“You’re looking for a bull to get off his feet. The higher their front feet are off the ground the better, and you want him to kick his back legs straight back. They call that break over, when they rear in the front and kick in the back.”
Mike Miller was explaining what he expects from his bulls. Miller is a stock contractor, a person who raises, trains, and provides the bulls used in Professional Bull Riders events. PBR produces several tours running year-round, with events from Boston to Brisbane to Brasília. Millions of people go to see them live. We were in the cab of a Ram truck towing three bales and a skid steer on a gooseneck trailer down a dirt road in Linden, Pennsylvania. Linden is a town of a couple thousand, midway between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, where Miller grows hay and raises bulls. I had driven from New York at 5 a.m. to watch Miller and his son Troop feed cattle. One of Miller’s bales of dry hay weighs around one thousand pounds; a bale of wet hay weighs about five hundred pounds more. His animals eat thirty-four bales a week.
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