You folks have a lot more experience than I do...my wife and I stayed at a working dairy farm in Vermont for a week, and one rainy day I asked if I could explore the property, and the farmer said sure, go anywhere you want...he suggested if I was interested, to take a look at their prize bull.
So, it was pouring rain and all mud, so I put on rain gear and walked down to where there was a structure with dozens of cows milling about. They stopped and regarded me, gazing with their uninterested look as they chewed, but sure enough, there was the bull, his head sticking FAR up above the backs of the cows.
And he had is eyes on me.
It wasn’t the dull, bored, disinterested look of the cows, it was a laser-focus, hostile look that made me fee distinctly uncomfortable.
And it didn’t waver during the fifteen minutes I was poking around. I haven’t spent much time around livestock, but I would wager that bull was somewhere between 1000-1500 lbs. And it was all muscle.
As I walked around, I could FEEL the thing looking at me, and when I turned around...it sure was. At one point, it put its front legs on top of some structure in the pen, and with an immediate feeling of danger, I thought “Jesus Christ. That thing can get out of there!” Then it went over to the gate and began pounding its head against the gate, and I thought “If that thing were to get out, I would be a grease spot.”
I decided I had enough sightseeing and left.
That was extremely intimidating to say the least. There was a definite feeling of a malignant presence that did not wish me well as I wandered around within the eyesight of that bull!
My Uncle had a bull named Tony who weighed over a ton. He always seemed pretty tame and mild mannered.
Still Daddy told me to never get close to him. I did notice my Cousins seemed to ignore him, not scared at all.
I know the look well. And the sheer size of an animal can be very intimidating. With range beef it is always the cows with calf that are very aggressive more so than the bulls.
As I was growing up my Grandmother had to keep reminding me that man could once take down mammoths and mastodons. It kind of mentally helped a bit with the size intimidation. lol
This just brought back a whole bunch of funny memories... :)
Your story brought back an old memory.
City boy about 12 years old...standing with my back to a barn looking up a cleared hill at my cousin’s 4H, three year old Holstein bull galloping straight at me. Can I make it around the barn to the door or go the other way to and over the fence before he gets to me?
I chose the fence and made it, but it was close.
BTW, unbeknownst to me, the out-of-sight barn door was closed.