Well, they always win – even if the cowboy stays on the whole few seconds the bull keeps bucking until they come off.
Some of the best bulls I’ve seen have been really trained to the flank strap. They’ll be ornery and snorting, attacking anything they can find. The moment the flank strap is pulled off, they jog out of the arena proud as a peacock, head held high listening for the applause.
Any thoughts about “bulls seeing red”, the red capes used in bullfighting…
… don’t forget the anvils.
Cattle are red-green colorblind, they do not react to the color, only to the flapping cloth. The red is for the humans.
So why do they buck when strapped, and not buck when unstrapped?
They probably would buck, at first anyway, without the strap because they are still hardwired to think that anything on their back is a Very Bad Thing. When you combine that with the pressure from the bucking strap (which is really more of an irritation than painful) they learn that having the strap on means they beck like hell.
This post reminds me of a Seinfeld skit:
They aren’t riding the cows. 
According to Ulfreida in post 18, they don’t buck when unstrapped.
How do you know that the strap is more irritating than painful?
Different critters are different but I’ve ridden all kinds of critters who don’t appreciate the experience, including steers and jackasses and every one of them bucked like hell until I was off their backs. Most of them would then be pretty cool about it–until you jump on their backs again then it’s Katy bar the door. All without any sort of strap at all–heck, I felt like I was overprepared if I brought a bit of rope to catch them with.
I can attest that bulls raised in a pasture can be very gentle, even to the point of walking up and smelling your hands. But when cows are in heat that same animal can turn vicious.
In my experience if you use common sense most are relatively safe (on a farm), in the sense that they aren’t actively trying to kill you. But even so it’s an animal which weighs as much as a car. It’s easy for them to hurt you accidentally too.
I’m from west Texas and have attended many rodeos in my time. In fact, when I was a freshman in college, there was a kid on my college’s rodeo team who was killed by a bull.
As others have noted, the strap isn’t around the genitals, it’s around the very sensitive area on a bull’s sides, just in front of his legs. It’s the same thing as the sensitive areas you have on either side of your abdomen, just above your hip bones. If someone pokes you there, it’s very startling.
After the cowboy gets off the bull, besides the clowns, there are horses and riders there who ride up next to the bucking bull and pull off the flank strap. Then the bull stops bucking. He still may be pissed off, and the clowns may fuck with him a little while he’s pissed off, for crowd entertainment.
Thanks, CurtC.
[quote=“Mean_Mr.Mustard, post:13, topic:941199, full:true”]
How mean are they? 
There are plenty of videos on YouTube of “bull poker” that show, for the most part, the bulls aren’t really all that vicious or else the players would get killed or maimed.
Bulls can be extremely dangerous. Wander into the wrong pasture and people find out the hard way.
I was accustomed to working around heifers and calves with no problem. We raised steers for resale or our freezer. I never had any problems except for getting stepped on a few times.
We brought a heifer to a neighbor for breeding. I got chased out of that pasture. He would have got me if I’d been further from the fence. I got scratched up climbing over the fence. Learned my lesson.
I wish this information had been given to me back then. I understand now why my uncle never kept a bull.
Yup. So true
Nice.
They are so mean that they put a blank in their blank.
God’s truth, I saw one bull shed his rider within three seconds and prance entirely around the circumference of the arena before making his triumphant exit!
While bulls can be scary and aggressive, sometimes they are scared themselves and need a friend. This video showed up in my YouTube feed sometime last week.
They certainly understand the concept of winning and loosing. I suspect that the only reason we don’t have a tradition of watching bulls fight each other is that farmers have always had more sense that to keep two bulls.