Rodeos use Brahma bulls, which are bred especially not to be ridden. In fact, unlike horses, those bulls will try to come back and kill you after they throw you off. (And the guy defending you is a clown! )
Other breeds may be docile enough. In most of southern Asia cattle are widely used as draft animals with no problems, but they don’t seem very exciting to ride.
Mongo’s bull in Blazing Saddles had a saddle. I don’t know if they just used a horse saddle or if they had to have it customized or altered in any way.
Yes, it’s a common interstitial act in a rodeo to have a person ride a tame bull around as if it were a horse. But that’s obviously a different breed from the bullriding bulls, the tame ones are more domesticated types. The thing with the main-event bulls is that they are twice the mass and specifically bred to be the t’oher way 'round, and want nothing more than to dance upon your face with their pointy hooves. Hence why rodeo cowboys mostly wear Kevlar vests and hockey helmets nowadays.
And I can’t provide a cite, but pretty sure the bucking-bull event derived from sheer extreme-sports machismo back in the days before Group B rally cars were a thing. “What is the most badass thing I could do…?”
The Khoekhoen, the pastoralist indigenes of Cape Town, had ridingcattle (the first sketch is likely contemporary second-hand reporting, but the second sketch is in-person). They were likely riding oxen, not bulls, though.
Yeah, the really surprising thing to me is how little cow-riding there has been in history. You’d think riding cattle would be a normal thing, maybe not as good as a horse, but if you don’t have a horse just ride a cow. Or put your knights on bulls rather than horses, for an even more formidable cavalry charge. We’ve seen camel cavalry, and war elephants, but war cattle? Nope. War bulls are apparently right out.
The problem with cattle-riding may be that they don’t have a gait in between “charging madly for a very short distance” and “ambling along very slowly, grazing as they go”.