It was a nice, pretty, calm day in Norfolk, Nebraska, sunny with a little haze and 53 degrees about 10 in the morning with not much going on when police officers got a call over the radio that said a car was rolling eastbound on 275 with a bull in the passenger seat newschannelnebraska.com reported.
It was Nebraska, after all, where the population of about 6.8 million cattle far outnumber the 1.9 million people, so it wasn’t a terribly unusual call. Sometimes a guy might need to get his bull from one place to the other in a hurry and you might have to use whatever vehicle you had at hand -- maybe the truck was in the shop or the cow trailer had a flat.
But the cops were thinking it would probably be a little calf that would fit into a car seat relatively easily. Nope.
It was what you call a Watusi bull, a breed native to Africa, which can grow as big as 1,800 pounds, and this big boy seemed to be on the large end of the spectrum. Watusis have massive, curved horns as big around as a man’s arm that measures six or seven feet from tip to tip.
The Ford sedan had been modified to accommodate Howdy Doody, which was the bull’s name. It had a hole cut in the roof because Howdy would have been taller than the car standing on the ground. Still a tight squeeze.
The police wound up giving the driver a warning and told him to leave the city and take Howdy home.
