The New York Times has a short piece on bull-riding and the technological advancements that are resulting in stronger and more virile bulls — to such a degree that the riders are struggling to keep up.

Tyler Hicks writes for the Times:

Over the past two decades, breeders have relied on the registry maintained by American Bucking Bull Inc. to help them identify champion bulls. Because breeders use anywhere from seven to 10 sires with one dam to increase their chance of birthing a champion, they need the registry to tell them whether their bull calf shares DNA with the best buckers.
“Think of it like Maury Povich,” explained Marlissa Gonzalez, the director of the registry. “We’re telling breeders who the father is.”
While Gonzalez and her team can’t isolate specific genes for bucking, kicking and leaping, they can use their database of nearly 400,000 bulls to trace an animal’s lineage back six generations. Because of that data, champion bulls are now scattered across the country like the myriad descendants of Genghis Khan.

I gawp at bull-riding anytime it’s on TV. The bestial rage of the bovinae and the lumbar-shattering impacts the rider endures make for some of the most gripping scenes. I question whether perfecting bulls is a good thing. Standardization among the livestock makes some sense; after all, this would reduce the chance that an otherwise superior rider has the misfortune of drawing the nastiest bull and loses out to inferior riders with better luck. But there’s something about attempting to perfect nature that nauseates. Some of the fun is the variety of the bulls — their traits and predilections. Moreover, would standardizing cattle result in riders becoming mirror images, raised not as cowboys but as travel-league bull riders?

I think of J. B. Mauney and how his brand of working cowboy is already fading from the sport. May it not be so.

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