, 31, is one of the best riders in the sport.
Mauney, who also has bred bulls, said he thinks bulls will only become more difficult to master.
“If they keep breeding better bulls, they’re going to have to start breeding better bull riders,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.