Carl Judson - Guerrilla Painter Notebook

The Bull

Some years back, I took a shine to a Dutch Belted cow that a neighbor had. I bought her and later she had a calf, named Persephone, that became our family milk
cow for many years.

Belted cattle are known, somewhat derogatorily, among cowboys as “Oreo cows” for their white belts sandwiched between black, front and back. Some belted cows and calves are visible in the photo above. The story goes that sometime around the tulip mania of the 1600s1, some of the Dutch aristocracy with more time than
sense took to breeding farm animals with white belts. In addition to cows, they bred
belted pigs, rabbits and chickens.
Anyway, Dutch Belteds not being
common, purebred bulls are few and far between. I finally located one for sale in the Midwest, so in the spring of 1998 I was on my way to Illinois with my pickup and
stock trailer to pick up a bull. On the way I spent time visiting folks in Iowa and Illinois. These five little paintings (on resin-sized carton, primed with acrylic gel medium or grey acrylic gesso)
are fond reminders of a trip that was, fortunately, a lot less eventful than it might have been…

I got to the farm in the breaks along the Mississippi in Illinois where I was to pick up the bull on a beautiful late afternoon. The farmer invited me to go take a look at him but cautioned me that he was “a mean one” (the bull, not the farmer). When we went out to the pasture, the bull was lying peacefully with his harem,
chewing his cud. He didn’t get up as we approached, so I thought I’d just let him know who was boss. I marched right up to him, nudged him in the nose with my boot and all 2000 pounds of him jumped
to his feet in awed surprise. The farmer looked at me like I walked on water…and I did feel, well, kinda smug…It was one of those “rancher/farmer” things. Some of
us ranchers have pretty high opinions of ourselves when it comes to dealing with animals.

Muddy Road
Cedar County, IA
Carl Judson © 1998
Oil and pencil on carton, 6" x 8".

The next day the farmer and his son volunteered to help load the bull in my stock trailer. They insisted on taking what seemed to me to be overly elaborate
precautions, like keeping a fence between them and the bull at all times and triple securing the trailer gate and the space between the top of the gate and the roof of
the trailer with about 50 feet of heavy rope. “Oh brother… farmers!” I thought to myself.

Spring Morning
Cedar County, IA
Carl Judson © 1998
Oil and pencil on carton, 6" x 8".

Spring Lane
Bureau County, IL
Carl Judson © 1998
Oil and pencil on carton, 6" x 8".

After I got the bull back to Colorado, I had the upper hand at first. Before he got used to our mountain feed, he had several
sessions of bloat (a foamy gas buildup in one of the stomachs, called the rumen). Each time, I had to get him into the squeeze chute, tie a rope through his nose
ring, put four feet of plastic tube down his throat and pump about a gallon of mineral oil into his stomach. Finally he had an attack of bloat severe enough that we had to poke a hole through his side into the rumen with a knife to let the gas escape.

All of this clearly took the starch out of him for a while, but gradually he became more
aggressive until he had got me all figured out and put me over the corral fence head first. It just went down hill from there until after about three years we finally sent
him to the sale barn because he was just flat mean and pretty much fearless – in other words downright dangerous.

Looking back on it, the farmer and his son turned out to have more sense than I gave them credit for, and I was sure lucky the bull didn’t call my bluff that first day in Illinois when I poked him in the snoot!

1. The Dutch Tulip Mania of the 1600s is one of the most famous
speculative bubbles of all time. Tulip prices (and tulip futures)
reached fantastic levels (as high as 15 times the average Dutch yearly family income per tulip bulb) before the bubble burst in
February of 1637 leaving many speculators financially ruined.