This bull is dead, or is he?!

[Cowpuncher]

Some good thoughts here.

Our neighbor (an animal lover) had an old Gelbvieh bull that had been injured fighting. (Never pick on young guys when you get old!!)

One day when it was raining, she found him down in the corral in mud. She was frantic. I said to leave him alone, but she insisted on getting onto dry ground. We put a log chain carefully about his neck and she hooked the other end to her four-wheel drive Dodge and eased ahead. The bull slid down hill about 50 feet real easy, but when we took to chain off, he stiffened up, peed all he had in him, rolled his eyes up and quit breathing.

"Damn, we have killed him," I said. And as we stood there looking at him for a minute or two, I ws expecting the neighbor to start railing on me. Suddenly, he picked his head up, took a deep breath and looked around as if nothing had happened.

The neighbor covered him with a tarp and carried food and water to him for a couple of weeks. Once she talked me into helping him get on his feet. We actually got him up. He stood there like a tree getting ready to topple over, then crashed to the ground. I walked off and told her to do the bull a favor and put him down - which she did about a week later.

P. S. The bull originally could get up and down after he was hurt, so we couldn't figure why he had finally gotten to the point where neither of his hind legs worked. We found out 9 months and 10 days later. The cow he was with gave birth to a nice bull calf. The old bull had injured his second leg breeding one last cow.