© Tanya RynoThere are bulls with no horns, one horn, and one and a half horns. (The later two categories are usually caused by removal due to infection or breakage.) There are horns I scientifically think of as "regular horns" and then there are horns like this bull's. The American Bucking Bull is a cross-breed. The "regular horns" are probably a good part Texas Longhorn influence. This guy's? I'm still trying to find out. Like most of us generic Americans, bucking bulls contain a little bit of everything, and most of them don't yet have pedigrees that go more than a few generations back.
The bulls with no horns are called muleys. Major Payne is a muley, which is probably a good thing, since he does like to push riders around a little bit once they are on the ground. Wikkipedia says that the gene for horns is recessive. If this is true, then a horned bucking bull bred to a hornless mixed-breed cow would result in hornless calves, and all of Major Payne's sons will be muleys. I'm not taking Wikkipedia's word for it, because most bucking bulls have horns, but then I'm neither a cattleman nor a geneticist.
To find the question of horns endlessly fascinating is probably a sign of an obsessive mind. But really, once you find a website that profiles every cattle breed known to mankind, you can spend hours looking at them. You quickly learn that, one, there are an awful lot of cattle breeds, and two, there are some really weird horns out there.
