Runaway Bull No Match For SWAT Team

Ferdinand the bull he wasn't.

A young bull who appeared to have a lot more testosterone than the literary bull got loose in Whipple Creek Regional Park in Vancouver, Wash. Tuesday and led the police on what would have been a wild goose chase except we're talking bull. And the police eventually caught their bovine.

It took the police and ordinary citizens hours of trying to lasso the bull before he was eventually stopped.

People bring their horses to the park for its trails and one of the most interesting parts of the story involves two women who came to the park to ride their horse and found themselves in the middle of a great adventure.

An excerpt from a story in the Columbian:

Melissa Williams of Ridgefield said she'd come to the park with a friend, Caitlynn Ralston, to ride their horses in the 300-acre park, which has more than four miles of trails.

Ralston, a Brush Prairie resident, offered to try to capture the bull with her horse, Zip, which is trained for herding cows, and her dog, Smoky, a blue heeler.

In a pasture, Williams said, "The horse got spooked about the bull and bucked her off."

The bull's horns may have scared Zip, Williams said, adding that Ralston wasn't injured.

At one point, Williams said, she was walking and holding the lead ropes of Zip and her horse, Tango, when the bull spooked them again. After being pulled more than 100 feet, Williams had to release the lead ropes.

With the two horses running loose toward their trailer, Williams followed them.

"I was running after the horses, and the bull was right behind me. When he was chasing me I was mighty scared." As she ran, Williams said, she was waving her arms, hoping to scare the bull away from her. She was thinking of jumping over a gate when the bull lost interest in her.

"It went past me toward our horses," she said. "I think a bull could do serious injury to a horse."

Williams yelled for someone to grab the horses' lead ropes, and someone grabbed Zip's.

The bull then ran into a vineyard, so Williams and Ralston tied their horses up and shared a snack. When the bull came toward their horses again, the women put them in the trailer to keep them safe.

You have to admire people with of such serenity that they take time out for a snack with a feisty young bull on the loose.

Anyway, freedom definitely wasn't free for this bull. As the Columbian further reported:

...An officer shot and killed the bull about 2 p.m.

Workers later used a machine to pull the bull's body to the road, where a rendering business hoisted it up and skinned it on the spot, Williams said.

"It was really sad to see him," Williams said. "But when you have an animal that large running loose and just out of control, it puts everybody's life at issue. It's a safety concern at that point."

After about five hours spent trying to catch the bull, officers regretted having to kill it, Shea said.

"We wished it would have turned out better."