“Shooting the Bull”

Animals come out unhappily in many urban legends. We hear about dead cats, microwaved poodles, deep-fried rats, and the like in some ghastly stories. But the humans who encounter animals in modern legends don’t have such happy endings either. There are, for starters, tourists in the Orient served their own pet—roasted; divers working in reservoirs scared witless by giant catfish; and people bitten by poisonous snakes sewn into imported garments.

Here is a typical modern legend that tells about both the hunters and the hunted. It was sent in by a reader in Durham, North Carolina, who began: “I heard this story when I was punching cowboys in Colorado. (I was a bouncer in a tough bar.) A man from Denver went hunting on the western slope, and he asked a rancher if he could hunt on his property.

“ ‘Fine,’ said the rancher, ‘but be careful. My prize bull is up in the pasture, and if you kill him it will cost you $2,300.’

“The hunter returned with the sad news that he had indeed killed the rancher’s prize bull. He wrote a check for $2,300. So the rancher got into his tractor to bring the meat down, and when he got to the pasture, he found the bull sedately grazing. Looking around he found a beautiful buck cleanly shot by the hunter who had been too stupid to tell the difference between a deer and a bull.

“The check cleared the bank five days later.”

Thanks, sir, for a fine example of an updated traditional Western tale! For decades, stories of stupid hunters mistaking domestic cattle for game have been told out here where I live .

Some are merely jokes, but others are believed as gospel. It seems reasonable to many farmers and ranchers that wealthy sportsmen from the big city would make such an error and be quick to pay the price, though perhaps there’s some wishful thinking in that last detail.

To warn greenhorn hunters against shooting their stock, some owners actually paint the word “COW” or “HORSE” in day-glo colors on the sides of the animals.

Most of the dumb-hunter stories in my state of Utah, whether believed or not, are told about a mythical California hunter. When he drives up to a state game-checking station, the checker on duty immediately knows that a terrible mistake has been made, because he sees that the “elk” feet sticking over the side of the pickup truck have horseshoes on them. Legions of local hunters have heard and believed that story, but no one seems to have been an eyewitness. The legend is revived every season but never verified.

A popular variation of “shooting the bull” appeared in Don Boxmeyer’s column in the Pioneer Press and Dispatch of St. Paul, Minnesota, in October 1985. He heard it from a colleague who swore that it happened to a friend of a friend of his.

Three Minnesota hunters drove into a farmyard, and one went up to ask the farmer’s permission to hunt his fields. The farmer approved on the condition that the hunters shoot an old bull that he had been planning to get rid of.

The hunter went back to the car and pulled a little gag on his buddies. He told them that the farmer was a rotten old coot who refused them permission to hunt. Then he had the driver stop when they passed the old bull.

He climbed out, very deliberately took aim and shot the bull, and then said, “That’ll take care of the rotten old coot.”

Whereupon his two companions each shot a cow, commenting, “That’ll really take care of that rotten old coot. ”

Boxmeyer added that later he was told virtually the same story by a friend from South Africa, who assured him that it had really happened in that country.

On April 16, 1987, former (several times) New York Yankees manager Billy Martin, appearing on “Late Night with David Letterman,” told virtually the same incident as a true story. Martin claimed it was a prank that Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford had played on him when the three of them were hunting in Texas. Martin said that Mantle, at the rancher’s request, shot an old mule, pretending that this was revenge for not getting permission to hunt on his land. Martin claimed that he himself then shot two of the rancher’s cows and had to pay $800 to replace them.

Thanks to Giles Daeger of the Department of English, Marquette University, Milwaukee, I have another version of “Shooting the Bull,” this one published in 1945 in Morton Thompson’s book Joe, the Wounded Tennis Player (New York: Doubleday Doran). According to Thompson, the farmer’s words are, “While you’re at it, you can do me a favor. When you come to the third pasture you’ll see an old white horse in it. Poor old devil’s got the bots. He’s dropping from old age. Been meaning to knock him on the head. I’ll take it as a favor if you’ll shoot him for me.

I have also heard an English version of the story in which a horse is the animal shot—an old mare of the farmer’s that is sharing a field with a valuable milch cow. In this version, the English farmer, speaking in a thick country dialect, remarks, “ ’Er’s served me well—can’t bear to think of her sent off to the knackers.” As a favor to the farmer, the hunter shoots the old mare; his hunting companion, misunderstanding the motive, follows suit and shoots the milch cow.

The Englishman who told me this one commented, “I heard this in the pub four times this past summer,” reminding me again of the Colorado bar where my American correspondent got his version. It seems that when hunters gather the world around, such stories are told. The urban outsider becomes an object of ridicule in the local legends.

So, when the conversation in a Western bar or an English pub frequented by hunters turns to the topic of “shooting the bull,” don’t believe a thing you hear.