The Story
The tractor is still holding the round bale when Big Joe hits it. He is an American bison bull in a ranch holding pen, and the blow rattles the machine.
His rancher puts a bale like this at about a thousand pounds, the top weight for a Yellowstone cow, and Joe shoves it around like a ball. Within a couple of minutes it has burst open. He tears it down to about a third of its size, then rolls the rest around the pen until it knocks into the water trough. Somewhere along the way he has also put a hole in that trough.
The rancher missed all of it. His mother brought the hay out with his stepfather and filmed the show. He had rated his three-year-old bull the hard case with hay, and says he has never seen a bison wreck a bale like this.
Joe carries the hump of his kind over his front shoulders, a mass of shoulder and neck muscle that lets a bison swing its head side to side and clear snow from its foraging patches. Yellowstone bulls weigh up to 2,000 pounds.
A lot of that hay is wasted, and the rancher lets it go. Joe has spent two or three weeks in this pen with two cows, and a bale gives a bull somewhere to put his aggression. What remains makes a bed on a cold, wet day. The cows wanted to eat it.
Some of that aggression has an address. The three-year-old lives in a pen some 70 or 80 yards off, and when Joe starts up he paces his fence, making little strut sounds with his breathing. Bison communicate with grunts and snorts, and his owner reads it as a bull saying he is here. The rancher wants these two kept apart for good. If they locked up, he says, both bulls and his equipment could take serious damage, and the three-year-old could be badly hurt. So the fence stays, and the bale takes the hit.
