Angell, 55, was attempting to coerce the straying Leo from the Wilkins’ yard Saturday morning, when the normally gentle bovine charged, pitching Angell about 8 feet from the point of impact, and butting the 55-year-old man in the face.
Mrs. Wilkins insists she is no hero for doing exactly what anyone else would have done. She grabbed the nearest tree limb, a slender forked stick about a yard long, and began striking the bull in the face and on the nose. Once she got him away from Angell, she tossed hands full of range cubes (feed) away from the attack site to lure Leo away.
Stunned after being pitched by a bull, Angell was bleeding profusely from the nose, and had broken his left arm. Mrs. Wilkins, a petite woman, somehow loaded the 230-pound man into the small vehicle and drove toward the gate. David’s wife, Beverly, arrived to assist and Angell was taken to the hospital.
Wednesday, left arm in a cast, right hand bruised, and displaying a scraped nose, Angell and his mother, Irene Angell, had nothing but praise for Mrs. Wilkins, who with her husband, Bob Wilkins, operates the award-winning Wildlife Artistry taxidermy shop near Minerva. Mrs. Wilkins has survived ornery cattle scrapes, so her reaction to Leo’s charge was automatic, thus saving Angell from a worse fate.
“Dodie saved my life,” Angell said. “She is my hero.” His mother echoed the same praise for Mrs. Wilkins, adding that “she saved my son’s life and I want everyone to know what she did.”
Leo, a neighbor’s bull that Angell was moving to his pasture for breeding purposes, may be retrained as a rodeo riding bull after his run-in with Angell. The bull was bottle-fed after birth and raised by the owner’s daughter.
Jon Gersbach, Texas AgriLife Extension agent in Milam County, said Charolais, like black Angus, normally are docile animals. But when working with livestock, no matter how much of a pet they have been, they are animals and they can become ornery and dangerous any time. Typically, livestock raised as pets, or “bottle babies,” become “pests” as adults when they aggressively seek out the treats they received as young animals.
Livestock outside their normal domain also may become nervous and react dangerously, Gersbach said.
